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[Angel-of-Dusk]

In this thread, we discuss the mighty tactics of fighting the true final boss of DF; FPS!

For me personally, I avoid making any flows, and if I get too much food, I stop growing stuff, and make 5 cooks go into overdrive and cook only lavish meals, to use up materials.

What about you guys?

[ahonek]

Excess stone is a big thing for me. I have no evidence at all that it makes a difference (other than people claiming it does), but I dig as much of my fort out of soil as I can, then atomsmash all stone that I don't need. Also keeping to one single stairwell helps pathfinding, since there's only one path to any particular location.

I also murder every animal I have that's not a pet, and sometimes I murder pet owners so I can murder their pets. I stick to 3x3 or smaller, and I don't ever, EVER, dig deeper than I have to (both to reduce floor space and to avoid Deep Things).

[plisskin]

All of the above, and when I have to mine a vein I wall the area off and add a door for access. Once I don't need the vein any longer I forbid the door 100%. I try to trade conservatively and give away a lot of goods as well.

Invaders and cavern creatures, I've found, are the hardest on my FPS so I try to decide if I'm going to wage war in the caverns or up top. If it's caverns I'll make the surface completely inaccessible save a drawbridge and if it's caverns, well, I don't breach them or wall them off.

The three basic rules of FPS are:

1. Conserve stuff.

2. Conserve space.

3. Conserve fluids and flow.

And the distant 4th rule is "Circumvent the circus."

[Hyndis]

Junk stone is dumped into magma chutes or atom smashed. Magma chutes are preferable as there are no moving parts, and drawbridges seem to eat up some amount of FPS when crushing stuff.

Moving liquids are avoided if at all possible.

Temperature off.

Wide corridors. Narrow corridors cause traffic jams which kill your FPS. Very wide, straight corridors are easy to navigate.

[Daetrin]

I find I most often end up with too much stuff. Too many bars of metal, too much food, too many crafts. You don't need huge backlogs of most of it, but I end up there anyway, especially with sieges. Avoiding flows is good, but I think it's worth it to set up a way to magmafy certain areas as a way of housekeeping. Of course, with enough dwarves you can just dump it.

[Olith McHuman]

I mod all of the usless stone types that I'm not using to boil at a temperature of 9901 (one degree above the temperature that stuff takes cold damage at, iirc). Keeps the stone count down a LOT. Of course, I can't build with these materials now, but that's not problem.

[plisskin]

Wide corridors. Narrow corridors cause traffic jams which kill your FPS. Very wide, straight corridors are easy to navigate.

Glad you shared this fact. I might start making 4x4 hallways instead of 3x3 in the future just to be safe.

Oh, speaking of which: traffic designations can help a little bit with FPS too, but unless you're really dedicated to a fort it's usually too much micromanagement to do every time.

[MonkeyHead]

Dwarfwash at all external access points. The amount of blood/pus that builds up on critters is staggering and has a noticable effect on FPS

[AdirianSoan]

Unnecessarily wide hallways will actually reduce pathfinding efficiency.  (It has to check those tiles.)

You really want hallways which are just wide enough.

[EveryZig]

Unnecessarily wide hallways will actually reduce pathfinding efficiency.  (It has to check those tiles.)

You really want hallways which are just wide enough.

Just wide enough for any passage or just wide enough for no traffic? (major hallways being more like 1 thick, 2 thick, or 3 thick?)

[Hyndis]

Unnecessarily wide hallways will actually reduce pathfinding efficiency.  (It has to check those tiles.)

You really want hallways which are just wide enough.

I've been using open plan fortresses, centered on a huge great hall with rooms going off of the sides. I usually get extremely high FPS with these designs. My FPS only drops when I start expanding into the caverns.

[Qwernt]

I try to design so that there are no loops (ie, 2 ways to get somewhere).  Also, each hallway usually has a single endpoint - IE, most dwarves don't need to go someplace so they don't run into each other. The 3x3 stairway I use liberally, and will look for other bottlenecks to reduce congestion.  Definitely seal stuff off.  Also, try to limit the number of LARGE rooms the lead somewhere (they are seen as BIG hallways).  In fact, I think long skinny rooms are superior in most cases, but haven't tried to prove it.
One other thing, I avoid playing on my desktop... for some reason, the laptop with slower CPUs spins a much higher FPS.

[AdirianSoan]

I haven't done extensive SCIENCE on the subject, just speaking from my knowledge of A* and other common pathfinding algorithms.  (It's possible to avoid this problem with graphs, but I've seen nothing to indicate Dwarf Fortress does this kind of path caching.)  Figuring out what the ideal is would be extremely complex; have to figure out the computational expense involved in the traffic, for one, and how frequent such collisions are.  An ideal fortress would end up with hallways that widen and shrink as they go.

I'd suggest starting small and expanding outward; plan on 3x3 or 4x4 hallways, but only dig 1 tile out.  If it later becomes a high traffic area, expand only the local section out as necessary to avoid traffic collisions.

It may be desirable to entirely block off sections of the fortress where the traffic dynamic has changed.

Hyndis - the caverns add CPU cycles, but so does pathfinding.  Depending on the size of your fortress and the number of creatures, pathfinding can easily become the bigger expense, particularly late-game.