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[Nefarian]

Hello, Recently my Volcano embark (default size) started having this problem. The game freezes for a while and then goes back to normal. During the freezes it says that dwarf fortress stopped working at the top.

Some info:
- The freezing happens quite often and lasts from 10 to 15s.
- My fort has 101 adults and 9 babies/children. Pop cap is 115, child cap is 15 and strict pop cap is 125
- No taverns/libraries, so no visitors
- I have around 20 animals, mostly restricted to a pasture to limit their movement. No more than 2fem 1male and 2puppies for each race.
- I have breached all Caverns (Sealed with gates unless i need something from there) but no Magma Sea (but i've discovered it already for some reason, might be due to the volcano).
- I have 3 full militia squads training at all times. I've tried disabling them to see if their sparring was causing issues, didn't change anything at all, not even a few fps.
- All of my mining tunnels are behind forbidden, no pet passable doors to restrict movement. I tried making them passable to see if some dwarf was going insane trying to get somewhere and was causing the freezes.
- There are no pumps or anything related to fluids except a simple tunnel that leads the magma under my magma workshops
- I use DFhack "Cleanall" frequently.
- Garbage/useless stuff gets dumped in the volcano and burnt or atom smashed.
- I've read that quantum stockpiles might cause random freezes but i don't have any.
- I use workflow and autobutcher.
- Game settings are all set to default, except for Aquifers that are turned off.
- It's not the game autosaving.
- Fps is stable at 65-75 depending on what is going on.
- My Cpu is a Intel Core i5 6600K

I'm pretty new to Dwarf Fortress and don't have any idea at all of what is causing the freezing and i need help figuring it out because i really don't want to abandon my first fortress yet, which to my surprise made it past 1 year already.

Edit: forgot to add, i'm an idiot and i missclicked on retire fortress once and reclaimed it a few moments later. But i don't think it has anything to do with it.

[Fleeting Frames]

I've never had this sort of freezing trouble, only time I recall getting non-crashing freezing being intentionally making 1-tile meeting area+location to test if it freezes(yup - if you have overcrowded/1-tile temples, enlarge them), and I've used all that you describe, though not at once. You could see if this happens on other saves? (Maybe DL some succession fort if you want to avoid your own designs.)

If it happens across wildly disparate saves, it's linked to your setup.
If not, you could type fpause in dfhack whenever it freezes and look around to see if you can find a pattern or cause.

[Nefarian]

I've never had this sort of freezing trouble, only time I recall getting non-crashing freezing being intentionally making 1-tile meeting area+location to test if it freezes(yup - if you have overcrowded/1-tile temples, enlarge them), and I've used all that you describe, though not at once. You could see if this happens on other saves? (Maybe DL some succession fort if you want to avoid your own designs.)

If it happens across wildly disparate saves, it's linked to your setup.
If not, you could type fpause in dfhack whenever it freezes and look around to see if you can find a pattern or cause.

Yep i've read about the 1tile temples causing issues because there isn't enough floor for people to dance, my temple is a 15x15 room so that's not the issue. Im going to try using that Fpause when it happens and look what's going on. I'll also try building a new fort and then spawning a bunch of migrant waves with Dfhack to see if it's the number of dwarves that causes the freezing (even if i doubt it is, because my fps is pretty stable all the time)

The only pattern i've noticed it always seem to happen when a Steel *something* production is stopped for whatever reason. I'll try removing the entire steel production workflow (1 of each steel armor piece at all times) and see if that is what is causing the issue.

[Nefarian]

Update: Apparently my dwarves decided that creating a moshpit inside 1 tile in a 15x15 temple was a good idea, it seems that was the source of the freezing.

I've restricted the temple to my dwarves only and upgraded the temple to a 30x30 room with all the dance floor they like.

Sometimes my dwarves really are idiots =/

I'll see if the freezing has stopped

[Fleeting Frames]

What would possibly possess your dwarves to do that???

Hm, can you take a screenshot of your old temple grounds?

[Nefarian]

What would possibly possess your dwarves to do that???

Hm, can you take a screenshot of your old temple grounds?

I can't take a screenshot because i've revamped the whole thing, but it was just a simple 15x15 room with 2 instrument, 3 containers and a table along the wall at the top. For some reason all the dwarves there decided they all wanted to pray in the same exact tile in the south-east corner of the temple, no idea what caused them to do that.

Expanding the temple to a 30x30 caused them to spread out from their favorite corner and pray like they normally should.

Maybe pathfinding went a bit crazy in there, or me retiring and then reclaiming the fortress had something to do with it. Either way the freezing is gone, and that was the source of it.

[PatrikLundell]

Retiring/reclaiming has been linked to some bugs. When it comes to your temple, it might be that you had two zones for the temple, with one being a single tile one zones can overlap). How did you revamp the temple? Did you remove the zones and repaint them, or did you remove the named temple entity ("The Pit of Vulgar Worship" or whatever)? Doing the latter without removing its problematic single tile zone first caused the problem to persist in one case I looked at.

[Nefarian]

Retiring/reclaiming has been linked to some bugs. When it comes to your temple, it might be that you had two zones for the temple, with one being a single tile one zones can overlap). How did you revamp the temple? Did you remove the zones and repaint them, or did you remove the named temple entity ("The Pit of Vulgar Worship" or whatever)? Doing the latter without removing its problematic single tile zone first caused the problem to persist in one case I looked at.

I revamped the temple and then increased the zone coverage without removing it. All of the temple was zoned even before expanding the temple.

I'll blame the retiring/reclaiming for messing up the pathfinding in there or something

[Loci]

I revamped the temple and then increased the zone coverage without removing it.

There is no way to increase coverage of a zone in vanilla. What you can (and likely did) do is draw a new zone over the old zone--but the old zone is still there (accessible in the zone menu by pressing 'v'), and could well cause problems if the game prioritizes the old zone over the new zone (and retire/reclaim may well alter the order zones are processed). If you did something similar when you originally built the temple you might still have a single-tile temple zone which originally caused your problem.

[Nefarian]

I revamped the temple and then increased the zone coverage without removing it.

There is no way to increase coverage of a zone in vanilla. What you can (and likely did) do is draw a new zone over the old zone--but the old zone is still there (accessible in the zone menu by pressing 'v'), and could well cause problems if the game prioritizes the old zone over the new zone (and retire/reclaim may well alter the order zones are processed). If you did something similar when you originally built the temple you might still have a single-tile temple zone which originally caused your problem.

You can resize the zone without removing it, you just need to use "Resize Room" after clicking on the furniture piece used to create the zone for the activity. I did that after making my temple 30x30 and the problem was solved

https://imgur.com/a/lOSfE

[ShimmerFairy]

Just a note on terminology: that's not a zone, that's a room. A room is defined from some piece of furniture, a zone is created via the (i) command (things like garbage dumps, meeting zones, fruit-picking zones, etc.).

[Nefarian]

Just a note on terminology: that's not a zone, that's a room. A room is defined from some piece of furniture, a zone is created via the (i) command (things like garbage dumps, meeting zones, fruit-picking zones, etc.).

By "the zone" i meant the temple zone, so the temple. My bad. ty for correcting me.

[Loci]

Just a note on terminology: that's not a zone, that's a room. A room is defined from some piece of furniture, a zone is created via the (i) command (things like garbage dumps, meeting zones, fruit-picking zones, etc.).

By "the zone" i meant the temple zone, so the temple.

Temples, taverns, etc. are "locations". "Zone" is a game term, as listed in the main menu under "i". Both "zones" and "rooms" can be assigned to a "location", but all three are distinct in-game concepts that behave differently. My statement that a zone cannot be enlarged is accurate, as is your statement that a room can be. Since your temple was defined by a room, the reason your dwarves chose to cluster in one tile is still a mystery. Sorry for the confusion.