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[Emerald Salamander]

Hi
I was playing in my 120ish dwarf fortress. I was also going through foums and reading about how some peoples best fortresses were only 150 dwarves. This scared me a bit as I thought the cap for dwarves was unlimited. Could anyone tell what the cap it, if there is one and how many dwarves would i be able to handle on a 24Gbs of RAM laptop?

[malvado]

With the large adress aware patch it might be possible to have a pretty large fortress.
Ive tried 400Dorfs in one and the problem is usually fps before anything else (Note, my population never reached 400 though, probably somewhere between 200 - 300 before fps hit 5 )

A well managed fort fixes usually that problem, but a lot of micro-management is indeed needed.

[Emerald Salamander]

Large adress aware patch? What is this?

[Broken]

The default pop cap is set at 200 in the init file. (data/init d_init.txt). You can change here if you want (note that the cap begins to work
after you reach it,meaning that if you have 199 dwarfs you can get a migrant wave of 50)
This afects migrants. births have their own, separate cap (you can put a limit in childs and in child/adult percentage).

About the maximun dors you can have,well, as much as the computer can handle. You can put the cap to 1000 if you want.

[PetWolverine]

Large adress aware patch? What is this?

Most of your 24 GB of RAM is useless to DF, since it's a 32-bit application and therefore normally limited to 2 GB (2^31 bytes). I think the large address aware patch that was mentioned is a binary patch to enable DF to use up to 4 GB, but to go beyond that would require the game to be written to be 64-bit, which will involve a significant rewrite on Toady's part.

[megahelmet]

Gah. Even 200 dwarves is waaay to many dwarves for me. Even at the 120 I usually run with, I end up with tons of 'you look useless, off to the military with ya' dwarves.

[Bigheaded]

In theory, why not even more than 1000?

Basically it's as many as your computer can handle if you edit raws or use lazy newb pack.
Altough, how much food would be needed to feed 1000 dwarves? booze? i can imagine 500 dwarves using a water source, but 1000? they'll bump into each other sooooooooooo much, would require walkways that are 8 squares wide.

If massive stockpiles of food/drink made beforehand (say at 200 pop) you could set it to 2000 population put ALL new entrants into squads and send them as fodder against hell.

Unlimited demons? meet unlimited dwarves!


i've had a total of 150 dwarves and 400 animals running around.

[Di]

I've had 220 dwarves in pre-vampire version, someone said he had played with as much as 400.

[Telgin]

The default cap is 200, but as has been stated DF is a 32-bit application and thus can probably support up to 2 billion dwarves in theory.  There is probably a signed 32-bit number used somewhere to identify or index them, and it would overflow at that point.

Assuming Toady was careful and used unsigned numbers for all of these cases, you can have a bustling 4 billion in theory.

All silliness aside, I've run 200 dwarf forts fine in the past, but FPS gets pretty bad after a few game years of this.

[Idranel]

The default cap is 200, but as has been stated DF is a 32-bit application and thus can probably support up to 2 billion dwarves in theory.  There is probably a signed 32-bit number used somewhere to identify or index them, and it would overflow at that point.

Assuming Toady was careful and used unsigned numbers for all of these cases, you can have a bustling 4 billion in theory.

Thats not how it works/fails.
You'd run out of address space for memory long before such a hypothetical index would overflow.
Its worse than using an integer to keep track of dwarves: the address of each piece of data in memory is only 32 bits long

[Telgin]

The default cap is 200, but as has been stated DF is a 32-bit application and thus can probably support up to 2 billion dwarves in theory.  There is probably a signed 32-bit number used somewhere to identify or index them, and it would overflow at that point.

Assuming Toady was careful and used unsigned numbers for all of these cases, you can have a bustling 4 billion in theory.

Thats not how it works/fails.
You'd run out of address space for memory long before such a hypothetical index would overflow.
Its worse than using an integer to keep track of dwarves: the address of each piece of data in memory is only 32 bits long

That's true, I was only considering the case of creature IDs overflowing or the main creature vector's index overflow.  I forget how long the dwarf data structure is exactly, but it's around 1KB for a dwarf, I think.  Plus some satellite data for things like skill lists and relationships (which aren't part of the main creature data structure), I figure it's less than 4KB per dwarf at the most.  So then you're looking at depleting your 2GB (maybe 3GB, depending on the OS and settings) of addressable memory in 500,000 to 1,000,000 dwarves at the theoretical limit.  Minus other data structures of course.

[GreatWyrmGold]

And FPS.

[Mr S]

On the forum thread is an image of Vectors and a +Chipset+.  The Vectors are growing.  The Vectors are striking a menacing pose.  The +Chipset+ is in a foetal position.  The +Chipset+ is crying.  The artwork depicts the attempt to run 500,000 dwarves on a single processor during the Melting Derailment, the Laughing Inferiority of Technologies in the late summer of '12.

[CaptApollo12]

Is it just me? My FPS sucks by 30 Dwarves. IDK how you guys can get 200.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Challenge:
- Play with modded dwarves that become adults at 1 year old.
- Disable the popcap and babycap or set them to large numbers.
- Encourage dwarves to be social so they marry and breed a lot.
- Determine how high population you can go before you crash the game or stop time.

I'd recommend embarking on a site with several soil layers and a water source so that you can implement massive farming projects and have a backup to booze. To conserve FPS for dwarves, I'd recommend killing all pet and stray animals. I don't know if anyone has stress-tested the game like this before by trying to simulate hundreds of dwarves.

Bonus challenge: use a loyalty cascade to kill off 99% of the massive population, and compare FPS from the start of the game to the peak FPS and ending FPS.