Spring, Year 50
Spring, Year 51
11,000 ammo, 1500 or so rings amulets, weapons shown F are scattered about the surface at the start of last year. Also a thousand cloaks or so, very annoying to scroll though when trying to outfit a military squad.
We traded away more than a million dorfbucks worth of stuff. I thought our Baron, Panopticon might be upset about that but it’s pretty easy to distract a child.
The floor:
The fortress is now secure – I think. Convoluted passageways kept showing up with access to the caverns, some of them leading offscreen. A couple of nasty surprises came to us that way. The dwarves blocked off several and then complained so, the large staircase was sealed off above the little passages. It needed a 2z wall. It’s not pretty but it works. You know how sometimes the builders keep suspending that last block necessary to turn the pillar into a wall for no good reason, and after unsuspending a dozen times you just go, aw, fuggit, and build on an adjacent tile? That’s why it’s not pretty. Same with the pump at the bath house and
horseunicorn trough.
The FPS Project:
01 Granite 50, starting FPS on my laptop was 29 but temperature was Off. I brought it up to about 50 and then turned temperature back On because all syndromes require ‘boiling rocks,’ etc. On 01 Granite 51, the FPS is now running 24 but there’s a lot of hauling and such going on. Turning the temp back off and waiting for iders, it stabilizes at 37 (100 or so idlers, all we ever have because of cleaning, eating, etc.). With temp On, those same 100 idlers have the game running at 26 so the temp is only a 10 hit. Even with temperature On, the game will again be 30+ once those many animals are butchered – they’re breeding now faster all the time. There are plenty of clad warbeasts, not yet assigned. Pathfinding is clearly the #1 driver in this fortress so those animals should be butchered or at least penned. All Overseers have necessarily sent out exploratory miners: many of those tunnels have been sealed off but not all. A locked door will stop pathfinding dwarves but not pets and a wall is much faster to put up than a bridge. The only thing worse than a siege for FPS is a surface fire. The caverns have now all been sealed off – I think – so there shouldn’t be any more FPS drops from Antmen or Goblins just hanging about down there, “siege-ing” in place. A Vile Force + surface fire once took it as low as 9 but the game kept playing and surprisingly, so did Soundsense. The Wiki pages on maximizing frame rate give some good ideas, the idea of a quantum stockpile with pressure plates is intimidating. But, that nobody-is-using-it-anyway archery range is already there. Linking levers may be the slowest thing in this fortress, however.
The save is uploaded, now I can try some cheats for FPS effect:
- clean map: 4,000 or so, maybe 1 FPS. I got used to the blood and the clean fortress now just doesn’t look right, somehow.
- cleanowned: were only 10 dropped clothing.
- traffic designations: possibly helps, will take some time to confirm.
- going back to a previous save and all that work to get the magma straight? Made a difference all of 3.
- The biggest increase so far came from expanding the area around the metalworks and putting in some small, dedicated stockpiles. There’s still more to do but large, “everything here” stockpiles far away mean many long hauling jobs to do anything. And kept the original Temple of Armok closed. Similarly, workshops have been moved as possible closer to the main staircase – now expanded – and pathways widened to at least 2 tiles.
WrapUp:
- Dark Church: I was all ready and then lost track and traded away the bone statues!
- Hall of the Mountain King: there are almost enough iron breastplates and armor stands to make one.
- Temple of Armok: Others were right, even with staged stockpiles, it just didn’t work. A new Temple was constructed much closer to the surface with stockpiles of blood, etc.
-Blueprints: in the Things I Never Got Around To list, there are prints for Artificer, another Great Magma Forge (missed that one or would have built it) and Magma Gunsmith. It’s been a year and we don’t have additional plans because they were never offered.
- Colosseum: way, way down there after Chaosgear’s cave-in project. I like the Colosseum but sometimes bad things happen there so, this one has been enclosed by a wall and a raising drawbridge. Fastest way to get legendary military skills.
- The only workshops on Repeat (as far as I know) at save upload are the single oven on the surface making coke for steel from all the wood close by in the quantum Depot, one glass forge making green glass for gem setting practice and another gathering sand.
- Additional carpenters have been working 24/7 for a year making bins. We still need more but it really helps the hauling – particularly when there are many thousands of bone do-dads scattered about.
- The Library: “your military dwarves will skill up very, very quickly this way,” it says in the manual. Maybe so, but I haven’t yet quite got it down. Military skills seem to move up more quickly from live fire training in the Prisoner Rooms and this fortress has lots of prisoners. More cage traps with quality mechanisms have been placed on the surface. Library studies are also non-linear: a novice skills up as quickly as a Grand Master reading an essay does, but a Grand Master making swords also brings a lot of value along with occasionally masterful weapons. It takes many apprentice scribes to keep up with a large library; skilling them also makes for much faster work (fewer reactions = higher FPS) but we already have 200 dwarves so, many Scriptoriums. Skills increase should be an easy thing to measure but maybe not so much when you’re fending off constant military threats at the same time. There were never enough trained soldiers.
- Spiders make very good sentries but give months of spam with all the webbing attacks before anyone can get through to administer the coup de grace. Setting a restricted zone over the webs allows them to be collected for the loom but caravans already bring more thread and cloth than could ever be used. It’s still fun to watch.
- Some scarecrows and stone decoys on pillars were scattered about. More are needed. We lost dwarves on the Magic Wand scavenger hunt to ambushers before knowing they were there.
- After building soap and the bath house, every dwarf spent the next two weeks cleaning themselves. Helps with infection and possibly FPS, I suppose.
- There are some large, mined out empty areas. No notes so, anybody’s guess is as good as mine. Walling them off or at least low traffic zones should help the FPS; a couple are next to the staircase.
- Everything within easy reach of the Depot is now gone so, several smashing bridges are scattered about. The one in The Pit is not yet linked up. Now that we are getting skilled dwarves, there’s not much need to have anything of low quality just sitting in a stockpile and it’s the size of the stockpile that affects FPS much more than the quantity of ‘stuffs’.
Head’s Up for the next guy:
- two sauropods are losing their training. Bogus’ crew is really slow doing their jobs and we’ve been stomped before – badly – by a pair of sauropods within the walls. Now I’m thinking they weren’t wild and sneaky but had lost training and I wasn’t paying attention. Dwarves were tasked with building an enclosed room right next to the Kennel but I don’t know if it will be done in time.
- There are poisons now in stock including one barrel of voodoo poison from some previous year.
- Several of the ‘empty cages’ have things in them like warlock amulets.
- Many wands have been gathered, soul containers are prepared so dwarves can now be upgraded to Legendary military skills.
- There’s plenty of mithril in stock, what titanium we had was used to make welded. The Alchemists are really, really slow. Sorry about getting our legendary armorer killed.
- Many of the masterful bone totems are quite interesting. I wanted to place them on the battlements and then do a Stonesense screenshot, didn’t happen. And there’s that smoldering Balrog skull down in the Panic Room.
- Invited caravans come quickly but don’t bring much. We should have invited Diplomats for the Wish Lists.
- Training squads are equipped with wooden shields because they’re lighter. Leather is lighter still, didn’t think of it.
- There are many easter eggs in this fortress.
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Topic: The Banners of Heart: ☼Masterwork the Fortress☼ (Read 34095 times)