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[Walkaboutout]

Sigh. I want to tear it up in these new versions of DF. I really do. But I just can't get into it. I'm one who used to run a single fort for a good generation or two before finally giving it up to FPS death. Longer if I was careful about how I did things.

These versions...I just can't get anything made that lasts even up 'till ten years. Maybe I don't have the most elite PC in the world, but it's decent. And it IS this version (as in 40.xx, active world stuff); whatever the actual culprit may be.

I've tried a medium or small world with like, 10 years of history and standard 3x3 embarks...I'm not really into doing smaller embark areas, though maybe, at this point, that's going to be one of my only real choices. But, come 4 years-ish, there's just that huge FPS fall. Population is capped at 100 right now. Sigh. Makes me sad.

Am I the only one having issues getting further along with this one, when it comes to that? Mostly this is just a place to commiserate I suppose, should we want to. I know the FPS situation has been discussed to DEATH, and I don't think it likely any new insights will arise from this thread, but you never know. It's always good to discuss the issues I'd say, and this to me is one of the biggest barring further interaction with the game, in my little corner of the universe.

[utunnels]

You are talking about fps death, but how slow is it on your side?

I'm currently playing a 6 years fort on a 2x2 map. My world is a 257x129 world which has a history of 121 years.
There are currently 116 dorfs. The game runs at 20~25 fps on an ancient computer and 25+ on another.

[Walkaboutout]

About 4 years in, roughly, I start to see the drop. It drops fast. I'm at 100 then suddenly, without much change to the map, the fort, or the population size, I'll be at 75 or 80. Within a year or so, I'll probably be down to the 40-50 range. 7 or 8 years in, yeah, I start seeing 30-ish, give or take, at which point I start losing my tolerance for getting things done.

That's all a generalization of the specific scenarios I experience when I try a fort of course, but it's probably a relatively fair idea about my experience in game. I have a small virtual machine I run at work as well on occasion, and while the numbers themselves vary a bit, I see the same type of fast falling off occur after the 4-ish year mark there as well.

[PatrikLundell]

There are a number of strange FPS fall steps that occur for no generally known reason.
If your FPS tolerance level is in the 30 range, I think you're going to have a tough time though.
Reducing the number of dwarves and livestock should help, as should restricting the livestock's pathing options through locked doors (although there was a bug that caused animals to try to path through animal restricted doors that may or may not remain).
Closing off as much of the world as possible to dwarven access is supposed to help, so walled off/locked doors to explored boring areas ought to help, although I haven't really tried it.
Turning off temperature (when not generating obsidian) and weather is supposed to help, as is removal of contaminants (blood splattered around, etc).
As small a world as possible with a short history and culling of historical figures should also help. I learned yesterday that a region map generates fewer z levels than an island map, which should mean fewer z levels of caverns for critters to path around in.

[utunnels]

Or you can upload your save for us to do some !!science!!.

[bluephoenix]

I am playing an 8 year old fort with a 4x4 embark area, 550 year history and small world at the moment which runs at 40FPS.
I guess my tolerance is a bit higher than yours because I cap my FPS at 50 by default so 40 or 30 is still pretty good in my eye.

Changing your G_FPS cap down to 10 apparently helps a lot, locking off empty mines/hallways with doors helps, throw garbage into magma instead of stacking it all on one tile and I am sure some the wiki gives some more information on how to increase your FPS.

Also make sure nothing else runs in the background on your computer, when I play dwarf fortress I always turn almost everything off even the internet browser.

EDIT: And yeah, like utunnels said, you can upload a save and we can see how many FPS we get and if we can improve your fort a bit FPS wise.

[Draba]

Somewhat related:
I remember reading somewhere that dead animals permanently drop fps.
Didn't now whether it's true or not, takes quite a bit to test so if anyone has a definitive answer it would be nice to know.

[Badger Storm]

Somewhat related:
I remember reading somewhere that dead animals permanently drop fps.
Didn't now whether it's true or not, takes quite a bit to test so if anyone has a definitive answer it would be nice to know.

B-but how am I supposed to make an entire economy based off unicorns then? D:

[ptb_ptb]

B-but how am I supposed to make an entire economy based off unicorns then? D:

Mod in a trainable tag and sell them to elves in cages.

[PatrikLundell]

Blocking background activity should have almost no effect on a remotely modern computer, since DF is single threaded, so all the other threads can play on the other cores without any CPU effect. However, cashes will be affected, as well as disk accesses.
However, if DF is set to run at the highest priority, other stuff should have very little effect.

[utunnels]

Somewhat related:
I remember reading somewhere that dead animals permanently drop fps.
Didn't now whether it's true or not, takes quite a bit to test so if anyone has a definitive answer it would be nice to know.

Well dfhack has a command to remove non-dorf/pet units from the deceased list.
But that doesn't fix fps.

[regulark]

I have a 14 year old fort, 188 dwarves, 3x3 embark that was slowing down to 10-25 FPS. I removed excess stock, and turned weather/temperature off to increase my FPS to 15-35. I then used DFHack fix/dead-units to remove the 3000+ dead/missing units to 107, I now have about 50 FPS. It seemed to have worked for me.

Intel Core i5-4440 @ 3.10GHZ 4 cpu

[Vndetta]

My highest FPS-drain has always been sheer number of items as the years go on in a fort. I habitually make lots of stuff - food, furniture, cloth, pretty much everything - and this drops the FPS in a major way when it starts adding up. Once I have industry set up, I sell off every possible thing to the caravans each season and smash what I can't sell. I've seen gains of 60+ FPS the second the caravan left the map. Culling livestock helps too, and DFHack can do a few things like cleaning spatter from map tiles or clearing up the Deceased unit list.

[Codyo]

Changing your G_FPS cap down to 10 apparently helps a lot, locking off empty mines/hallways with doors helps, throw garbage into magma instead of stacking it all on one tile and I am sure some the wiki gives some more information on how to increase your FPS.

Yeah, changing the G_FPS in the init.txt file helps. In the same file change processor's priority to HIGH. Realtime doesn't seem to work. By using your task manager you could try assigning only one core to dwarf fortress too. To make that more useful though, you would have to go through other processes and turning off that specific core for them.

People use DFhack to clean up their fortresses usually, like all the blood, vomit, and other bad things covering objects and creatures. There may be a command for even deleting non-essential and certain items.

Turning off the temperature and weather usually provides a large boost, at the cost of fun features. Like burning fire and clouds of death, thrall-creation, blinding and whatever else they do.


You can try mods too, once the version releases start slowing down enough for modders to catch up you'll see FPS improvements being made. Usually mods that delete a lot of useless minerals, alloys, clothing, trees, gems, and name tags on items. Basically making the game more generalized in object differentiation.

[Pirate Santa]

Great way to remove clutter is to use DfHacks Autodump.

Just mark items for dumping, use d-b-d if there's a lot of them, then type autodump and they will all teleport to your incinerator/atom smasher.
Alternatively typing autodump destroy will vaporise them on the spot.

I like to use this to clear out the acres and acres of rocks that are never going to be used.