Got an embark I was really intriguied with - embarked on a river, and just as I embarked I had several cave in messages and thought oh, no, not again; normally when I see that I'm in for continuous hitting of the space bar as unending cavern collapse pauses finally convince me to just abandon and restart. This time, I was pleasantly surprised to only have a handful of messages...
...and when I looked around, I was delighted to find that the collapses had opened up the caverns below to the surface. In the area right behind my wagon, the collapse had brought tunnel tubes to the surface, and the ground in places was dotted with other varieties of underground trees. The river had been bisected in a couple of places, and (as I had paused it) appeared to be cascading into the caverns. I had to go, with no chance to play the new map, but I was kinda looking forward to it - wondering if the caverns would fill up and I'd end up with huge underwater caves and tunnels, and what I'd do with the network of exposed caverns.
I started it up today and (as more experienced players probably guessed would happen) was immedietly crushed by a 1 FPS rate (and, though the program indicates 1, if it's reaching 1 it's a very generous count...) It must be all the water calculations, with the river in several places cascading into the caverns... At first I thought I'd try to ride it out - after all, maybe when the rivers filled the caverns, the FPS would stabilize a bit - but I'm worried now, as there is a section of cavern exposed with water already in it that goes off the map edge - and my understanding is that this will act as an infinite drain and so water will never actually fill the caverns, it'll just make the biggest craziest waterfall series I've ever seen, and unfortunately never allow the FPS to recover.
So, is my understanding correct - is the water in the cavern off the edge essentially an infinite drain? Is my intriguing embark doomed to a 1 FPS abandonment?
Good news, in the 5 minutes or so that it took me to type this, my miners have mined one more square of sand....
I'm sad, as I don't think this is going to end up playable...