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[GenJeFT]

Hello.

Is there anyway to find out what is causing dwarf fortress to run slow. I was getting 20fps then suddenly it dropped to 6fps and I am not sure why. The only big thing I could think of that is a major change is that I captured a dragon and suddenly tamed it. It seems named creatures in cages trigger FPS issues for some reason. But I am not 100% sure what is up and its really annoying. I don't really want to let the dragon out of the cage to find out right now as its "semi-wild" and I don't want this sucker going wild and burning my youtube series fort up.

I know in minecraft (sorry) someone wrote a program that would look at the game and give you a read out of what was using all the resources in the game (like some random zombie stuck on something) so you could take care of the problem and speed it up. Is there anything like that for dwarf fortress?

Also an annoying thing I noticed as well. I looked at the resource monitor to see if it was my CPU that was slowing the game down and its not. The game is not using more then 15% of my CPU cycles. At first I thought it might be using one of several cores at 100% or something but nope, its not. So there also seems to be something that throttles the game from being able to use all the resources it possibly could use.

Any suggestions?

[Fleeting Frames]

This post might help guide you to diagnose the issue. Usually the drop you have may be something like mood or pet-impassable door somewhere, but may also be something in the caverns (ex, one person from yesterday had their fps killed by random cave crocodile).

[MorsDux]

A sudden drastic drop is usually connected to pathing. Try walling off cave entrances but also if the caves are connected through tunnels, you need to wall those off too, so no creature can decide to go from 1 cave to another.

alternatively backup your save, use dfhack to exterminate wildlife dwarves etc. and reload the save when you found out what was the cause of the fps drop.

[anewaname]

The only big thing I could think of that is a major change is that I captured a dragon and suddenly tamed it. It seems named creatures in cages trigger FPS issues for some reason.

I think it is not named creatures that cause the pathing FPS issues, but creatures that are attempting to path to another creature (usually pets, invaders, and creatures that are hunting). Speculation: They are attempting to path to a moving target, so they run the pathing calculation more often, sometimes over a long distance and probably each time their chosen target moves. I had a prison fort with 500-800 named and caged things, mostly goblinoids but including a dragon (never did get a mate for it) and FPS stayed steady about 20 except when new invaders arrived.

[Staalo]

One perhaps less obvious pathing-related problem is related to doors. A door that's locked for animals but not dwarves ("Passable" in the building view screen) seems to be erroneously considered as open space for animal pathing. Because animals can't actually move through the door, it looks they start spamming pathing calculations trying to find a route through it over and over again. Even one animal head-butting such a door can crash FPS noticeably.