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[coteyr]

So I have built maybe 10 or so forts. 4 of them have been Fun the other 6 have died to FPS. I can't seem to make a fort that will go long term and not die to FPS. My last run was about 6 years. I went really slow, only made items that I exactly needed, didn't dig squat that wasn't strictly needed. 5 wide hallways, Clear smooth paths. More vertical then horizontal. And still there was a slow but steady decline in FPS till eventually I sat there at 4 FPS and basically couldn't even designate things.

Now this fort was meant to "go a long time". So I was in a Calm, Warm area. I don't even think I had a goblin raid. Just some kobalds, and  few  wondering, scary looking monsters that were pretty easy to take care of.

I did accumulate a lot of crap, but I atom smashed it to try to restore my FPS. Nothing seems to work. I had, before I gave up, reduced my inventory down to about 1,000 items across all categories. This seems a bit extreme to me, but there you go.

So I have a few quesitons, as this really is ruining my game play. I like looking to Fun but not to bugs (unless they are vermin then that might be Fun).

- Is Accelerated Dwarf Fortress, Masterwork any better?
- Aside from the stuff in the wiki, any sure fire tricks
- How do you guys handle FPS issues?
- The only thing I noticed was using dfhack's "flows" command told me there were a large number of magma flows, I had not seen any magma yet, but is there ay way to turn those off/make them standing magma instead?
- I had a pop cap at 100 but I have a great computer, it should be able to handle more, what are your pop caps at?
- Any other tips, suggestions, what ever. I really like this game but I hate not even having the ability to play long enough to get a good cat splosion or Mega Beast.

[Linkxsc]

Ive been trying to troubleshoot the fps death causes in various ways. (Current attempt is a modern version of my time capsule fort. A 48x48x15 fort, all underground, with a top floor for some wood aboveground.) And even though its hermetically sealed, and all items are quantum stockpiled (in several piles mind you, basically 1 pile for each category of items, only other piles are some feeders for my dyer)
And still on year 15 im running into some rapid fps decline.

[PatrikLundell]

Magma flow is the last level of magma above SMR, and I don't think there is any actual flow, and thus not any FPS hit, from it.

My last fortress ran for 18 or so years before I got bored with it. I'd opened the candy pipes and killed all clowns that emerged (not quite true, a few decided to settle in my access tunnels), but never bothered to descend through them (as far as I understand, there isn't really anything interesting except combat down there). The FPS was quite good, I think it went down to 30 or so.
I've got a new powerful computer, which probably helps, the SSD disk would help with any disk cashing. Apart from that, I used the following:
- Pocket universe (island) modified somewhat with extra savagery, lots of caves, lots of volcanoes. I don't think any of that affects FPS.
- 250 years starting point, culling of historical figures. Double amount of megabeasts, semi megabeasts, and titans.
- At war with goblins from the start (my civ dying). In range of two black towers. This resulted in goblin sieges once-twice per year. A number of undead sieges the first 5 years.
- No other races, since they'd been killed off (as happens usually, with the parameters I use).
Embark size 3*3 to guarantee at least one candy pipe (I did get 3, one of them huge, something like 40 levels high).
- Captured and bred cavern critters, but mostly they were caged. Probably around 100 non caged animals (sheep, dogs, cats, chicken, blue peafowl, turkeys, cavern critters, like rutherers).
- Pop cap set to 50, with strict pop cap set to 80. Didn't get above 60, though, since my dorfs were lousy breeders.
- Starting at a volcano, so I had access to glass from the start, but no metal except goblinite.
- Reduced the amount of junk by sending worn clothing and trade junk off with caravans, but didn't go to any extremes.
- Managed to slow the build up of food, but probably had around 10000 units anyway.
- One reason I got bored was a treesplosion. I started in a sparsely wooded area, but by the end both the surface and all three caverns were overgrown with trees, and the first cavern also was more or less covered in spider webs (which I didn't collect. I'd built a silk farm, but stopped it after a while when the amount of unharvested GCS silk became huge. Since I had GCS breeding anyway, there'd be no problem restarting the farming if needed). The tree clutter also gummed up the secured cavern entrances.
- I generally used QS stockpiles, with exceptions for still and thresher source stockpiles, food stockpile, seed stockpiles, trade junk and worn clothes stockpiles (since I wanted to be able to move the stuff in bins to the trade depot for disposal). Enemy bodies were disposed of in a magma pit, which other refuse went into a QS stockpile. The bones were made into trade junk.

[KingKaol]

It seems like the number of dwarfs is the biggest drain for me, followed maybe by trees and other units.

I get FPS within the 30-60 range at normal zoom with a 16x16 tileset:

- medium world with a lower site cap (401, down from default of 1050), default pop and civ count
- culled unimportant historical figures, reaveal all 'no'
- 4000 year history
- 2 cavern layers
- 3x3 tundra reclaim embark (no liquid water or trees on the surface)
- walled off unused reclaim areas, walled off lower cavern layer, only a small area of access in upper caverns for tree harvesting
- immigration pop cap set to 25, usually have 26-27 dwarfs due to births
- ran the fort for 30 years
- no quantum stockpiles

Zooming all the way out causes FPS to drop to 10-20, with multilevel view even sub-10 frames sometimes

Playing zoomed in all the way (setting tileset to a 32x32 size) seems to help a lot, keeping FPS pegged to 60 most of the time. Basically the more visible tiles in the current view the slower things run.

[Linkxsc]

Confirming that clearcutting all but a few of my trees gave me ~10 fps back after all the wood was hauled.
Figured out that seasons changing and causing leaves/fruit to fall is also a pretty big drain.

[Pirate Santa]

If you have DfHack running you should consider using some of the clean commands regularly.

[coteyr]

I did clean-owned and clean all quite a bit. I just never got my FPS above say 10 when I finally gave up. I might try some of the pocket world and culling things. I was on a big world and maybe that was the source of the lag?

[§k]

The big world and embark size are probably the issue.

Mine is usually: smaller world; 50 years; 1x1; about 50 z-levels from sky to bottom; And it can steadily go with 20-30 fps for many years. The population is 80-90, neither large nor small.

[Detharon]

Did you wall off the caverns? And use traffic designations? I've noticed that the major impact for my FPS is the pathfinding algorithm, which doesn't seem to handle well the third dimension.

Dwarf Fortress uses A* algorithm to find patches, which is guided by the heuristic path length (ignores the obstacles) from it's current point to the destination, and once it's impossible to move further, it starts flooding the area. The thing is, it doesn't know that dwarves usually cannot traverse the z dimension, and it takes a long time to find route in such cases.

A short walking distance is not enough to ensure that you fortress is FPS friendly. Spreading your fortress among many z-levels works quite well in the beginning, but eventually it will be a source of lag, more or less, depending on your staircase and workshop design.

[coteyr]

I did have many z levels but I did use designations. I walled off caverns (I only found 1)

I am going to try playing with the World Gen Thingy and see if I can have some Fun in a pocket world before I died to FPS. Now Ijust need to figure out how to use the world gen to limit z levels.

[mobucks]

The typical central staircase design ends up being rather poor for pathing because of what Detharon posted above.

I find that building the entire fort on one Z level really helps with FPS, especially as your population grows.

[coteyr]

The developer in me knows that  pathing is always going to be a problem. The gamer in me wants to focus more on the Fun then the technical issues revolving around a the best layout to avoid path based FPS Death.

I get that it will "always" be an issue. I understand that no matter what is done ode wise, rather it be multi-threading, or better path finding or what,  that the moving parts of a simulation are the limiter of the speed of the simulation. I just was hoping that I could focus more on fun and less on tech.

The good news is that the "pocket" world and some of the settings listed above seem to really make a difference. I guess time will tell.

[Detharon]

Well, it's still strange that you're encountering such issues that early.

My last fort just hit 5 years, 4x4 embark on small world, central staircase design, multitude of trees, flowing river, a lot of seeds, worn clothes and other products, around 2000 blocks used in constructions, caverns and unused parts of the fortress are walled off, no quantum stockpiles. It's running at 50 fps underground and 30 fps at the surface.

[Skuggen]

I generally don't run into FPS problems until I start messing around with magma projects, but I generally have smallish worlds, shortish history, smallish embark sizes, fairly low (60-100) population cap, and regularly do cleanup of junk items by magma or garbage compactors.

[utunnels]

My current world has only 1 cavern and no magma. It runs fast enough(150fps).
I wonder if you can still have volcanos without magma layers.

In my experience, junks don't affect fps much, unless your dwarves  carry them around constantly.
Also, not having any cabinet helps fps because currently it is bugged, dwarves will always try to store their spare/tattered clothes.