In my game I'm working on in Unity, I want to have energy and machines (i.e ore processing machines, smelting (think Minecraft modded)), but I was thinking about performance. The player could have quite a few of these machines in their base, all of them could be doing something and could be off screen, so this could effect performance as each machine will have logic to handle whatever it needs to do, and lots of them could be running at the same time.
Machine example; Let's say we have a machine that crushes stone. Player puts it into the machine slot, machine then starts crushing it if it has enough energy, and after X seconds, it outputs the crushed stone. Player could keep the machine UI open and watch the progress (i.e progress bar), or be far away from it.
Should these machines be running constantly in Update, if not, what would be a better way to do this?