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[Tamren]

Apart from bugs the biggest issue by far in most games of DF is stone management. After a not-so-small period of time the number of loose boulders in my fort can soar to 10000+. And that does not include stone blocks and ore which is too valuable to dump. So I figured, if we can cut that load on the computer by at least half that should make the game perform a lot better.

One thing I though of was stacking stones and blocks together. The way it works is simple and automated. When you make a stone or block stockpile, stone of the same type can "stack" on the same tile. Boulders can stack up to 4 by placing 3 in a triangle and putting another on top to make a pyramid. Blocks are smaller and can be stacked up to 5 (3 on level 1, 2 on level 2 etc). When you open up the stocks menu, full and partial stacks of boulders count as a single item for tracking purposes.

Now I realize that you can store blocks in bins but I don't like that setup because its hard to get them out again and 10 dwarves carrying ten blocks is 10 times faster than one dwarf lugging a superheavy box.

If this would not affect performance, then it would certainly help us store excess stone. New tiles would be required but they are rather simply to make. 2 stones on the same tile is two lumps beside each other, 3 is a triangle of lumps (like the predators laser sight) and four is 3 lumps in a triangle with a fourth superimposed over the other 3, as if you looked at the stack from above. For blocks the icon is easy, just a pyramid with varying amounts of stones depending on how big the pile is.

Make sense?

[Align]

I dunno, I'd rather just have plain restacking.
For now, if you have magma in the map, toss garbage/excess stones in and it'll be destroyed in moments.

[ March 02, 2008: Message edited by: Align ]

[thvaz]

Or you can destroy them with bridges.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[infinity]

I get rid of excess stone by building several catapults and having the dwarves fire them directly into a  wall.  it pulverizes the stone (at least for me), goes through it quickly, and trains the dwarves.  

Another option which helps with training is to churn out boatloads of rock crafts and dump them onto traders, even if the profit for them is excessive.

For simple destruction Bridges are good because they (apparently) destroy everything.

To help with dumping stone, I setup a Autohotkey macro to assign, for example, ctrl+right arrow to set the dump flag and move right.  Saves a few keystrokes.  You can also do a similar thing for marking lots of items in a list (like when trading).

[Tamren]

The key here is not just reducing the amount of waste stone lying around, that is simply a welcome side effect. The main point is that the game can take all of that waste stone and condense it. It might be junk now, but its possible that somewhere in the future we will actually have a need for all the stone. Some people do already in the building of massive castles.

Even if nothing else changes, its still a convenient way to get by with 1/4th of the stone stockpiles we have now.

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by infinity:
<STRONG>For simple destruction Bridges are good because they (apparently) destroy everything.</STRONG>

Not megabeasts.  The lever simply doesn't pull (to either raise/retract--fling or drop--or lower/extend).