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[schlake]

I commented recently that my game crashed on me.  I was told in the forums that this is common.  But I've been playing since August 15th of last year.  I had one crash, the first time I tried to use truetype fonts, so I didn't try to use truetype fonts again.

But since that crash, my game crashes all the time now.  And it started when I learned a new DF trick.  I learned how to use a metalcrafters forge.  Up until this point, I've been selling mechanisms to the caravans for all my military needs.  But as soon as I set up a metalcrafting industry, the crashes started.

Is this just my imagination?

[NW_Kohaku]

I've been having MUCH more crashes in .40 than I ever had in .34, myself...

What are you using to run the game, exactly? Are you using the PyLNP stuff that includes DFHack?  I'm guessing there's a good chance some of that stuff makes the game more unstable. 

Also, what time of year are you in, and do you have trees? I wouldn't put it past the new trees to have a crashbug.  I had a lot of crashes in my autumn.

Personally, I've had the most crashes just trying to change Z-levels with a mode like q-look engaged, myself...

[schlake]

I just run dwarf fortress.  I pretend I'm in the matrix when I stare at the screen.  I removed the aquifiers because as best as I can tell, you people are all liars when you claim they can be penetrated.  :/

I've always embarked with trees.  I enjoy cutting them down and building giant wood towers that my dwarves have to live in.  The metalcrafting is new though, from about when the crashes started.

[NW_Kohaku]

I just run dwarf fortress.  I pretend I'm in the matrix when I stare at the screen.  I removed the aquifiers because as best as I can tell, you people are all liars when you claim they can be penetrated.  :/

I've always embarked with trees.  I enjoy cutting them down and building giant wood towers that my dwarves have to live in.  The metalcrafting is new though, from about when the crashes started.

That's funny, I embark on aquifers all the time.  I actually prefer it to embarking anywhere else, since it's free water starting from any horizontal tile I want. 

Incidentally, the easy mode aquifer breach, "The Chicken Run Technique" was one I stumbled trying to set up quick test forts where I didn't care about risking my dwarves' lives.  All you need is to train up your miner to rank 5-6 in mining, (dig soil holes - works best if you only have one miner -) and dig faster than the water can fill up the pit.  Connect to caverns, and boom, problem solved.  Aquifer flows are much slower than river or ocean flows, so you aren't in nearly as much danger as you'd suspect. 

Once you're below, you can easily use the drainage method, or a modified drainage method with an atom-smasher tied to a repeater to eliminate all the water coming down and make a stairwell through as arbitrarily large or shaped as you wish. 

Alternately, the easiest method is to just embark on the boundary of a biome with an aquifer and one that doesn't have one.  My current embark is half desert and half forest with an aquifer.  Just mine down the desert half to get past the aquifer, and tap the aquifer for infinite water.  I always embark on biome edges, anyway, since that gives me access to a wider variety of resources.  (And deserts are guaranteed sand while forests are guaranteed wood.)


Anyway, to get back to the matter at hand, what have you started doing differently that starts causing crashes, to be specific?

Are these magma forges? Can you shut off forges, but keep smelters working, and see if that causes crashes, or vice versa?  Are you melting large numbers of things?

Is the game running or paused when it crashes?  What menus were you in? 

How many dwarves do you have, and how many items do you have both inside and outside of stockpiles?  Are you using quantum stockpiles?  Do you have large numbers of forbidden items or items outside of general burrows?

(And again, what year and season are you in?)

[schlake]

Different: I've been building smelters to smelt things (every ore on the list on repeat), a metalsmith to make iron breastplates, iron legs, and iron hats (never made it this far so I don't know what would come next).  I also have a wood furnace going, but I've done that before to make soap and never had problems.

Never tried  a magma forge.  I only melt ores I find.  I haven't tried melting objects yet.

The game crashes when running.  Usually right after I have queued something up on the metalcraft station.  Not in any menus.  It runs for a moment out of the menus, then drops.

I think I'm usually up over a hundred dwarves by the time I'm ready to metalcraft and then it crashes.  As for items, no idea.  Probably lots.  I don't use many stockpiles.  Usually just seeds, gems, and food.  Everything else I just pile up on the trading post in case I want to trade it.  I don't forbid things, and I d-b-c the entire map somewhat often because the dwarves keep forbidding bolts on their own and they end up laying all over the wilderness.  I don't know how to make a quantum stockpile.  I stopped using burrows before I started metalcrafting, so no burrows.

[NW_Kohaku]

Wow.  I sometimes forgo the pretty designs and just get down to brass tacks, dig a Stairway to Hell, and make a magma forge (on floor B100) before I make my first bed.  I make the "proper" magma forge in year two.

But then, I'm used to wood being rare.  I'm actually building walls aboveground with wood instead of stone in this version of the game because the first tree I chop gives me 40 wood.  I never fertilized fields and only made a couple bars of soap as a luxury.  Magma forges are mandatory.  I count on one hand the number of things I NEED from metal before I can make a magma forge. 


OK, then, SCIENCE time. 

Load up a save, punch in your orders, and see if it crashes.  If it does, load up the save again, and punch in the orders for only the northern half of your forges/smelters.  If it still crashes, load it up again and try it only for the southern half.  (If it doesn't crash, force-quite through ctrl-alt-delete to reload from the same point.) Do the same on an East-West split. 

See if you can narrow down which forges are the source of the bug.

(In fact, if you can get a save right before a consistent crash, this is time to upload to DFFD and check up on Mantis.)

[Shonai_Dweller]

Are you sure it's metal crafting, and not the widly reported buildings-on-trees crash bug?
Build a building on a tree, game will crash.
New tree grows into building, game will crash.

Seems to be the cause of a lot of vanilla DF crashes.

[schlake]

I'm always building wooden towers, and never crashing.  I've even practiced building things connected to trees and never had a crash.  I did have spectaucular build/tree collapses though.  The crashes only started when I figured out how to make metal armor.

[Eldin00]

Every crash I've experienced in .40.24 during gameplay has been traced back to either interactions between trees and constructions, something I'd messed up while fiddling with the raws, or to something in DFHack. Not to say that there isn't a crash bug hiding somewhere in the smelters or forges, just that I've never hit it, even on fortresses with a thriving metal industry. As others have said, if you can get a save from which you can consistently trigger a crash, and provide instructions on how to do so, there are people willing to look at those saves to try to track down what might be causing it.

[Varnifane]

The crashes only started when I figured out how to make metal armor.

The game is crashing because you've trained it to think you're an elf.

[schlake]

I don't mess with DFHack.  I've tried Therapist a couple of times, but I don't use it.

I tried to make a fort last night to test metalsmithing on.  I cut down all the trees to make sure there were no tree problems.  One tree was a major problem.  It kept growing up in the air above my farm and blocking out the sun.  I never really defeated it, I just kept cutting it down.

But the ground defeated me.  I dug into the earth, and I found...diorite.  And then some granite.  And the diorite.  And more diorite.  Below that, diorite.  Then there was some diorite.  The first thing I found below the meager layer of granite that wasn't diorite was admantine.  A single tube of it that wasn't even tube shaped, so it couldn't be burrowed through.

So I wasn't able to test my theory since I had nothing I could smelt.

[NW_Kohaku]

I don't mess with DFHack.  I've tried Therapist a couple of times, but I don't use it.

I tried to make a fort last night to test metalsmithing on.  I cut down all the trees to make sure there were no tree problems.  One tree was a major problem.  It kept growing up in the air above my farm and blocking out the sun.  I never really defeated it, I just kept cutting it down.

But the ground defeated me.  I dug into the earth, and I found...diorite.  And then some granite.  And the diorite.  And more diorite.  Below that, diorite.  Then there was some diorite.  The first thing I found below the meager layer of granite that wasn't diorite was admantine.  A single tube of it that wasn't even tube shaped, so it couldn't be burrowed through.

So I wasn't able to test my theory since I had nothing I could smelt.

There's an indicator for whether or not there are metals on your embark.  I highly recommend you not embark anywhere there isn't multiple metals both shallow and deep.  In fact, I usually embark on "corners" with 3 biomes available to up my chances. 

You might want to alter your metal scarcity to better your odds, as well.

[schlake]

My world is aquifer free, and had metals everywhere.  I'm positive the screen said deep and shallow metals, clay, and deep soil.  But that might have been before I shrunk the embark size to 2x2 and moved it.

[NW_Kohaku]

My world is aquifer free, and had metals everywhere.  I'm positive the screen said deep and shallow metals, clay, and deep soil.  But that might have been before I shrunk the embark size to 2x2 and moved it.

Why do people so hate aquifers?  They're so lovely.  I can't imagine what people have against infinite, easily accessible, and completely secure water sources. 

Anyway, are you talking about the "metals everywhere" setting in the simplified embark settings?  I only use advanced settings, so I'm not really sure, but I think that should make it so that every metal a layer stone can hold, a layer stone will hold, so you shouldn't be able to go for a bathroom break without tripping over native gold. 

I'd suggest using DFHack reveal or whatever, and taking a look (and force quit to avoid saving if you don't want to ruin everything) to make sure, but yeah, you might have screwed yourself over by doing memory edits to your embark. 

[Eldin00]

My world is aquifer free, and had metals everywhere.  I'm positive the screen said deep and shallow metals, clay, and deep soil.  But that might have been before I shrunk the embark size to 2x2 and moved it.

Why do people so hate aquifers?  They're so lovely.  I can't imagine what people have against infinite, easily accessible, and completely secure water sources. 

Until you've had the experience of successfully piercing a few aquifers, they can be intimidating. Once you've learned a technique for getting through them that you're comfortable with, they're no big deal and can in fact be useful (though I did have a map once where 100% of my available iron was in a 12 Z-level aquifer, which made it a real pain to get any).

On the topic of this thread, for the purpose of trying to track down your crash, you might try creating a world with the mineral frequency set to the highest available setting (if you're using the quick worldgen) with the 'mineral scarcity' setting below 1000 in advanced worldgen, to make it easy to find a site with very accessible metals, to for testing purposes.