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[Callista]

I recently tried to cave in about fifty floors in a 3x3 embark, to hollow out a space for a megaproject construction. (You know--mine them out, atom-smash the useless rock, leave a couple z-levels of solid rock below them, burrow all dwarves somewhere else, then cave in the top floor onto the rest. Chain reaction.)

When I removed the last support on the top floor, the game locked up and stayed that way for hours, and finally I gave up. I eventually had to give up on the cave-in altogether and used DFHack to remove the floors instead, reasoning that if the cave-in had worked properly, I would have had them empty.

Does anybody have experience with this? How much area can you cave in safely without locking up the game? Should I have done one floor at a time instead?

[NecroRebel]

Cave-ins take a lot of processor cycles to complete, which does mean that they do make the game hang. One of my forts the megaproject involved caving in a circular plug, around 80 tiles in diameter and 25 thick, and it took my computer around 45 minutes to process the whole thing. You tried to cave in over 8 times that much, so I'm not surprised that it would've taken hours to process.

The bright side of cave-in processor locks is that the game auto-pauses after a cave-in occurs, so it's completely safe to trigger it and leave it overnight.