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[Hishan]

Hi fellow bay watchers,
Dont you hate it when your fortress gets to year 10 or so and you're chugging along at 5 FPS. This could be partly  due to that 15,000 stone you have lying in the corridors. I was wondering what is the best way to get rid of it, since some methods cause substantially more lag, and some still tracks the stones after they are destroyed, so help me do a little mythbusting. Which is the best method?

1)Atom smashing  - pros:easy to set up  cons:labour intensive, removing stones in such a manner causes unknown effects on tracking

2)Magma - pros:easy to set up, rock boils away completely cons:labour intensive, need magma

3)"Boiling" the rock by setting its melting temp to fortress temp. Pros:quick, no labour  cons: all your workshops and furniture melt, 10,000 cleaning jobs

4) megaproject pros:definately works, cool structures   cons: VERY labour intensive

5)Chasm - same as magma really, but youll need a chasm,   con:chasm beasties

And yes I know removing 10,000 stone will have a monstrous effect on my forts value but for smoother running it is a sacrafice I am willing to make.

Thanks, all feedback welcome!
Feel free to offer new ideas to my limited list here!

[Qiu]

Building stone floors with the stones as soon as they are mined. Lots of work, but at least it's more spread in time. (not sure if floors are tracked and would somehow still affect your FPS)

[Trigonous]

Quantum stockpiling underneath a 1x2 atom smasher.  If you get to many, simply trigger it, and have your dwarfs refill the stockpile so your masons have materials.

[Jaeke]

You forgot about catapults, they seem to work quite well if you have enough of them.

[NW_Kohaku]

Magma dumping takes a season to get rid of the molten rock, like a blood splatter token.  Atom smashing is hence slightly preferable, if not quite as dwarfy as using magma as your garbage disposal chute.

Atom smashing also has the advantage of allowing you to sort through the dump site for the things you don't really want dumped beforehand, like if you strip caged seigers naked to loot their goblinite for melting and giant cave spider silk loincloths for decorating with spikes of green glass and selling to elves, who for some odd reason apparently like to wear loincloths made to cover genetalia of creatures smaller than them that are menacing with jagged glass spikes.

The problem is that things like catapults and atom smashers and magma or chasm dumping all take dumping jobs...  which by the time you have 10,000 stones lying around is a job that takes years to accomplish.  Those are solutions for when you are removing stone as you go along.  When you have THAT much stone, sublimating some of the worst offending stones will probably be your best bet, and all I can say is boozecook a little and put your masons under a waterfall for happy thoughts as you vaporize 2/3s of their life's work.

Workshops are fairly easy to rebuild (I mean, really, it's just one stone, and you just said you have 10,000 lying around... compared to 10,000 haul jobs, 40 workshop building jobs is nothing), and if you can avoid a tantrum spiral from sublimating stone, you can just rebuild everything with economic stones or obsidian or the like.

Otherwise... well, I'm actually going to try that catapult, but for now, I have a neat bismuth (for the magenta color) atom smasher with a dump site beneath it.

[assimilateur]

Kohaku: explain to me what tantrums or boozecooking have to do with magma-dumping (if that's what you meant by sublimating) stone.


On a general note, magma dumping is controversial because at times it will create "phantom globs", i.e. molten stone that will show up on your stocks screen and will still be tracked. It's "phantom" because it doesn't actually exist; while you can zoom to it, there won't be anything in the pinpointed position.

Now, whether or not that is a big enough issue, I do not know. If I had to guess, I'd say no, because when dumping thousands of stones I'd get maybe a couple dozen "phantom globs", but if you're anal about this it will probably be preferable to atom-smash or chasm your refuse.

[Shinziril]

No, sublimating is setting both the melting point and boiling point of the relevant stone to just below room temperature, turning the masses of stone into a quickly-dissipating cloud of cool mist. 

The problem with this is that anything made out of said stone will also evaporate.  This is bad if it was masterwork, or otherwise important (like the floodgate holding back the pressurized cistern).

[NW_Kohaku]

Kohaku: explain to me what tantrums or boozecooking have to do with magma-dumping (if that's what you meant by sublimating) stone.

What Shinzril said, it destroys all non-construction stones, meaning your microcline mugs are all going to vaporize, and if they were masterwork, that triggers the art defacement penalty.

On a general note, magma dumping is controversial because at times it will create "phantom globs", i.e. molten stone that will show up on your stocks screen and will still be tracked. It's "phantom" because it doesn't actually exist; while you can zoom to it, there won't be anything in the pinpointed position.

Phantom nothing, turn on show liquid depth in init.txt, and you'll see them - they're red double tildes, which occlude seeing the depth markers.  You can also see them in k-look mode.

Now, whether or not that is a big enough issue, I do not know. If I had to guess, I'd say no, because when dumping thousands of stones I'd get maybe a couple dozen "phantom globs", but if you're anal about this it will probably be preferable to atom-smash or chasm your refuse.

As far as I can tell, it's not "occasional", it's every time - every stone you dump into magma will still be there, simply in a liquid form.  Since the objective is to actually remove the object from the game's memory, and you aren't doing that (just adding a "liquid" tag to them), at least until it hoepfully gets removed in the following season, so it limits magma's usefulness as a means of removing objects from the game entirely.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Kohaku: explain to me what tantrums or boozecooking have to do with magma-dumping (if that's what you meant by sublimating) stone.

What Shinzril said, it destroys all non-construction stones, meaning your microcline mugs are all going to vaporize, and if they were masterwork, that triggers the art defacement penalty.

On a general note, magma dumping is controversial because at times it will create "phantom globs", i.e. molten stone that will show up on your stocks screen and will still be tracked. It's "phantom" because it doesn't actually exist; while you can zoom to it, there won't be anything in the pinpointed position.

Phantom nothing, turn on show liquid depth in init.txt, and you'll see them - they're red double tildes, which occlude seeing the depth markers.  You can also see them in k-look mode.

Now, whether or not that is a big enough issue, I do not know. If I had to guess, I'd say no, because when dumping thousands of stones I'd get maybe a couple dozen "phantom globs", but if you're anal about this it will probably be preferable to atom-smash or chasm your refuse.

As far as I can tell, it's not "occasional", it's every time - every stone you dump into magma will still be there, simply in a liquid form.  Since the objective is to actually remove the object from the game's memory, and you aren't doing that (just adding a "liquid" tag to them), at least until it hoepfully gets removed in the following season, so it limits magma's usefulness as a means of removing objects from the game entirely.

Such globs of molten rock are normal (it's molten rock). What assimilateur was talking about is when they disapear (as usual) but the game continues tracking them.

[They Got Leader]

What about (d) (b) (h)? Hide all of the unneeded rock. That seems to help for me.

[smigenboger]

I recently learned causing cave-ins will not destroy stone--it will make the next layer have 2x (or 3x, 4x, etc...) the stone when it's mined out. Cave-ins won't remove lag, it will make it worse until you remove that stone

[Retro]

1)Atom smashing  - pros:easy to set up  cons:labour intensive, removing stones in such a manner causes unknown effects on tracking

Very useful in tandem with dwarves at SPEED:0. As someone who's removed about a million stone partially using this method I can testify that the game simply stops tracking the items and frees up your computer

2)Magma - pros:easy to set up, rock boils away completely cons:labour intensive, need magma

The game continues to track much of the rock melted away due to a bug in the liquid flow programming. Not a good solution.

3)"Boiling" the rock by setting its melting temp to fortress temp. Pros:quick, no labour  cons: all your workshops and furniture melt, 10,000 cleaning jobs

As mentioned earlier, take the quotation marks away from the word boiling and set the boiling temperature to fort temp (100,15). If done selectively you can prepare in advance to weather out the storm - ie. replacing to-be-melted floodgates and mechanisms with ones of a stone type you won't be melting. The masterwork loss is sad but bearable; losing the capability to operate your machines which may now be inaccessible is horrible.

4) megaproject pros:definately works, cool structures   cons: VERY labour intensive

Your 'pro' is wrong, sorry. It's rare that any single megaproject or even a few megaprojects will be able to use up even 10,000 stone, much less amounts greater than 100k.

5)Chasm - same as magma really, but youll need a chasm,   con:chasm beasties

Highly effective. However, the same result can be achieve using the end-side of an underground river (which I recommend ever so highly) as well as dumping into the 'lava flow' tiles of a magma pipe, which is floorless and destroys the stone forever.

Ultimately the best solution is a combination of 1, 3, and 5. Boil the majority of it (selectively, I must repeat), atom-smash what's far from the chasm, and chasm the rest. For easy reference...

[They Got Leader]

Where do you make the dwarves have SPEED:0?

EDIT: Found it... wow... ITS LIKE A BEEHIVE!

[Azulth]

Building stone floors with the stones as soon as they are mined. Lots of work, but at least it's more spread in time. (not sure if floors are tracked and would somehow still affect your FPS)

I wonder... Do engraved floors still count when there's a constructed floor on top of it?

[They Got Leader]

Building stone floors with the stones as soon as they are mined. Lots of work, but at least it's more spread in time. (not sure if floors are tracked and would somehow still affect your FPS)

I wonder... Do engraved floors still count when there's a constructed floor on top of it?

I believe not, because the floor that is built replaces the engraving. That's how you can fill a room with masterwork engravings. Just build flooring over and remove. Viola, new floor to be engraved.