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[anonydwarf]

My current fort is starting to crawl to a halt largely because its population is at 260 and growing.  Because of how much it was slowing down, I made sure the POPULATION_CAP value in d_init was set to 200.  But the migrants just keep coming, and dwarf babies just keep popping out.

What gives?  How do I get it to stop giving me more bodies to slow down my CPU with?

[Leonance]

Babies have a different cap and migrants come in waves that are already planned out in advance so if you have pop cap set at 300 and find out your comp starts to crawl after 200, then change the settings you will still receive more immigrant waves.

[Grumbledwarfskin]

I've never actually hit the pop cap myself, but what I hear is that population cap only has effect after the liaison leaves: if you were at or above pop. cap when the liaison leaves, you won't get any more after that. The in-universe reasoning is that the liaison spreads the word that migrants are no longer welcome, or perhaps that the dwarven government decides what migrants go where (and not the migrants themselves), so migration is a part of your agreement with the mountainhome.

So, you can overshoot your limit by up to 100 (if you get four waves of around 25, and you were just under the cap when the liaison left previously). Fortress wealth and the death rate have an impact on how much overshoot there will be, since they decide your migration wave size.

If the liaison fails to escape alive, you could potentially overshoot by more, if that doesn't scare off the migrants itself.

[Ipslne]

I set my cap at 999 on purpose to see how many dorfs I can get before significant slow-down. Turns out I can't keep my population above 210 anyhow. They die in various ways and it seems population growth has tapered. Sure, my fortress is currently pretty dangerous... but it's nothin terrible. Just some toxic blood pooling in the entrance. The occasional forgotten beast. Sieges and ambushes catching a hauler off-guard.

[CaptainArchmage]

My current fort is starting to crawl to a halt largely because its population is at 260 and growing.  Because of how much it was slowing down, I made sure the POPULATION_CAP value in d_init was set to 200.  But the migrants just keep coming, and dwarf babies just keep popping out.

What gives?  How do I get it to stop giving me more bodies to slow down my CPU with?

I believe migrant waves are tracked over the world map, so time may pass between the time your fortress hits the population cap and the migration stops. This probably depends on the distance from the mountainhomes.

I set my cap at 999 on purpose to see how many dorfs I can get before significant slow-down. Turns out I can't keep my population above 210 anyhow. They die in various ways and it seems population growth has tapered. Sure, my fortress is currently pretty dangerous... but it's nothin terrible. Just some toxic blood pooling in the entrance. The occasional forgotten beast. Sieges and ambushes catching a hauler off-guard.

"Nothing terrible" isn't good enough for getting your population up that high. Try sealing off sections of the population away from the trouble and the population will go up. Or build a new entrance. Set your miners and masons to work making new sections of the fortress for migrants.