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[They Got Leader]

Hello fellow DF'ers,

I have been around the forums a long time, and have clocked quite a few hours into the community and even more into the game over the course of many years. I have seen many megaprojects and have tried my hand at quite a few myself (here and here, albeit, those were the only 2 I ever uploaded).

In the recent year or so, I have wanted to dip my toes back into the world of Dwarf Fortress, but I tend to over micromanage the game and I just don't have enough time to put into it. This is where this thread comes into play. I want to set up a fortress that will be able to run with minimal input from a person while still maintaining itself. Growth will come when I assign new tasks for the dwarves to work on. With the power of the forums, I want to know your tips and tricks for successfully maintaining a long running fortress, and how you set up the manager screen (j -> m [if I recall correctly]).

In my future plans, I am going to be soon replacing my motherboard, RAM and processor. They still work, but they are getting old. I was toying with the idea of setting up a headless box (or one hooked up to the TV in the living room) and letting it run cycles in the background. IF I WERE TO DO THIS, what would you recommend for remote login? Is it possible to do a Twitch Plays DF? I want serious feedback on ideas, and I am open to a lot of suggestions.

Thanks,
Althis

Fortress Plan:
Invaders will be turned off for a long period until I get the fortress working, and I remove the kinks involved with learning how to automate it. I will begin military training on pretty soon as well as provide elaborate trapped entrances.

For the most part, I am going to avoid breeding animals due to FPS death. Unless they are giant. Or mythical. Or war trainable. Maybe.

There will be a population limit. However, I want there to be generations within the fortress, so I will need to enact a social program to get dwarves to marry and produce children.

More Information!:
I am not looking for complete FPS saving information. I want the game to run, even if it is slow. I want to make this fortress as self sustaining as possible with as little human interaction as possible.

That being said, I still plan on putting in interactions into the fortress from time to time. The idea is to create some kind of elaborate structure, either/both above ground and below ground. This means that once every few hours, I will log in and make sure that the game is running smoothly. I am leaning towards having the game running on the TV in my living room, so that I can watch it as I'm doing homework or whatever.

[NJW2000]

Ptw mainly, but a neat formula I use is to have hunting enabled on my archer squads. Trains them fast and well, can result in a small supply of meat as well as bone bolts for more hunting and training.

[Sbcc]

ptw

[Mostali]

Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but if you haven't played since the implementation of work orders then you might find this thread helpful.  There are still some things that aren't automatable yet - like shearing, and hence a wool industry - but there are a great many systems that can be run completely hands-off.

[NJW2000]

If you could hotkey workshops a macro might do it.

[They Got Leader]

If you could hotkey workshops a macro might do it.

Explain? I think I know what you mean, but I want to see this written out.

Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but if you haven't played since the implementation of work orders then you might find this thread helpful.  There are still some things that aren't automatable yet - like shearing, and hence a wool industry - but there are a great many systems that can be run completely hands-off.

Yes. Yes, yes yes yes. And yes. This is the kind of information I am looking for.

I worry less about shearing and etc, but more about brewing, training, making blocks for the giant skull fortress and generally making sure they they have clothes, food and brew.

[NJW2000]

If you can set certain keys (e.6g. f1, f2, f3 etc) as hotkeys which zoom to a certain workshop, you might be able to create a macro that presses that hotkey and then the key sequences that initiate shearing, milking, thread spinning and cheesemaking (q, a, etc) every so often.

Dunno if that's even possible. But you can do it with artifacts.

[bloop_bleep]

Set up a bunch of farms; put brew drink from plant, cook meal, and weave robe on repeat; lock yourself in from the outside world; and watch your dwarves constantly do the same things endlessly throughout the ages!

[mikekchar]

You can automate milking and shearing fine. Getting the math right is a bit tricky, though.

Apparently animals can be milked every 17 days.  So that means for every 17 animals, you can set up a daily milking of size 1.  You will also get cancellation spam every couple of days for the first 17 days until the timing is set up.  You can also set up a monthly milking of 1 for every animal that you have.  This is not as efficient (you only get 56% of the milk), but you will get no spam.  It depends on what is important to you.  Personally I don't think 1 spam a day is too bad.

Milk stacks when making cheese.  So one cheese making job can use up to 5 milk.  From that perspective, it makes sense to have a daily job that with the condition of having 5 milk.  The size only needs to be set to 1 for every 85 animals (17 * 5).  You should never get spam for this.

Shearing can happen every 10 months (I'm not sure the exact duration, but that's pretty close).  That means you can have a shearing job of size 1 per every 10 animals.  Basically I always round up because I don't care about 1 spam per month.

The amount of wool you get is dependent on the animal, but sheep have 7 wool, I believe.  You can safely have a spinning job every day for every 42 animals.  Again, you should never get spam for this job.

The only difficulty is that you need to replace the milking and shearing jobs occasionally.  I tend to do it once a year because I really don't care about efficiency.

[gchristopher]

You should consider FPS management as a central part of your plan. That's going to rapidly get in the way of any truly long-running fortress.

[Sethatos]

You should consider FPS management as a central part of your plan. That's going to rapidly get in the way of any truly long-running fortress.

I completely agree. Limit your population as well to keep fps up. Keep the cap under 50 so you don't get a mayor, thus no mandates, diplomat visits/conversations. This will allow your fort to run smoothly without looking at it.

Also, go into the init file and edit the announcements to remove all of the autopauses like P and :BOX. Do this on everything except megabeast attacks because you will want to know when a forgotten beast shows up.

Make military squads for everyone in the fort and assign them a metal armor uniform. Set the squad to have one person active training every month so no one is too busy with military training but will have an outfit that never falls apart on its own. Just set the uniform to "replace clothing". This way you don't have to keep making clothes for them.

[gchristopher]

I didn't offer more because I'm not a FPS expert. I frequently play large embarks on complex worlds with reanimating biomes, which are all anti-FPS, but if you search, there's some pretty extensive discussion out there.

Some things I've seen are: tiny world, mods that reduce the number of item types, embarking with a single (or no) cavern layer, embarking in a very low-z-level area, exterminating anything that could send invasions, diplomats or caravans, avoiding digging, embarking in an area with no trees, preventing liquid flow, and avoiding creating items.

A successful FPS-preservation strategy will also probably include healthy amounts of dfhack to clean contaminants, delete items (though I've seen claims that atom smashing fully deallocates the item), and remove records of dead units. (The deceased unit history page by itself can kill a game.)

Sigh, the game doesn't sound nearly as much fun with all of those...

[They Got Leader]

I have read through all of the discussion so far, but I wanted to comment on the last couple posts mostly ==


I am not entirely worried too much about FPS loss. Of course I will take measures to vastly improve the FPS (reduce animal counts and/or no animals, no invasions, etc), but I still want the game to run.

Is there a new version of DFhack? Last time I heard, it was not up due to the extensive ability for DF to page memory because of the 64x update.


Does anyone have examples of manager tasks they have set up for automation? Screenshots?

[bloop_bleep]

If you want to actually fight sieges instead of waiting them out, you could set up an elaborate and overly-complicated (that is to say, dwarfy) contraption that "processes" incoming enemies. Perhaps a fully automated way you can do this is by setting a vampire or other reliable friendly creature (but not military) in view of the fortress entrance but not accessible from it, so that whenever it sees an enemy incoming, it flees, thus activating a pressure plate that initiates a killing mechanism that's installed in the entrance. The mechanism can be made to wait a certain delay before it opens a bridge covering a hallway leading to a quantum stockpile, and then flushing out the carcasses and loot with water unto that stockpile.

EDIT: Is being in view of but not being accessible to actually possible? Perhaps glass walls?

[Sethatos]

Glass walls still obstruct view. You can achieve the same effect by placing a fortification in front of a window however. View will not be obstructed and the fortification will prevent monsters from destroying the window.