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[hobgoblin]

Hello. Im new to this game and played it for about a week or two now. At first it felt like too hard to learn to play as the interface is what it is, but I learnt it.

Now Im starting to really like this game. At first I lost my forts to goblin sieges and tantrum spirals, but a couple of my latest fortresses I have had to abandon cos the game keeps on crashing a lot. I normally get to play couple of years and then the crashing begins. I got no idea whats causing it.

Im playing it on Windows 7 with 6 gigas of ram. Its working very smoothly until it suddenly just crashes. Im also playing it under lazy newb pack ( latest version 0.31.25 ) with soundsense and therapist on.

Any suggestions what to do or what not to do that can cause the crashes? Are any of the older versions more stable? I tried the 40d but it didnt work with lazy newb pack...

-hobgoblin




Edit:

I tried to load again my latest problem fort and didnt build or designate anything. I just let the fortress live its own life and read the forum. No soundsense or therapist either. And it still crashed.

Dwarf Fortress.exe has stopped working - thats what always happens.

[Pancho Cachondo]

It could be a lot of things... I've been playing for one year and for it crashes when I generated a large world with a long history or when the water in the map freezes. 

[thegoatgod_pan]

Try downloading it again.  To be honest I am not sure what the problem could be from your description--there are a lot of confirmed bugs and my experience generally goes that if you track down what exactly is causing a crash, you can avert it--i think there is a story thread where someone kept having a crash and isolated it to an interaction between some forgotten beasts and some kittens tossed their way--he circumvented it by tossing his military at the f.b.s, the kittens survived, the military died, but the fort ground onwards.

Generally df is pretty stable, but certain interactions, esp. temperature calculations and the like can cause trouble.  Try turning off temperature and weather and running the trouble save again, to see if you can get past the crash.  I recently had a series of crashed in a young community fort, each of which happened when a part of the river froze/unfroze. I got through it by saving repeatedly through the whole winter and closing other programs, to make it easier on my RAM.

Hope it works and glad you're enjoying your dive into dwarfiness

[hobgoblin]

Hmmm im mostly playing in warm and scorching areas so there should be no problems with ice.

I started a new fort now on temperate region. Maybe it works better as I cant remember my first games crashing at all ( played on temperate then ). Didnt even have the autosave on then.

[Jenniretta]

Huh, I've played on warm and scorching areas with no problems, may be a problem with part of the the lazy newb pack (I've never used it), have you tried using the official release instead?

[thegoatgod_pan]

Actually warm and scorching areas can be kinda problematic--there was a major bug that passed around the forums, where the high climate temp heated up rain to the point that dwarves melted if exposed to it. The problems caused by temp can be caused by the necessity of calculating the heat/cold on each tile and each object on that tile, so any temperature extreme can be iffy--also as Jenniretta said, the newb pack may well be less stable than the official release.

[Jenniretta]

Actually warm and scorching areas can be kinda problematic--there was a major bug that passed around the forums, where the high climate temp heated up rain to the point that dwarves melted if exposed to it. The problems caused by temp can be caused by the necessity of calculating the heat/cold on each tile and each object on that tile, so any temperature extreme can be iffy--also as Jenniretta said, the newb pack may well be less stable than the official release.

I've had problems with melting dwarves and such, I meant specifically that I've never had problems with crashes due to scorching areas, lol.

[hobgoblin]

Ok, Iwe been playing this game a lot. The game has came to my dreams etc...

I installed again clean without the newb pack. Then I installed ironhand tileset, dtherapist and soundsense.

Still, all my forts start crashing when the goblins arrive or even earlier. One cyclop caused my game to crash when i killed it and then tried to examine the body with K.

Iwe made over 10 forts now and havent seen a single cavern yet. Or magma. So  seriously? How often does the game crash when you play it? For me it happens a lot. Every fort starts to crash at some point. I got 6 GB mem and can keep my pc running for a month, only going to sleep mode when not using it and all the other games are working fine. I think the DF is only using about 500MB of my mem at most.

I really like this game and all tips are welcome how to get rid of the crashes. I understood the game should not crash a lot?

I have noticed one thing that i dont make a central staircase that about all of you are talking about. Could there be some bugs in the pathfinding? Also if I dont make staircases and only use ramps the dorfs cant find back up from about 10 z levels deep?

[trees]

Still, all my forts start crashing when the goblins arrive or even earlier. One cyclop caused my game to crash when i killed it and then tried to examine the body with K.

Sounds like it could be this. Try disabling TrueType.

[hobgoblin]

Yes thats exactly like it happened to me, but i got over it after i reloaded and it didnt happen again when i met another cyclop. I have also played without truetype font earlier as I read it can cause crashes, but the game kept on crashing. Majority of the crashes seems to come out of nowhere without doing nothing.

[Dragonchampion]

Are you sure it isn't loading and you are closing it too quickly?

[hobgoblin]

Yes Im sure its not loading. When its loading or doing some deep math it stops responding and I just wait a couple of seconds and its ok. Like when the ice melts.

When it totally crashes the windows opens a message Dwarf Fortress has stopped working and you can press ok and send some info to microsoft.

[krenshala]

I'd say update the save file to DFFD and open a bug report.  Being able to review the save game data makes it much easier to isolate what is causing the problem.

Out of curiosity, do you have problems with any other memory or CPU intensive applications?  It is possible the problem is not the software but hardware. I don't know if that is the case, but if you have a name brand system they usually have diagnostics to test the hardware.  If it isn't name brand, I recommend at least running memtest86.  If nothing else, this helps rule out a hardware problem on your end being the cause.