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[k9wazere]

I must admit since I first found Dorf Fortress, I've played somewhat defensively. Even more so when I started playing in reanimating biomes :p

But always my forts end in FPS death very quickly. Sometimes in less than a year.

Does stopping enemies from pathing into your fort cause them to endlessly check every square on the map for a way in?

My most recent fort went from 100 FPS to <20 when I made a tunnel from one side of a mountain to the other side. I suspect this was due to pathfinding strain too.

So what are the things not do do if you don't want a very quick FPS death?

[taptap]

So what are the things not do do if you don't want a very quick FPS death?

What I do to avoid FPS death (some of the stuff is probably superstition, but overall it works):

Small embark, population cap, limited or no animals (and not lock in those I have behind dwarf-only-passable doors), small distances between parts of the fortress, designating traffic zones, quantum stockpiles, destroy waste, avoid overproduction, throw away clothing that starts to decay, burrows, deactivate caravans, clear cutting, treeless desert or glacier embarks.

[unknown zombie]

I play on a laptop that has an AMD Athlon 2.1 GHz and 1 GB of DDR 400 RAM. I have soft population cap at 100 and hard cap at 120. I have been playing a fort for 3 years, have 120 dwarves, and the game runs between 10-15 FPS depending on what's happening. I play a 4x4 embark. I have many animals, but they are all pastured except for dogs and cats.

Population caps are the way to go.

[Naryar]

No, turtling does not cause FPS death. Turtling actually improves FPS due to reduced pathfinding on dwarves.

It's just that you probably have a lot of dwarves and lots of dwarves DOES cause fps death.

Although FPS death in the first/second year ? How the hell do you manage that ?

[GhostDwemer]

All you did was dig a tunnel from one side of a mountain to the other? You did nothing else, no new dwarves showed up, no invaders, and when the tunnel was finished, FPS dropped immediately by 80 FPS? I think something else must be going on, that sounds really extreme. For me, very little I do with and digging channeling has much of a visible impact on FPS. The number of dwarves, number of possible destinations (i.e number of workshops, stockpiles, and the like), and number of items has much more of an impact for me.

[4maskwolf]

This actually happens to me somewhat: even on 2x2 maps with the seven starting dwarves I have noticable FPS slowdowns before the end of the year.  Migrants don't help matters at all.

[Sadrice]

To test the tunnel, try sealing it with a raising drawbridge.  Pull the lever, and if fps changes dramatically, submit it as a bug report.

[Gukag]

Flyers still massacre my fps. Sudden slowdowns for me are almost always due to a flock of ravens, seagulls, vultures, or other flying pests showing up, to the point that I remove the flying tag and parameters for any such critters that can show up on the type of embark I am in. Make sure to add higher walking and climbing gait as well, or they will crawl around for years on your map blocking the arrival of any other savage creatures. Alternatively just remove them completely from the raws.

[Detros]

Flyers still massacre my fps. Sudden slowdowns for me are almost always due to a flock of ravens, seagulls, vultures, or other flying pests showing up, to the point that I remove the flying tag and parameters for any such critters that can show up on the type of embark I am in. Make sure to add higher walking and climbing gait as well, or they will crawl around for years on your map blocking the arrival of any other savage creatures. Alternatively just remove them completely from the raws.

Or install some flak crossbows and/or ballistas. Eeasy.

[GoblinCookie]

Actually in lots of way a low FPS in Fortress Mode is a good thing within reason.  It makes things like combat rather a lot easier to handle particularly. 

Basically do not worry about lowering FPS too much, it is just what happens as the game progresses.  It makes it easier to handle a very large number of stuff going on and it is caused by a very large number of stuff going. 

[utunnels]

Big world.
Big map.
Long history.
Too many stray animals.
Too many dead units.
Too many trees.
Play with big window size, multilevel rendering, etc.


My FPS is usually affected by those factors.

[Hurkyl]

Actually in lots of way a low FPS in Fortress Mode is a good thing within reason.  It makes things like combat rather a lot easier to handle particularly. 

Basically do not worry about lowering FPS too much, it is just what happens as the game progresses.  It makes it easier to handle a very large number of stuff going on and it is caused by a very large number of stuff going.

I worry about lowering FPS because it makes the game too slow.

If I wanted to have more time to do stuff and didn't want to use pausing for whatever reason, I would have set my FPS cap lower.

[orbcontrolled]

dwarf-only-passable doors

That one bears repeating. A single cat trying to get through a dwarf-only door brings my FPS from 100 down to 15 instantly. Anyway...

Do you have DFHack? If so, backup your save, type "exterminate" in the console to get a list of species on the map, and then start doing "exterminate SPECIES_NAME" and check each time to see if FPS has improved (be aware: you can never have 0 wild creatures on the map in the current version, as more will instantly spawn, so just shoot for a low number). If that doesn't work, d-b-d the whole map and use "autodump" and then "autodump-destroy-here to gather and subsequently destroy every item in your fortress in one fell sweep and see if that helps. If its neither creatures nor items, then you might be out of luck and need to gen a smaller world or something, but at least you can narrow down the problem a little and find out what its not.

[k9wazere]

dwarf-only-passable doors

That one bears repeating. A single cat trying to get through a dwarf-only door brings my FPS from 100 down to 15 instantly. Anyway...

Good to know. I've been using that a lot to stop cats getting massacred by cave critters :p

I think in future animals with migrant waves will be 'adopted' by the butcher... They always starve to death in the meeting hall anyway :p

[Detros]

If its neither creatures nor items, then you might be out of luck and need to gen a smaller world or something, but at least you can narrow down the problem a little and find out what its not.

Also turning temperature off (in "DF folder/data/init/d_init.txt") may save quite a bit of resources, especially if there is moving magma - recalculations of nearby tiles that get periodically heated and then colder again are quite demanding. But note warm walls will not be warm anymore then which can (literally).lead to lots of !!FUN!!. There are also other things to turn off in that init file, like weather.

Reference: A Better Magma Pump Stack thread