How to avoid Unity eating CPU resources for very long periods?

After making changes in the terrain or adding vegetation, it start "baking" and even very small modifications in a 500x500 terrain takes 10 minutes or more in a 4.5GHz quad-core CPU overloading it at max.
I think it's lighting related?
I'm not there right now, I'll post the exact status messages ASAP.
I don't need anything professional, I just want to be able to play around a bit and create simple stuff without my PC catching fire.

Thanks in advance!

 

Lightmaps are set to automatically generate with new projects. You can disable that from this window.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GlobalIllumination.html

Lightmapping is complex. Ten minutes is nothing.

That being said (and I don't know whether you're just overexaggerating or being literal here) I feel it needs to be pointed out that no computer that is properly maintained should have any problems maintaining 100% CPU usage for very long periods of time. Computers are designed to be able to do it. It's completely normal.

 

Thank you, will try that next time, btw, what implies to disable this feature?

I'm being literal about hardware specs, times and usage, and I know it will not cause a fire, I worked with computers almost my whole life, what I mean is I don't feel it worth to spend such resources in an scenery where I'm just starting rather than achieving something big.

 

Stopping the feature just stops it from happening automatically. You can still manually start a bake and you can always just switch it back on. Unity is currently developing a GPU-based lightmapper too so bake times will be way lower in the future.

Just checking. We've had some people who literally thought their computer would go up in flames and we've had people with computers that may have actually been ready to do just that.

 

Amazing, thank you!