If you've been messing around with performance settings in your game, you've probably seen the roblox studio streaming min radius property and wondered what exactly it does for your player's experience. It's one of those settings that seems small, but it can totally change how a game feels, especially if you're building something massive like an open-world RPG or a detailed city. Basically, it's your way of telling Roblox, "Hey, no matter what happens, make sure at least this much stuff is loaded around the player."
Setting up your game to run smoothly on a high-end PC is easy, but making it playable for the kid on a five-year-old phone is the real challenge. That's where StreamingEnabled comes in, and the roblox studio streaming min radius is a core part of that system. Let's break down how to actually use it without breaking your scripts or making your players fall through the floor.
What is this setting actually doing?
When you turn on StreamingEnabled in the Workspace, Roblox stops trying to shove the entire game map into the player's RAM all at once. Instead, it dynamically loads and unloads chunks of the world. The roblox studio streaming min radius represents the absolute minimum distance (in studs) around the player's character that the engine guarantees will be loaded.
Think of it as a safety bubble. Everything inside that bubble is high priority. If a player is standing in the middle of a forest, you want the trees right next to them to exist, right? If the radius is too small, a player might run faster than the game can load, leading to them seeing the "void" or, worse, losing collision on the ground and falling to their death.
The default value is usually around 64 studs, which is pretty tight. Most developers find themselves bumping that up a bit to ensure a smoother visual experience. But you can't just set it to 5000 and call it a day, because that defeats the whole purpose of streaming.
Min Radius vs. Target Radius
This is where people usually get confused. In the Workspace properties, you'll see both StreamingMinRadius and StreamingTargetRadius. It helps to think of them as "The Minimum Requirement" and "The Goal."
The roblox studio streaming min radius is the "must-have" zone. Roblox will try its hardest to keep this area loaded at all times. If the player's internet is struggling or their device is running out of memory, Roblox will prioritize this area above everything else.
On the other hand, the StreamingTargetRadius is how far you'd like the player to see. If the player has a beefy computer and a great connection, Roblox will load parts all the way out to this target distance. If the device starts sweating, Roblox will start unloading stuff between the target radius and the min radius to save memory.
Finding the sweet spot for your game
There isn't a "magic number" that works for every game, which is annoying but true. If you're making a round-based fighter in a small arena, you probably don't even need streaming. But if you're building a massive map, you have to experiment.
For most games, a roblox studio streaming min radius between 128 and 256 studs is a safe bet. It's enough to keep the immediate surroundings stable without nuking the performance of a mobile device. If your game has fast vehicles, like cars or planes, you might need to crank that min radius up. If a player is zooming at 200 studs per second, a 64-stud radius will result in them constantly outrunning the loaded terrain.
I've seen some devs try to set the min radius very low—like 32—to get maximum performance. The problem is that Roblox's physics engine can get a bit wonky when parts are popping in and out of existence right under the player's feet. You really don't want a player to see the world rendering in; it breaks the immersion.
The "Falling Through the Floor" problem
We've all been there. You join a game, walk forward, and suddenly you're plummeting into the abyss because the floor didn't load fast enough. This is the biggest risk when you have a low roblox studio streaming min radius.
Roblox added a feature called StreamingIntegrity to help with this. If you set this to Wait, the game will actually pause the player's character if they reach the edge of the loaded map. It's better than falling through the floor, but it's still a bit jarring for the player. The real solution is balancing your min radius and making sure your low-poly "LOD" (Level of Detail) models look decent enough that the player doesn't feel the need to sprint into unloaded territory.
How it affects your scripting
This is the part that trips up most scripters. When you use the roblox studio streaming min radius, you have to accept that game.Workspace.PartName might return nil.
In a traditional game without streaming, everything exists the moment the server starts. With streaming, if a part is 1000 studs away and your min radius is 200, that part literally does not exist on the client's machine yet. If your LocalScript tries to reference it, the script will error out.
You have to get used to using :WaitForChild() for basically everything on the client. Or, even better, use the CollectionService to tag objects. If you're trying to run code on all "ClickDetectors" in the game, you can't just loop through the workspace once at the start. You need to listen for when parts are streamed in.
It sounds like a headache, but it's actually better practice anyway. It forces you to write more robust code that doesn't rely on everything being loaded instantly.
Testing on different devices
You can't really get a feel for your roblox studio streaming min radius just by playing in Studio on a high-end rig. Studio's "Emulation" tool is okay, but nothing beats actual device testing.
If you have an old phone lying around, publish your game and join it. Run around the map as fast as possible. Do you see parts flickering? Does the ground disappear? If so, your min radius might be too low, or your StreamingTargetRadius is so high that the phone is running out of memory and forcing a hard unload of everything.
Also, keep an eye on the "MicroProfiler" in Roblox. It's that scary-looking bar chart you can open with Ctrl+F6. It'll show you exactly when the engine is struggling to stream in new assets. If you see big spikes when moving into new areas, it's a sign that your streaming settings need a tweak.
Using RequestStreamAroundAsync
Sometimes, you know the player is about to go somewhere far away—like if they're stepping into a portal or being teleported to a new zone. If you just teleport them, they'll arrive in an empty void while the roblox studio streaming min radius struggles to catch up.
You can use Player:RequestStreamAroundAsync(position) on the server before you teleport them. This tells the engine, "Hey, I'm about to send this guy here, start loading the area now!" It makes the transition much smoother and prevents that awkward few seconds of standing on an invisible floor.
Final thoughts on optimization
At the end of the day, the roblox studio streaming min radius is about balance. You're trading off memory usage for visual stability. If you're building a horror game with lots of fog, you can get away with a tiny radius because the player can't see far anyway. If you're building a flight simulator, you're going to have to get clever with how much you stream.
Don't be afraid to change these numbers as your game grows. A setting that worked when your map was a single baseplate won't work when you've added a thousand high-part-count buildings. Keep testing, keep an eye on your mobile players, and don't let the void swallow your players! It's all a part of the learning process in Studio, and getting these settings right is what separates a laggy mess from a professional-feeling experience.