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[Leonidas]

REVISED Sep 5, 2020

I'm preparing to retire a fort that I intend to later unretire and play, after my adventurers have had their fun. This is my second time to do this. The first unretired fort got a bit messy, so this time I'm trying to do it better to make the fort unretirement as smooth and stable as possible. These steps haven't all been tested carefully. Many are based on rumor and speculation. But if stability is your goal, then these steps seem like sensible ways to eliminate potential bugs.

This list is a work in progress. If I've missed anything, please point it out.

Preparing for Retirement

• Nobles. After retirement, DF will assign dwarves to all empty noble slots. Those nobles will probably be unable to migrate during retirement. So fill those slots with dwarves that you want to remain with the fort.
• Burrows. Remove all assignments of dwarves to burrows and cancel any civilian alerts.
• Activity Zones. Delete all activity zones that might attract visitors, meaning taverns and libraries, and possibly temples and guildhalls. Visitors who arrive at your fort during its retirement will probably be bugged, meaning that they stand around and do nothing. Setting the zones to "citizens only" doesn't help.
• Scholars. If you haven't deleted the library, then scholars assigned to it will keep on researching, and are probably less likely to migrate. So leave the scholars in place if you want them to keep researching at that fort, or remove their assignment if you want them to migrate to a new fort.
• Pastures. Delete all pastures. They will lose their animal assignments and need to be rebuilt.
• Bins and Barrels. Items in bins or barrels remain in place, but outside their containers. The AI relating to stockpiles has a hard time dealing with this. So when possible, use stockpiles without bins or barrels such as QSPs.
• Chests and Cabinets. On unretirement, all chests and cabinets will be un-built. The furniture item will still be on the same tile, but it'll need to be rebuilt. So if you plan to later unretire and play a fort, don't go overboard with chests and cabinets.
• Stockpiles. Some stockpiles may stop working after retirement. I saw one definite case of a broken raw fish stockpile. So keep your stockpile setup simple with the expectation that you'll need to erase them and start over. Maybe set your (o)rders to not mix food, so that you can easily make complex food stockpiles later. More research is needed here.
• Pending Orders. Delete all digging designations and dump designations. Complete all orders for building or constructing. Check the jobs list, and complete or delete all suspended jobs and anything else related to construction.
• Rooms.Delete all specific room assignments: bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, barracks, tombs, etc. Assigned/claimed rooms in particular are said to be buggy.
• Workshops. Delete workshop profiles. These are reported as mildly buggy.
• Visitors. Wait for any merchants to leave. Lower the visitor cap to zero and wait for all the visitors to leave.
• Items for Adventurers. You may want to visit this fort as an adventurer to collect your best armor, weapons, waterskins, backpacks, food, booze, and other useful items. So gather those items in an easy-to-find location. Remember that your fort may be difficult to navigate in adventure mode with its limited vision. If you plan to deposit items into the fort as an adventurer, then you definitely want to leave some empty display furniture close to the surface. Items left on the ground at fortress retirement stay in place, but items dropped in the fort on the ground by adventurers will be scattered each time the site reloads.
• Booze and Brewables. As a consequence of the great barrel-and-bin dumpout, all your booze will be gone on unretirement. If you intend to unretire this fort and resume playing it, make sure that you have plenty of brewable food on hand.
• Hostiles. Every creature in a cage or on a chain will be released and scattered around your fort. So dispose of all hostiles before retirement. The creature scattering might also move a hostile from a sealed-off section of a cavern to a not-sealed-off section, so be prepared for that possibility.
• Sealed-Off Areas. If any open tiles in your fort are sealed off, you may want to open them back up. This will minimize the effect of bug 1871, which un-reveals those tiles. On the other hand, maybe you don't want to leave your fortress open to their caverns and their subterranean wanderers. And you could deliberately use this bug to un-reveal HFS that are harming your frame rate.
• Fluid. If the fortress map started with a natural lake or river that you drained or dammed, that fluid will suddenly reappear on unretirement. This could cause major flooding.
• Entry. If you might visit the fort as an adventurer, make sure that there's a way in.
• Back up the game and copy it somewhere safe. You may want to reload it later to recover from any problems, to remember what was in the old fort, or to navigate the retired fort in adventure mode.

Ideas for After Fort Retirement

• Reset the graphics. Adventure mode is unstable with the fancy graphics packs. So turn the graphics down to CLA 18px for stability in adventure, then turn it back up for fortress unretirement. Only change graphics in between forts or adventurers, meaning that you have a "Start Playing" option on the main menu. Always unretire a fort on the same graphics that you used to retire it. It's easy to forget this. And since retirement immediately wipes out your save, always back up your game before retiring.
• Item Transfer.
  
  • Have an adventurer pick up high-quality gear from your retired fort, then go kill things with it.
  • Have an adventurer carry items into a fort that you plan to unretire, such as books, artifacts, or other nice stuff from an old fort. It's best to drop them into a container, such as a pedestal. If you drop items on the ground, they'll be scattered and re-scattered each time the fort reloads. Manufactured items such as armor and weapons are slightly bugged. Your soldiers can't equip them unless you strip them trader and foreign flags from them, and then dump them. Raw materials don't have this problem.
  • Have an adventurer drop items onto a site where you will later start a new fort. The dropped items will stay in place.
  • Pack animals help with item transfer. And adventurer's carrying capacity is proportional to both strength and body size, so a large animal-person adventurer can be very useful. While there seems to be no upper limit on how much weight a pack animal can carry, carrying more than about 500 items in adventure mode will destroy your FPS.
• Win the War. Have an adventurer massacre civilians in sites belonging to an enemy civilization. Legends Viewer helps with this. It doesn't feel heroic, but it may be the only way to defeat a site that's too tough to handle in fortress mode.
• Specialists. Create one or more adventurers with obscure skills, then retire them into the fort that you intend to unretire and play. With this trick you can hand yourself experts in hard-to-develop skills, such as doctors and artists. (Most of the scholar skills are not available.) You can also design these adventurers psychologically to avoid stress and work hard in the area that you've chosen for them.
• Hero Preparation. Create a new combat adventurer and immediately retire him into your future fort. He can get military training while you play that fort, then you can retire that fort and play him in adventure mode as highly trained killing machine. Or you could use adventure mode as the training ground, and then retire skilled adventurers into a new fort to jump-start their military. If you want to retire an animal-person adventurer into a fort, be aware of bug 9588. Retiring a fort with an adventurer assigned as militia commander will make it easy to later recruit companions from that fort in adventure mode.

Steps for Fort Unretirement

• Start making booze.
• Re-create your food stockpiles. Some of them might not work.
• Free and reassign rooms for nobles, especially bookkeeper and manager. If you left noble positions vacant at retirement, they will be filled with random dwarves. Remove or replace them to your taste.
• Set bookkeeper to All Counts Accurate.
• All cabinets and chests have been un-built. Start rebuilding the nobles' rooms first, then the hospital and tavern chests, then the general bedrooms.
• Re-designate pastures and their animal assignments. Re-assign animals to chains.
• Cooking/brewing preferences are gone. Set them back.
• Re-create your other stockpiles. If an old stockpile held items in bins, then you may want to re-form it somewhere else. The items in bins will still be where you left them, but they won't be in the bins any more. If you leave the stockpile where it was, or if you re-create it as it was, then those tiles will be jammed. They won't work properly with the usual flow of placing items into bins. So either move the items off the stockpile and bring them back, or move the stockpile.
• Restore burrows, workshop profiles, activity zones, squads, rooms, and anything else you removed before retirement. Check details on hospitals, barracks, tavern, and library.
• Review the visitor cap.
• Save and load the fort to fix some graphical bugs.
• Some items may randomly pick up TSK flags, which can cause "Item blocking site" messages. Forbid and unforbid those items to clear the flag.
  

[Justin]

I believe there is a dfhack command that gives your fortress the 'laird's tag. This keeps everything in place, so your forts possessions are strewn across the map when you reclaim.

[HungThir]

if there's anything you would like your future adventurers to be able to purchase, wait till caravans come so you can move it all to the trade depot (and then don't sell it to the traders).  i THINK this works, IF you get lucky and there's a local hanging out at the depot to trade with when you come visiting.  but i'm not certain, cause one of the times i tried it, the fortress got obliterated by a tavern fight loyalty cascade at the wrong moment, and fell into ruin rather than being retired, and the other time, 5000 goblins came calling in the two weeks of worldgen, and the place became unvisitable due to lag

i think trade depots work similarly to pedestals and display cases, in that items within them stay put over retirement (but i haven't successfully confirmed that yet).  and world gen fortresses with trade depots will let you purchase stuff if there's a local hanging out to trade with (unlike the downstairs stockpiles), and i don't see why that shouldn't work for ex-player fortresses too, if they have items in stock (but i haven't successfully confirmed that yet either)

[it might be worth also changing the trade depot to "allow anyone to trade", especially if you're unassigning your broker, but again, haven't had a chance to confirm either way]

[Fleeting Frames]

Good lists, though few small notes:

Delete all squads and remove all nobles to the extent possible. In addition to stability, this will probably help make those dwarves available as companions in adventure mode, or as migrants to other forts.

Being in a squad doesn't disable one from being migrant, at least as of 43.05.

Also, on unretirement empty noble slots will be assigned, so might be instead wise to assign those you don't want to recruit/are least bad for position.

Remove all scholars and scribes from the library.

If you keep the scholars as scholars, they'll keep researching while fort is retired, so might not want to do this.

Create a new combat adventurer and immediately retire him into your future fort. He can get military training while you play that fort, then you can retire that fort and play him in adventure mode as highly trained killing machine. If you want to use an animal person for this, be aware of bug 9588.

Worth noting here, the squads are not actually useless in adventure mode; if you appoint your adventurer as milita commander they can recruit people to their squad.

[Leonidas]

Those are good points about the squads, nobles, and scholars. I've revised the list to reflect them.

I've never tried the trick with an adventurer as militia commander. Check the Hero Preparation entry and see if I described it correctly.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

If you put all drinks into well, will dwarves drink water laced with alcohol and become happier?

[Fleeting Frames]

I've been told it as a way to recruit people into fort. No idea about recruiting people from fort, but I'd expect it'd give you some authority over them.

@Iä! RIAKTOR!: Yes, but they'll simultaneously get "drank dirty water" thought. I think overall result is net happiness, but since water mostly serves as hospital cleaning tool I don't bother.

Mainly an use for modded play if you give golden salve a healing syndrome or something like that.

[Bumber]

@Iä! RIAKTOR!: Yes, but they'll simultaneously get "drank dirty water" thought. I think overall result is net happiness, but since water mostly serves as hospital cleaning tool I don't bother.

Does that increase the risk of infection? Could be a good way to supply your patients with booze, otherwise.

[Fleeting Frames]

It doesn't count as booze for the purposes of alcohol-dependence unfortunately (and vice-versa item DRINK with water as material does).

[knutor]

Should we wait for missions to return, or is it okay to retire, with raids going on?

[Leonidas]

Should we wait for missions to return, or is it okay to retire, with raids going on?

I see retirement and unretirement as the alternative to missions. But that depends on what you want to do with missions. You can massacre any civilization with two well-trained adventurers, some excellent gear, and some patience. You can't actually extinguish the enemy civ, but you can certainly beat their sites down to population levels that make them easy to conquer with missions. You can use adventurers to steal books and other artifacts much more efficiently than you can with missions. And you could use adventure mode to collect specific individuals and place them into a particular fort, though that may be buggy.

I'm not convinced that missions are as bugged as people say they are. I recently retired a fort that ran hundreds of missions over ten years before it got mired in low FPS and frequent CTDs. The bugs may lie elsewhere, maybe with soldier equipment, maybe with visitors and returning soldiers bringing bugged items into the fort. And some mission bugs are probably avoidable, such as not sending a squad on a mission until they've all dropped whatever they're carrying, not carrying food or drink on missions, and not sending a squad back out on a new mission until all its members have returned from the old mission. And I never do artifact recovery missions.

The next time I run a miltary-focused fort, I'll lock out all visitors and make sure that none of my missions involve bringing back any items. Maybe that'll help beat the CTD blues.

[knutor]

CTD blues. I hear ya. Last two forts I quit for that reason.

I am worrying about the one I am in now. QSP for finished goods has 8000+ items in one square. I know DF was not designed for that. I also see bags in my barrels. That seems strange.

Ever retire with an atom smasher running? Ive never really done much of this. Seems like a good method for handling unwanted visitors, make them dodge about 9 drawbridges.

[Leonidas]

CTD blues. I hear ya. Last two forts I quit for that reason.

I am worrying about the one I am in now. QSP for finished goods has 8000+ items in one square. I know DF was not designed for that. I also see bags in my barrels. That seems strange.

Ever retire with an atom smasher running? Ive never really done much of this. Seems like a good method for handling unwanted visitors, make them dodge about 9 drawbridges.

I always run atom smashers in mature forts, because my neighbors keep dumping their thongs, socks, and corpses on my lawn. Cleanup is a total nuisance.

I started studying fort retirement as a way to get around the seemingly inevitable FPS loss and CTDs. I'm using adventurers and a pack animal to haul huge quantities of stuff from one fort to another. I even built another tiny fort just to put a bridge across a major river to make the main hauling route easier. So far it seems promising, though I won't know for sure until I unretire the new fort for real and start playing it.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

It doesn't count as booze for the purposes of alcohol-dependence unfortunately (and vice-versa item DRINK with water as material does).

But this give inebriation with euphoria.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

In very cold climate, you can freeze booze. Unfrozen booze will be drink or liquid_misc?