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[Lemunde]

I just retired my last fortress.  I took it about as far as it could go and I couldn't think of any fun projects to keep it going.  Almost all of my barrels were made of metal.  Mostly iron with a few rose gold, electrum and nickel barrels.  I ran into a couple of gold veins and had a legendary metalcrafter so I had a lot of high quality golden items to trade in for whatever I wanted. 

Oddly I didn't have a single goblin ambush throughout the entire game.  I think they didn't like the heat.  Which sucks because I had a nice squad of sword and marksdwarves all trained up.

All of my high ranking and legendary dwarves had some very nice quarters with their own dining rooms.  A fairly uneventful fortress but very nice to look at.

I just started a new fortress in some joyous wilds(max pop 30) so I'm hoping to get some sunberry brew going.  Haven't noticed any interesting creatures roaming around.  Right now my dwarves are still digging out stockpiles just trying to get the basic necessities up and running.

[Retro]

Combatting the evils of low FPS. I've been at 1 for a week or so, and just started to hit 0 more often than not. Mostly because I'm engaged in a rather substantial digging project that's excavated about 170,000ish stone so far - I have 33 dedicated, legendary +5 miners, which is as many picks as I have (not starting up forges until the digging's done for unrelated reasons). The big problem is that now there's so much loose stone (and the other 80 members of my fort are more or less pure haulers at this point) that even with an atom smasher / chasm when I find the UG river, I can't dump them fast enough, and there's so many loose objects around that my game's crashed once or twice simply from too much stuff on-screen. The designation area took me about four days of serious time commitment to lay out (certainly not just big square shapes), so I don't want to undesignate anything - I'm thinking my only option now is to turn mining off for all my miners and let them chill for a few years while this stone gets cleared. Which is unfortunate.

At this point it takes about four or five hours to play out a month without pausing, so... that could be a little while. Despite not wanting to, I eventually gave in and made dwarves have SPEED:1, but things are still substantially slow. Argh. Is there some third-party utility I could use to simply destroy all loose stone?

edit: Scratch that previous time estimate, I just noticed it's been 13th Granite for the last hour at least. Oy vey.

[Lemunde]

Combatting the evils of low FPS. I've been at 1 for a week or so, and just started to hit 0 more often than not. Mostly because I'm engaged in a rather substantial digging project that's excavated about 170,000ish stone so far - I have 33 dedicated, legendary +5 miners, which is as many picks as I have (not starting up forges until the digging's done for unrelated reasons). The big problem is that now there's so much loose stone (and the other 80 members of my fort are more or less pure haulers at this point) that even with an atom smasher / chasm when I find the UG river, I can't dump them fast enough, and there's so many loose objects around that my game's crashed once or twice simply from too much stuff on-screen. The designation area took me about four days of serious time commitment to lay out (certainly not just big square shapes), so I don't want to undesignate anything - I'm thinking my only option now is to turn mining off for all my miners and let them chill for a few years while this stone gets cleared. Which is unfortunate.

At this point it takes about four or five hours to play out a month without pausing, so... that could be a little while. Despite not wanting to, I eventually gave in and made dwarves have SPEED:1, but things are still substantially slow. Argh. Is there some third-party utility I could use to simply destroy all loose stone?

edit: Scratch that previous time estimate, I just noticed it's been 13th Granite for the last hour at least. Oy vey.

And that's exactly why I stick to low populations.  I may never get a king but I can make all my dwarves live like kings and they do it without dipping into my fps.

This probably doesn't apply to large populations but I usually make two very small garbage dumps near the entrance to my fort; one for stone and one for other stuff I want to get rid of, keeping only one of the dumps active at a time.  This way I can always reclaim all the stone and not worry about random stuff getting put back in my stock piles. 

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think having large amounts of stuff in a garbage dump puts any load on the CPU.  So I don't even bother trying to get rid of it by using an atom smasher or anything.

[Retro]

Normally I have POPCAP:40, but I wanted to play this fort out legitimately. I actually don't even think that the population's the problem, actually; I killed about 100 stray dogs when I decided not to go forwards with my wardog army and the abysmal FPS count didn't flicker at all despite the clearing of pathfinding. I'm not even that concerned about the FPS now, I have the patience to wait it out - it's the sheer amount of stone crashing the game that bothers me. I can't destroy it as fast as I dig it out, though, but at least I can stall the crashes. Mining is I'd guess 80-90% done, so once they stop and the dwarves spend a couple days (like, real life days) clearing stone I should be safe to continue the next section of the digging.

I'm not sure about quantum stockpiles affecting the FPS rate; I would imagine since the stone exists it would be the same, but it might be better. Hard to say. I don't think the difference would be that noticeable if there was one, though.

[Axe27]

Le sigh. I'm trying to work out a way to fill my trade depot with water on a moment's notice. I finally figured something out, and I'm trying to build it. But Goblin Ambushes are making construction near impossible, aside from claiming my second champion archer.

[Lord Shonus]

You can change the melting points of the rock in the raws to room temperature.

[Retro]

You can change the melting points of the rock in the raws to room temperature.

Genius! I hadn't even considered that! Thank you, sir.

Question, then - would walls built out of said rocks (a buttload of diorite, microcline, and orthoclase) melt as well? Actually, you know, disregard that. Let's find out.

edit: Well, that froze DF for a good half hour. Let's try them one at a time, perhaps.

double-edit so as to not hog the thread: Right, well, that was certainly odd. To let my laptop manage the craziness, I went one stone type at a time, beginning with orthoclase - I made its melting point 10 and its boiling point 20, hoping that all orthoclase would simply boil away.

90% of my population died from 'freezing to death'*. Uh. It's the beginning of summer.

Going to try again without the boiling tag and see if that helps / works better. Worst comes to worse, the digging's done now and I can leave the program open for a couple hours to continue the insane stone dumping (for this portion of the digsite, 200,000 stone was uncovered).

* the rest had serious injuries and were walking around through red mist which was 'boiling orthoclase' - it didn't look like fire, but it was kicking the crap out of them. Interesting...

[Qanael]

I'm currently almost done building a magma duct above the ocean surface, to pour magma into the ocean in a square shape and wall a section off. I will then pump the water out of there and build some glass domes for the main areas of the fortress, and build the rest under the sea floor. Then I'll breach the wall.

The fortress as it stands is pretty standard, since I need to survive while I build everything. Nothing fancy though.

[hitto]

You can change the melting points of the rock in the raws to room temperature.

Genius! I hadn't even considered that! Thank you, sir.

Question, then - would walls built out of said rocks (a buttload of diorite, microcline, and orthoclase) melt as well? Actually, you know, disregard that. Let's find out.

edit: Well, that froze DF for a good half hour. Let's try them one at a time, perhaps.

Constructions will never melt. Even wooden walls! Go for it!

[Lord Shonus]

If you set the temperature too low, the rocks will emit cold and freeze everyone.

And I can't take credit for the original idea. That was some other genius.

[blue emu]

One of my Original Seven undermined himself, collapsed the tile he was standing on and fell in my Moat while connecting it to the Stream. He fell directly into the Stream itself, underneath the "walkable surface".

He actually learned to swim while I was digging him out!

It must have been a case a strange luck, with the Stream tiles dropping from 7/7 to 4/4 while the water was flowing into the new Moat.

I think I'll dig out a "Swimming Pool", fill it to 4/4, and upgrade his swimming skills to "Competent". You never know when it might be handy...

[Retro]

If you set the temperature too low, the rocks will emit cold and freeze everyone.

And I can't take credit for the original idea. That was some other genius.

Aye, learned that one the Fun way. Well, at least my miners are okay. The rest of the fort took a beating, but I think overall happiness is good enough to see this through.

You DID remind me of temperature wizardry though - and even with removing only Orthoclase, about 1/8 of the total stone I need to move, I'm back up to 15-20 FPS. Gonna make the second pass a bit better, walling off the main stone areas and moving all loose stone outside there to an out of the way spot to make sure the freezing steam won't hurt any o' my smallfolks.

The ability to remove 200,000 stone of the course of a few hours is pretty great for me. It takes about 10 minutes to save right now, hence the time needed to de-fubar this. Oh man will it be nice to play normally again - even the paused screen lags pretty bad.

ed- Decently laggy; extremely bearable in comparison, of course. 200k stone has become 3k, most of which is built into walls anyhow.

[smjjames]

In my current game I have diorite set to boil at 10,000 (which is a bit below ambient underground temperature I think). I have multiple layers of it on my site which would result in a good percentage of the rocks bieng diorite, so I set it to this (and made it an economic stone). When my miners dig through it, they look like orange comets digging around and it does no harm at all.

I also have a good deal of orthoclase and would set that to boil if I didn't have orthoclase mechanisms already. They are at the very least  manageable anyways.

In other news, my fort just went past the 80 pop threshold and now I'm a bit anxious about sieges since I'm not really prepared. I do have 8 champion wrestlers that I recently started training in shield (one is still resting due to a pike in the arm, heal up already!), but no armor and my smelter/forges industry just got started up. And there is the stonefall trap lined entrance area.

Of course though, that was a bit late at night and so I was a bit tired to suddendly start thinking tactically.

[Shurikane]

I have to deal with six megabeasts.

Sounds fun. I thought you could only have one megabeast on a map, and that they stopped sieges while they were there?

Also, any chance of posting the raws for said megabeasts, or a link to them? They sound quite Fun.

Legendary Lands Mod. 

This is for those guys who no longer feel challenged by goblin sieges and need some real threat to their fort.  Several of the LL megabeasts are impervious to common traps and drowning chambers, and are self-regenerating, such that the only viable option is to fight them mano a mano.  To do this, you'll need solid military management, a good armory, and a whole lot of champs.  Even with them, a megabeast will often tear through a good portion of the fort before being taken down.  They're very difficult to kill, but they've given me the most epic and hilarious battles I've seen in my DF carreer.

[Sphalerite]

I have just abandoned a temporary experimental fortress.  The land around the fortress had an amazing wealth of minerals, with magnetite lodes and veins of coal exposed to the surface, but under that lay an aquifer at least three Z-layers deep.  With great effort and a lot of pumps I managed to safely tunnel through the first two layers, then gave up when I hit the third.

The new temporary experimental fortress I just created has the opposite problem:  no water whatsoever.  No aquifers, no above or below ground rivers, no pools, no rain.  Oh, I've also set a rule for this fortress of no bridges or doors used for defenses, and at all times at least a third of the population are soldiers.  And for even more fun I've installed the mod that makes dwarves burst into flames when they die.  I expect Fun to occur as soon as any significant number of injuries happen.  Did I mention that I struck the HFS in the first winter of the fort?