I have a custom iron ore patch I spawned in that measures about 2.3G, whenever I place a mining depot in range of the ore patch the game freezes for a solid 5+ minutes, each and every time. If the mining depot is set to copper ore this doesn't happen, but immediately when it is set to iron ore the problem occurs. Any way to fix the problem?

Can you provide the save game?

This link should hold the file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kQPPM07oqZup5PLBH7FEjB0l7bhPjITO/view?usp=sharing
The ore patch is in the uppermost left hand corner

Oof, one problem is that there are multiple ore tiles on a single spot, so its finding over 30,000 ore entities when it does the search.

I have optimized the searching for the next release, down to about 150ms (about 10 frames of time), so it will still stutter, but not for 5 minutes

Thanks for the help!