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[FZE]

All right, I'm mining out a bunch of loam wall in an attempt to find an aquifer, because I somehow neglected to find an embarkation site with a river. Before I go any further, should I be worried that my exploratory mines will hurt my framerate at some point? What if I were to later mine out the area and turn it into a large storage areas?

And on that note, does anyone have tips for hunting down an aquifer?

[bongotastic]

Aquifers are usually kindof in your face... and you can't miss them. This being said, if you embark at the edge of two biomes and only one has an aquifer, you should dig down in both biomes. It usually is quite obvious from the surface soil/sand/rocks where the line is.

Alternatively, dig down to the caves and get your water there. It can be dangerous, but you can wall in a small enclosure and designate the inside as your watering point.

Have fun.

PS: I have never experienced a FPS dip with Aquifers, unless you manage to get it to flow over land, or into the caves. Flowing water is a real b*tch on FPS.

[FZE]

How about all these empty mineshafts, or the storage spaces I would make out of them? Any pathing issues to slog down the game?

[bongotastic]

Large areas can be a drag for pathing. However, set path of high traffic from doors to doors and leave the storage bits at a higher cost, this will lead the pathing algorithm to go through the room fast and hopefully get to its destination before each tiles in the storage room is scored.

Remember, large rooms will have no effect unless there is a lot of path that requires going through the large room. If point A and B don't go through the room, it will not matter to the pathfinding (in principle).

There is some explanations on pathing here: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Path_Finding
But I'm not sure if it makes as much sense if you don't have a Comp. Sci. degree...

[bongotastic]

How about all these empty mineshafts,...

My previous answer was about large rooms. For mineshafts, this should not be a problem unless your dorfs are trying to path through impossible routes, or across the entire map. You can always lock them out with walls, or doors set to forbid everything from going through. But it shouldn't matter.

[janglur]

I've never found any solutions to reducing lag short of completely locking out areas they can access.  Simply using desginations of low/high/restricted pathing do nothing.

[tolkafox]

I've never found any solutions to reducing lag short of completely locking out areas they can access.  Simply using desginations of low/high/restricted pathing do nothing.

Putting restricted areas around the stairs leading outside your fortress and areas into the caverns should help dramatically. Technically it should be on all areas that lead to large rooms, but these are the high killers.

Of course, walling off completely helps a lot more, it's just a matter on if you want to do something in the caverns/outside or not.