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[Kethas]

I'm running a quad-core 3.0 ghz machine and picked a fairly aggressive starting site (6x6, river, underground river, magma pipe, HFS, flux, no aquifer). (I imagine the quad-core is largely irrelevant, as DF can't take advantage of multiple cores, other than to ensure that DF gets a core to itself.) At 175 dwarves I have significant slowdown - 20-30 fps from the normal 100. I'm thinking of restarting on a smaller site to make pathfinding easier (4x4, underground river, magma pipe, HFS, flux, no aquifer) - I originally wanted two rivers to increase the total flow I could get through projects requiring constant water (waterfalls mostly) but I think I could do fine with just one. Underground to permit towercap farming.

How many dwarves can other folks handle before the slowdown becomes noticeable? What's your machine like, and what's your site like?

On another note, I think part of the problem is that I encircled most of the map in a giant curtain wall, and for some reason dwarves that can't find a booze barrel that isn't already being used are pathing outside the fort entrance and all the way around the map to the back of the fort, outside the curtain wall, to drink where the brook enters my curtain wall, for some reason. I have 'zone-only drinking' enabled and have a water source marked - the part of the brook right next to my main stairwell, and fisherdwarves recognize the zone just perfectly. Any idea why dwarves might not be drinking at my designated drinking area? Yes it's a zone, yes it's enabled for a water source, yes it's accessible, yes 'zone-only drinking' is on.

It's a problem for two reasons - one, I assume finding a path all the way around the map like that is particularly laborious for DF to compute, but also it's essentially the perfect way to guarantee civilians and children find themselves in a goblin ambush far away from military assistance.

[Name Lips]

4x4. Magma and underground water and HFS somewhere, currently undiscovered. I have the population cap at 100, which means including the horde of babies I always end up with I have around 120 dwarfs. The fps has reached 25-30, which I really consider minimum playable. It drops drastically when there's a siege, and from previous experience, if I unleash the HFS it'll drop to 0-1 for about an hour while it sorts out the pathing of a few dozen hidden creatures all stepping over each other.

I run a fairly slow system, though. 1.9 ghz, 2 gigs of ram. My video card is pretty good - a geforce 9600 - but that doesn't matter much in DF.

[Heron TSG]

My system resembles Name's, but I usually end up with 20-30 FPS on a 3x3 map with around seventy dwarves.

[Kethas]

Hrm. Yeah, I think I'll try 4x4 with a pop cap of 100 and see how that performs before possibly bumping the pop cap up some more.

While I'm genning worlds for this next playthrough: Where/how, exactly, can purring maggots be trapped? I think that's the only part of the economy I haven't played with yet, and I'd like to give those immigrant milkers/cheesemakers something to do. The wiki has conflicting information on different pages - the Vermin page has a table that lists purring maggots as being available in 'subterranean chasm' but the person that provided the table justifies it in a single line on the talk page without a source for his information, and that's almost two years ago. Purring Maggot's talk page has someone saying 'I thought they spawned in chasms, but I haven't caught any in the last five maps I tried.' Can I verify that they are caught by placing animal traps in chasms? Do all chasms contain them as candidates for animal traps, or only some maps and it's determined by luck?

[Kethas]

Hrm... I finally genned a world with a 4x4 site with underground river + chasm + magma + flux + no aquifer + HFS (and there's a brook one tile away, so I'll probably play on a 5x5 area), but the chasm is odd - the walls are entirely sheer, i.e. there's no walkable floor flagged as 'chasm.' If I wanted to trap purring maggots, will that work and how do I go about it?

[Albedo]

Wiki - "framerate" has some tips too.  Also the forum "announcement" thread on 40d11.

[Kethas]

Also the forum "announcement" thread on 40d11.

Tried that, didn't work, clicked the poll. It's not graphics related, it's pure CPU.

It's a shame DF doesn't work on multiple cores; pathfinding for different dwarves could be split off pretty easily.

[Smew]

I'm running a similar processor, 3.2 ghz dual core, and I like to cap off at about 70~ dwarves, in reality that means 90 by the time immigrants figure out I don't want them, IT's right around 70 that my FPS begins to bugger down, my current fort is at exactly 100 dwarves, along with a few other sentient beings(Dwarf Companion!), one deranged Troll Ruler, and 73 misc animals, most of whom are caged, tiny dragons breed so quickly.
The current FPS jumps between 40-60, which isn't bad at all, though I don't have a brook, or any sort of running water, except a walled up UG river, a chasm, a bottomless pit, and a magma-pipe, and the HFS I just killed off, So I guess the framerate isn't THAT bad, I plan to free up a couple FPS by disposing of some(a lot) of stone.

[Kethas]

Totally unrelated question: can pumps pump water from the same z-level, or must the water be one z-level below?

I'll eventually need to run water from a dammed brook into a storage cistern, which will involve a lot of lateral motion, and I'm trying to think of ways to speed up the water. Making the waterway a (very gradual) downward slope instead of flat could be one solution; purely lateral pumps could be another.

[Albedo]

The water is drawn from the z-level below the intake, but that intake can be submerged under additional levels of water.  (Since the side where a dwarf would stand would then also be underwater, automation would be required.)

[Martin]

Hrm. Yeah, I think I'll try 4x4 with a pop cap of 100 and see how that performs before possibly bumping the pop cap up some more.

While I'm genning worlds for this next playthrough: Where/how, exactly, can purring maggots be trapped? I think that's the only part of the economy I haven't played with yet, and I'd like to give those immigrant milkers/cheesemakers something to do. The wiki has conflicting information on different pages - the Vermin page has a table that lists purring maggots as being available in 'subterranean chasm' but the person that provided the table justifies it in a single line on the talk page without a source for his information, and that's almost two years ago. Purring Maggot's talk page has someone saying 'I thought they spawned in chasms, but I haven't caught any in the last five maps I tried.' Can I verify that they are caught by placing animal traps in chasms? Do all chasms contain them as candidates for animal traps, or only some maps and it's determined by luck?

You can easily catch maggots by placing traps in chasms. By 'in' it means hanging in open space inside the chasm. I have a legendary milker which means I've caught at least 600 maggots.

Every chasm I've tried had maggots, so if it's luck, I've had pretty good luck.

Here's a picture of how it works:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The traps you see are all over open space (even the 8 surrounded by smoothed floor). The barrels are meat/fish since the traps need to get reloaded often.

[Kethas]

snip

Excellent, that's great news - thank you very much for posting it. I had no idea you could put traps on thin air and I almost certainly wouldn't have stumbled upon it myself.

[Eater of Vermin]

Dual-core 2.6GHz machine, popcap of 100 but I'm stuck with 248 dwarves (bloody kids!) on a "default" (more or less) map and I'm hovering at 5-6 FPS.

Sieges have become a serious chore.

Mind you, I do like my water features.