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[ShaveDaWookie]

Hello all, OP here, were now 43 years into this fort and ive done a LOT of science.

population is still 40

im running an old i3 at 3.5, ddr3 ram

map size is 2x3

my FPS varies from 15 to 50, usually around 35-40. i smash everything from sieges, make as little as possible, ect.

ive got all three caverns open (but bridge off), allow surface access (but ive disabled most outside jobs like fishing) i think this shows that even a modest rig can maintain decent FPS if your willing to work it into your design. I really wish i had done a smaller embark and not opened the caves but 35fps is good enough. I plan to goto 80 dwarfs soon for more science.

the weird thing is sieges dont really drop the FPS that much, I havent located the problem yet but somthing drops my FPS to 15 for about 10 seconds once a month.

edit: im really loving low pops, you still get sieges and megabeasts when you get enough wealth, you can be much more extravagant with each dwarf

[CyberianK]

Embark 1x1

You can go with 2x2 , it's larger enough for a decent fortress and you should be able to keep the framerate above 50+ for a decade or two without problem at 100 pop as i do on my current fort (assuming of course you use the other fps controlling tricks) on an old computer :


turning off siege is a problem to me as it introduce boredom very quick , mostly because unless you make your own self challenge rules in current and default gameplay it's too easy to get your fortress to be self sufficient in only a few months on your first fortress year (and that will still continue to be self sufficient even when you'll reach your max pop).

I usually only turn off siege temporarly so my dwarves can have enough time to haul all the useless items generated by defeating a siege into my atom smasher (as it can take a very lot of time when you're not using dfhack for its autodump destroy script) before the next siege

An additional benefit to have a 2x2 ( 1x1 ) map with siege enabled, is that it actually increase the siege challenge, because the invaders spawn so close to your fortress that your dwarves will have less time to prepare for them (assuming you jusy simply didn't walled/roofed your fortress completely.

Thats interesting in my last game sometime last year I did 2x2 and pop limit of 80. But still the FPS where in the 10s after 3+ years and falling.
And my CPU is decent an OCed i5somethingK thats not too old (no i7 but multithread no help in DF... dont remember exact model right now cause I am not home). I also tried to limit my items to produce and also used quantum stockpiles and I walled off dugout areas to assist pathfinding. That said I had trees and a small above ground area with a large wooden wall around it with roof and fortifications. I also had a 3x3 central staircase and a small turkey egg farm and a few watchdogs but no other animals. Maybe thats what added to the issues.

Anyway I would love to see a Fort that has a decent amount of Dwarves (over 60) after 5+ years and still has decent FPS. At this point I have totally given up with this game. It might be that I always do many things wrong in my Fortresses so I would really like to see a fort that keeps decent FPS. I would love to do a new game but at this point I have totally abandoned hope.

If anyone could provide a zip to one (specifiy which version) it would be really helpful. I think I am doing something wrong.

[bloop_bleep]

I don't know, DF seems.... pretty playable for pretty much everybody here, so you either don't have the specific hardware requirements (RAM speed I seem to remember is the main bottleneck), or just too high standards. 

Note that because DF doesn't have fancy 3D graphics, the screen updates don't have to be silky smooth in order to stop jittering, so what's generally the minimum playable FPS rate for DF is much smaller than for other games.

[CyberianK]

I don't know, DF seems.... pretty playable for pretty much everybody here, so you either don't have the specific hardware requirements (RAM speed I seem to remember is the main bottleneck), or just too high standards. 

Note that because DF doesn't have fancy 3D graphics, the screen updates don't have to be silky smooth in order to stop jittering, so what's generally the minimum playable FPS rate for DF is much smaller than for other games.

I would actually be fine with 20 FPS after 10 years. Thing is I played games there it dropped to like 6-8 and that is just unplayable for me. And when my forts where I specifically tried to limit performance issues still drop in the 10s after a few years then can be sure that those forts die the same performance death a few years later.
Another issue that each of my last 3 games had is that at some point items over a certain distance can't be reached/accessed anymore. Its like the pathfinding totally fails. Its not that these items were marked forbid or so they were just unreachable by the game logic. Easy to see is for the Trade depot it only sees items near it but not something thats 10 levels below. But it affected all workshops and general hauling too not just the Depot.
Your right that it seems many peoples don't have issues that's why I want to look at some other savegame because I it could be due to the way I design my forts I just cause these issues. Even though I specifically read about things and tried to limit impact before my last game.

[§k]

My 2x2 100 population seaside forest fort is almost 5 years. 40 cats and 10 grazers. 1 cavern breached, there's a magma pipe so I don't dig further down. Pocket island of 30 years. 30 fps on an old laptop.

I will upload the save when year 5 comes.

[CyberianK]

My 2x2 100 population seaside forest fort is almost 5 years. 40 cats and 10 grazers. 1 cavern breached, there's a magma pipe so I don't dig further down. Pocket island of 30 years. 30 fps on an old laptop.

I will upload the save when year 5 comes.

That would be amazing thanks your fort sounds great seems there is still hope I mean I would be fine with fewer dwarfs, no trees and no cats. So I guess I will try another game after I had a look at your general design so I don't fall into my own patterns again that break everything.

[Leonidas]

My solution to low FPS is to turn up some pleasant music, open some entertaining browser tabs, and check on my fort every ten minutes or so.

[Robsoie]

Anyway I would love to see a Fort that has a decent amount of Dwarves (over 60) after 5+ years and still has decent FPS. At this point I have totally given up with this game. It might be that I always do many things wrong in my Fortresses so I would really like to see a fort that keeps decent FPS. I would love to do a new game but at this point I have totally abandoned hope.

If anyone could provide a zip to one (specifiy which version) it would be really helpful. I think I am doing something wrong.

If you want to give a try and see what kind of fps you can get The fort i have in my screenshot can be downloaded there :
http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=13644

My fort is more than 10 years old now, but that saved game was done a few years ago in my fortress life (but still it had more than 5 years) as i had posted it for a bug report on mantis some days ago, but the bug isn't gameplay breaking as i still continue to play with that fort without problem (just some dead dwarves corpses that had lost their names after a retire -> unretire and so aren't considered anymore by the game as dwarves that were citizen and so will be left rotting on the corpse stockpile).

I would be interested to know what kind of fps you have on that fortress, i have 50+ on my old system with DF 44.09 (the 32 bits SDL version directly from Bay12 , not something like a prepackaged 3rd party DF that may have performance problematic features, only difference is i'm using a simple tileset, said tileset being completely optional you don't need it to play that fort) and most of the time it goes to more than that.

[Lenny Zicree]

So if I understand everyone correctly for starting a fortress that does not die performance death I should:

Embark 1x1
Small+young world
Limit Caverns
No trees
Don't build stairs
pop below 50
no sieges
don't produce rotting clothes
destroy all excess items
don't mess with water
don't dig out much
no animals

Forgot anything? Maybe I try playing this game again maybe it can still be fun with the outside raids and such but those above measures drastically reduce the fun in a fortress.

i like this!  some thoughts:

Embark 1x1 on a Small+young world -- absolutely!

Limit Caverns - by walling them off entirely. leave only a small box with fortifications secured with a bridge through which you can see the wonderful visitors.

Don't build stairs -- dunno. ramps confuse me.  how about .. build only a 1x1 central staircase. with a single pillbox/minecart dispenser stockpile for everything not specialized elsewhere.

pop below 50 -- used to think that until i had 40ish addtl merchants etc in a fort on a reclaim with no noticeable drop in fps.

no sieges -- huh?  what you may mean is 'kill the outside pathfinder.' i do that by leaving a pillbox for in the cavern where interesting thing or just crundles can hang out for 6 months at a time ... and immediately caging and pitting the first bunch of sensible wild surface animals in a pit on the surface. this stops any and all future wildlife from entering the map. (also sidesteps tree problems?)

don't produce rotting clothes, destroy all excess items -- put everyone in squads (yeah yeah, miners and woodcutters are special) and slowly get them used to wearing nothing but metal in your fort built on the ice.   .. seems to not matter much if you keep them dressed until you've sold every last remaining sock to the visiting garbage collectors.

don't mess with water - c'mon now! i want my dining hall mist-wall and entrance flowing washers. agreed on 'no naturally running water' -- but a few guys pumping all the time seems quite ok.

don't dig out much -- then what?  just wall off anything you've exhausted and leave/use only the spaces you actually need. fancy 3 high mountain hall dining room, drop-pits, entrance tunnels. and ... argh food. eliminate hallways!

no animals -- they seem to work fine. its the nestboxes that used to kill me. i had two forts in the recent .07 that went from 100 to 25fps within hours because i messed up something inside a single 6x6 nestbox room. i gave up on them.  3rd time it happened i realized what had gone wrong (cant reproduce in words) and the fps returned in full shortly 10..20 mins after i had killed all the egg-layers that were ever in that room.  my unicorn leather farm seemed to not affect fps at all. (again in a room with a door and zone inside.)

i also did a thing i read: in entity_default.txt changed all [ETHIC:KILL_ENEMY:x] tags to [ETHIC:KILL_ENEMY:ACCEPTABLE]

the most i've played with any fort under the 2018 releases is 20 years. while uncapped fps has gone down from unbelievably high 500+ at the start to 120+ in a fully dug fort i usually cap it at 50 and am content that its usually not going below that with all the kids and such -- the laptop is 5yrs old already.    .. seems slowness is a lesser part of the trauma conditioning experiment known as df now than it was anytime in the last decade.

still, i'm keeping my pop-limit at 40.

and hey, no hallways:  just above the caverns i have 8x8 4x4 = 64 bedrooms in a grid. above that another floor like that with workshops, some specialized. also another floor with 3x3's for specialized mincart-dispensor piles and farms. the butcher at the very top has another dispensor that dumps corpses etc into a deep shaft so there's minimal mayhem when things reanimate.

other than that, what Leonidas said. pleasant music and letting them write pray, dance and write books.

and oh.. do bring at least a few male cats. i thought i'd get them anyhow - but noone has brought one to my current fort in however long it takes for the first kids to grow up. ugh.

anyhow, this is what i know. looking forward to learning more!

[Bumber]

I've heard setting [G_FPS_CAP:20], down from 50, helps somewhat.

no animals -- they seem to work fine. its the nestboxes that used to kill me. i had two forts in the recent .07 that went from 100 to 25fps within hours because i messed up something inside a single 6x6 nestbox room. i gave up on them.  3rd time it happened i realized what had gone wrong (cant reproduce in words) and the fps returned in full shortly 10..20 mins after i had killed all the egg-layers that were ever in that room.  my unicorn leather farm seemed to not affect fps at all. (again in a room with a door and zone inside.)

You were probably using a pet-forbidden door, which causes pathing spam.

[CyberianK]

I would be interested to know what kind of fps you have on that fortress, i have 50+ on my old system with DF 44.09 (the 32 bits SDL version directly from Bay12 , not something like a prepackaged 3rd party DF that may have performance problematic features, only difference is i'm using a simple tileset, said tileset being completely optional you don't need it to play that fort) and most of the time it goes to more than that.

So I just loaded your save and let it run for a month. FPS were between 60 and 90 (I didnt count the first decrease from pause) mostly around 81-83
This is amazing I never thought that would be possible. There must have been things majorly wrong with my forts in the past.
And your fort even has water and trees what a luxury. MASSIVE THANKS to you you gave me hope in DF again.

I did a clean install of DF 44.09 x64 + Spacefox graphics + DFHack
I never manually installed before always used LNP. I always used DFHack and Soundsense and Spacefox. Sometimes I used Therapist but just for vieweing dwarfs not for changing anything.
I will start a new game now with my clean install. I hope DFhack wasn't to blame in the past as I can't play without it but it might have been more my worlds and forts in the past. I will try a very minimal 2x2 embark without trees in small world at first this game world from this guy https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/8a4yhc/fortress_friday/dwwjpqg/ sounds interesting.

Also @Lenny thanks for that comment on nestboxes I think I had Turkey nestboxes and wardogs in each of my games even though in the last one I massively reduced the number. I guess this time I will try to go totally without the turkeys just to be on the safe side. I will keep like 10 dogs just for initial watch duties.

[Dragonborn]

So I just loaded your save and let it run for a month. FPS were between 60 and 90 (I didnt count the first decrease from pause) mostly around 81-83
This is amazing I never thought that would be possible. There must have been things majorly wrong with my forts in the past.
And your fort even has water and trees what a luxury. MASSIVE THANKS to you you gave me hope in DF again.

Good to hear you found something that works. 

With regard to your other comment where it seems as if "pathfinding fails" and items just randomly become inaccessible, the likely cause is that you're storing items in bins.  Items in bins become inaccessible if a dwarf is hauling or using the bin.  This can cause problems where items are mysteriously not visible from the trade depot menu.  It also causes workshops to not "see" items needed for jobs, which causes job cancellations.  A similar effect happens if you use furniture stock piles.  If say you order your mason to make a table, the moment it's done, a dwarf will move it to the stockpile.  Tables are heavy and if the stockpile is far away, it will take long to move it.  During the time that it's being hauled, you can't order it to be constructed.  It won't be visible as an available table to use in the build menu.  I rarely use bins and almost never setup dedicated furniture stockpiles for the heavier stuff.

If that's not the cause, the other possibility is that you may have blocked access by improper construction or ramp usage.  It's easy to screw up ramps when you're just starting out.  You have to be careful not to dig out the wall that the ramp is supported by. It took me a few tries to get them right.

[Robsoie]

If it can help, here's some tips regarding how i built my fortress.

2x2 map in the d_init.txt was good as i was previously playing 3x3 map but noticed i wasn't even using lots of parts of it, and considering invaders takes so long to come to you, 2x2 is way enough for my forts and fun.

Atom smasher, this one is an absolute considering the huge amount of garbage useless items you'll have on your map with time, regularly going to the z -> Stock menu and press d to dump the many useless things that will accumulate, it really help to keep your item count in check, make sure to have a dump zone ( key i ) in your atom smasher room so the dwarves dump everything there (and if you're using dfhack, learn to love the autodump feature) .
 
Tons of invaders corpses from various sieges will be useless to your fort (i only kept a few on the corpses stockpile at my village gate for "the atmosphere" ) , atom smashing is always the answer, all those thousands of x X or XX bad clothing or armors too -> atom smash (as current version seems to not allow me anymore to trade them out of my fort).

Quantum stockpiles, again another must have so you don't have giant amount of surface to dig (and lots of dug tiles will create a lot more performance trouble for the pathfinding code) in order to have items stored.
In my fort instead of doing a single quantum stockpile, i decided to do 4 , one for food, one for wood, one for stone and one for everything else just as a matter of preference as i wanted to see what the dwarves were doing, a single one would have been enough honestly.
And make sure every stockpiles part of the quantum does not accept barrel or bin, you don't want to add bugged stuff regarding container there

Walling sections of the fort that are uneeded, on the bottom of my fort there's the baronness big room, while it does not show (because the retire-unretire hide it again) , there's another big room that extend beyond the east wall (as it was my stone quarry before) that i have walled out, so there is no pathfinding code that will uselessly run there.

Pathfinding performance can be impacted too by the traffic settings, so using d -> o , i setup to Restricted lots of zone that my dwarves have no interest/business to go to but that i didn't want to wall off.
By example the big baroness room, there's part of it that has traffic zones set to restricted (press d -> o to see them) because there's 0 interest for any dwarves to pathfind there.
did the same everywhere else there was no need for the pathfinding code to go.

I have the refuse order to allow gathering outside too ( o -> r -> o  ) , simply because if not there will be giant tons of useless stuff lying around after a while, dump them all to atom smash them.
Check when you have body parts or anything else stuck where your dwarves will never go to collect them and mark them to forbid (items in water, items on trees , item on wall top etc...) so when you mass dump things, pathfinding will not try to get them (and fail, but still adding more pathfind calls)

I have used no stairs, only ramps , mostly because i have read that it helps with the pathfinding code apparently, no idea if it is true but as my fort wasn't going to be too complex there was no need of stairs anyways.

I have not dug down to the caverns, mostly because in the end it didn't interested me as out of the rare forgotten beast there's not much fun to have there for me as there's no big invasion armies coming from there, and caverns are usually so convulated that i prefered to avoid having the pathfinding code going nasty down there.

[CyberianK]

So I just loaded your save and let it run for a month. FPS were between 60 and 90 (I didnt count the first decrease from pause) mostly around 81-83
This is amazing I never thought that would be possible. There must have been things majorly wrong with my forts in the past.
And your fort even has water and trees what a luxury. MASSIVE THANKS to you you gave me hope in DF again.

Good to hear you found something that works. 

With regard to your other comment where it seems as if "pathfinding fails" and items just randomly become inaccessible, the likely cause is that you're storing items in bins.  Items in bins become inaccessible if a dwarf is hauling or using the bin.  This can cause problems where items are mysteriously not visible from the trade depot menu.  It also causes workshops to not "see" items needed for jobs, which causes job cancellations.  A similar effect happens if you use furniture stock piles.  If say you order your mason to make a table, the moment it's done, a dwarf will move it to the stockpile.  Tables are heavy and if the stockpile is far away, it will take long to move it.  During the time that it's being hauled, you can't order it to be constructed.  It won't be visible as an available table to use in the build menu.  I rarely use bins and almost never setup dedicated furniture stockpiles for the heavier stuff.

If that's not the cause, the other possibility is that you may have blocked access by improper construction or ramp usage.  It's easy to screw up ramps when you're just starting out.  You have to be careful not to dig out the wall that the ramp is supported by. It took me a few tries to get them right.

I know what you are talking about but it was not that. It also affected regular things just lying on the ground somewhere. So like a Mason Workshop could not access a regular boulder that was lying on the ground a few levels below and top which dwarfs could easily travel. When I selected the Mason menu from which materials I want to make items then only items closeby were available.
I guess if that happens to me again I make a thread about it. At that time I spent over 10 hours to figure out what was wrong and tried to fix it. Redid workshop, redid stockpiles and staircases and many other measueres/experiments but could not figure it out it basically destroyed my whole fortress because it was not correctly working anymore maybe this was connected to my FPS issue?

edit: so I started a Smaller SHort History world with more beasts and savagery for now and embarked 2x2 in Savannah with sparse vegetation and temperature disabled, temp calculations will also cost FPS and I don't think they are very necessary

[§k]

My 2x2 100 population seaside forest fort is almost 5 years. 40 cats and 10 grazers. 1 cavern breached, there's a magma pipe so I don't dig further down. Pocket island of 30 years. 30 fps on an old laptop.

I will upload the save when year 5 comes.

That would be amazing thanks your fort sounds great seems there is still hope I mean I would be fine with fewer dwarfs, no trees and no cats. So I guess I will try another game after I had a look at your general design so I don't fall into my own patterns again that break everything.

This is my fort in year 5. It's 24 fps now, but that's still not bad.

http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=13654