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[robertheinrich]

Well as the title states, did anybody ever do some SCIENCE on that topic? Let's assume you try to keep a small and stable self-sustaining thing without much harm from the outside. Embark on a tropical island or turn invaders off per ini, limit the population cap to a certain minimum because this is going to be a long-time project and you don't want fps to drop too drastically. Food and booze are not really a problem as everybody knows. Then there are clothes, not such a big deal either if you can plant and process pig tails (or some of the surface equivalents) fast enough so that everybody gets his stuff before the old ones are so tattered that they produce unhappy thoughts. So the basic upkeep can be done with a small number of dwarves and a small space on your map reserved for housing and necessary industries. With a limited population you'll only need so many bins, barrels, large pots etc.

But after a while your dwarves will die of old age. So you will need to craft coffins or slabs to put them to rest. Coffins can be made of wood, but they still need a tile to be placed on. You could build some sort of tomb tower but that has its limits. Either way, you are restricted by the amount of tiles on your map.

So... after how many years would you run out of tiles or would DF run out of memory in such a scenario?

[Necrisha]

That would depend on your computer more than the game. for my computer the obvious answer is that it'd run out of memory long before running out of tiles becomes a problem.

[i2amroy]

Thousands of years at the least, probably much longer (I know for a fact that there was at least one fort out there that a person ran for over 500 years, and that wasn't even in "ideal" conditions). There are two main things that effect your original assumptions.
1)Running it with the Large Address Aware patch (or simply running it on a Mac) will double the space you can use up to 4 GB, which will take a long time to run out of memory assuming you go out of your way to prevent things that expand the file size.
2)Once a dwarf has passed the date that they would have died of old age at, (which is 170 years at the maximum) they will never rise as a ghost. This means you can safely throw their corpses away without fear of any problems and means you will never run out of tiles.

Also as long as you don't dig out too much even strange moods shouldn't become a problem, since the number of strange moods cap is directly related to the amount of tiles that you have dug out.

[robertheinrich]

2)Once a dwarf has passed the date that they would have died of old age at, (which is 170 years at the maximum) they will never rise as a ghost. This means you can safely throw their corpses away without fear of any problems and means you will never run out of tiles.
Also as long as you don't dig out too much even strange moods shouldn't become a problem, since the number of strange moods cap is directly related to the amount of tiles that you have dug out.

This is an interesting piece of info. I was assuming that removing coffins and throwing away corpses would always result in ghosts sooner or later, so I thought that the number of tiles on your embark would effectively set a limit of how long you could possibly go without getting problems.

[CaptainLambcake]

I have a fort running 38 years now.  Only about 10 died of old age, since I embarked at year 150.  Coffin space isn't a problem, have you seen how much room you have?  I could probably live forever with this fortress.

[robertheinrich]

I have a fort running 38 years now.  Only about 10 died of old age, since I embarked at year 150.  Coffin space isn't a problem, have you seen how much room you have?  I could probably live forever with this fortress.

Forever is a thing which doesn't exist in computer games (unless the programmer took care of the peculiar issues related to it). The amount of rock and ore is a limited number per embark. So is the number of tiles. Every single dwarf or pet or even some random animal one of your hunters kills is stored in the list of dead units. Sooner or later you WILL reach some sort of limit, in the worst case it's that of your memory. And towards the guy who said that "your computer" will break down faster than "the game", I don't think so. DF only uses one thread and without patches I think it only uses 16bit. This slaps a restriction onto pretty much everything which can exist inside a running game. It doesn't use content streaming at all (at least not that I'm aware of it - which is by the way commercial games allow you to travel around in a huge world where the whole of it wouldn't fit into your RAM) so there are physical limitations.

[StruckDown]

Wouldn't a fort of vampires be the logical option here? You could completely seal the fort, and perhaps have the ability to cycle out new clothes, but that would take longer than anyone would probably want to play or run DF.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Wouldn't a fort of vampires be the logical option here? You could completely seal the fort, and perhaps have the ability to cycle out new clothes, but that would take longer than anyone would probably want to play or run DF.

Why would you need the clothes? One stark raving mad naked vampire in a cage will last forever and keep your fort "alive".

[StruckDown]

I'd figure you'd lose with the last member insane. Even better.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I'd figure you'd lose with the last member insane. Even better.

You lose if the last dwarf is berserk. Normally insane dwarves die of thirst/starvation, but vampires won't. The cage protects the vampire from being targeted by violent ghosts.

[Patchy]

Who even needs clothes for vampires. Dress them in leather armour, leather leggings, and leather high(low) boots. Since it's armour, it never wears out, and so its prefect for your undying vampire hermit. Though you might as well go all out and dress them in actual metal armour.

[Loud Whispers]

Thousands of years at the least, probably much longer (I know for a fact that there was at least one fort out there that a person ran for over 500 years

Name? That sounds awesome.

Also as long as you don't dig out too much even strange moods shouldn't become a problem, since the number of strange moods cap is directly related to the amount of tiles that you have dug out.

Really? For Forts that have dug out thousands this might be an issue. Though to be fair every Dwarf that passes a mood is one that'll never get struck again, and there are only so many unlucky shell demands.

The amount of rock and ore is a limited number per embark. So is the number of tiles.

Eventually you'll come to a completed Fortress where you won't be needing more tiles. Obsidian farms can create more rock, ore can be extracted from goblins unless you drive them to extinction.
If you drive them to extinction there's still humans.
In addition it'll take some special disasters to get rid of metal so what you have shouldn't disappear.

I'd figure you'd lose with the last member insane. Even better.

You lose if the last dwarf is berserk. Normally insane dwarves die of thirst/starvation, but vampires won't. The cage protects the vampire from being targeted by violent ghosts.

Were-creatures can hold a Fort's survival even though they are berserk for 2 days a month. It'd be interesting to see if as a side effect of this they can be berserk in normal form and still count as a citizen.

[i2amroy]

Thousands of years at the least, probably much longer (I know for a fact that there was at least one fort out there that a person ran for over 500 years

Name? That sounds awesome.

Ugh, I can't seem to find the name. They never did a big story post type thing on it, so it was just a mention in some other thread.

As for the longest running fort that did post on the forums about the progress of their fort you would want to check out FlareChannel which ran for 213 years before ending and generated some awesome stories in the process.

[MrSparky]

The amount of rock and ore is a limited number per embark. So is the number of tiles.

Eventually you'll come to a completed Fortress where you won't be needing more tiles. Obsidian farms can create more rock, ore can be extracted from goblins unless you drive them to extinction.
If you drive them to extinction there's still humans.
In addition it'll take some special disasters to get rid of metal so what you have shouldn't disappear.

Plus you can stretch metals with the melting exploit using trap components for mundane weapons grade metals and the slower coins for the rest.