(I'm not entirely sure which section to put this in, so I'm putting it here. Also, this may have been asked before - I apologize in advance if that's the case, and feel free to remove this post if it's problematic in some way.)
As of late, I haven't been terribly active in the Bay12 community. Rest assured, though, I'm still keeping up with Dwarf Fortress updates. I'm also continuing to tinker with the game itself, across all the different versions I have.
I'm going to wait until the major issues with the current version have been ironed out before I try it. For now, I've been enjoying messing around with version 31.25.
Bit of backstory on that - I've enjoyed all the versions of Dwarf Fortress that I've played, but version 31.25 is my favorite by far. I've had some trouble with the earlier versions (40d and 23a), mostly in regards to low and/or fluctuating FPS. (Which is unfortunate, because 40d would probably be my favorite if it weren't for that issue.)
Recently, I tried out version 34.11. While I like a lot of the new features in it (necromancer towers, evil weather, vampires, werebeasts, all sorts of new and interesting creatures, advanced worldgen options for a good number of the new features), and it fixes a lot of the issues from version 31.25 (which I will get into shortly), I have a few issues with it that have kept me from upgrading long-term. Most notable is the fact that dwarves will now go to the site of an item with a storage container to collect it, which often interrupts repeat jobs (something that is an intrinsic part of my admittedly shoddy strategy). Until I get used to this feature and develop a new (and probably better) strategy for handling it, I'm going to stick with editing 31.25.
Which brings me to the main point of this post - I apologize for taking so long to get to the point, it's a really bad habit of mine. There are a fair number of annoyances in version 31.25 that aren't present in other versions, and here I will give a short list of my most notable gripes.
-Crystal glass cannot be manufactured
-Body parts (skin, bones, etc.) of large creatures instantly clutter workshops
-Plants with good/evil tags (sliver barb, sun berry, etc.) will not show up, even in their respective biomes
-No wagons or diplomats for caravans
-No dungeon master or exotic pet taming
-Dwarves won't wear new clothes that they claim
-There may be a couple other issues I can't think of right now
Now, that being said, there are some bugs in 31.25 that I consider personally advantageous (no economy, all metal items only take 1 bar), so make of that what you will. But those are my primary annoyances. (I saw on the wiki that there is a problem with eggs causing clutter in kitchens when cooked, but I have never experienced that myself, beyond the completely normal case of a large food stack causing kitchen clutter. Was this fixed?)
Now, my last question is: Are there workarounds or patches for any of these? I have a patch to fix the crystal glass issue, and DFHack takes care of wagons and diplomats, but that still leaves the other issues. Some of them can be fixed by modding (making it so that good/evil plants spawn in specific biomes rather than good/evil regions, making large creatures smaller (bleh), making all creatures just have "pet" instead of "exotic pet" tag), but I want to know if there's another way to fix them.
Again, I'm aware that a lot of these issues were fixed in version 34.11. That is not what I'm asking here. What I'm asking is if anyone has made fixes for version 31.25. Upgrading won't solve the extant problems in the version I'm using and prefer to use, so please refrain from recommending that - I've already tried, and I don't like 34.11 as much as 31.25. If there are no fixes, I'll go on playing the game the way I've been playing, as there is already a workaround for the biggest issue (crystal glass) and most of the others are just annoyances. But I figured there's no harm in asking if I can make my gameplay experience smoother in this version.
(Also, if anyone has any idea what might be causing my framerate issues in 40d, I can try and provide some more details. That's an if, though, and it's not the main subject of this post. For now.)