Bay 12 Games Forum

My current fortress goes by the name of Gusildesis: Copper Snarling
We are part of the great dwarven civilization known as Dumat Sharul: The Roughness of Impunity

We have produced one amusingly aptly named artifact, a millstone by the name of Lularsisal aka Root Gallows

My neighbors include Elves who seem to to get utterly destroyed by goblin attackers every single time they send anyone to visit me. They call themselves TaleFiminaro, The Trampled Crow.

The local goblin menaces go by the fitting name of Asusbu, The Mysterious Evils. They are a strange lot of goblins who have shown up with human generals and have come mounted on just about everything under the sun.

The naming system in DF is so bizarre and funny that it actually trips me up more when it gives something a perfectly reasonable name rather than one involving forlorn spoons etc.

Thanks for all the responses. It's been illuminating.

While number of dwarves and their pathing does impact fps it's hardly the only one source of slowdown.
Recently I've run 30 dwarf fort for 30 years and fps went down from 140 to 15 simply with time passing.
The difference between 'all are hauling' and 'all are idling' is something around 10 frames, the big and open spaces never caused immediate slowdown (though I had rather small patches of land in my underground lake, so that might have cut the pathing done by critters there).
Then there's crap I've had several thousand of items on stockpiles, later on all crushed, which while seemingly slowing down the slowdown didn't change the ultimate results.
I've also had kid go insane while hauling bones for planepacked artefact if anyone is interested.

Pretty much anything that happens in df slows it down.
So, on i7 I wouldn't worry about number of dwarves but your fort is doomed anyway.

One thing that is sad is that it seems no matter how efficiently you build your fortress and how few Dwarves you have living there, time will eventually bring your fortress's fps to its knees. This example you provided is very sobering. I pretty much figured a 30 dwarf fort could run for all eternity without a slow down but apparently even this tiny number of dwarves can survive for only so long.

I've used slabs many times before. (My poor dwarfs tend to fall victim to occasional magma accidents.) Either I was tripping for a moment or the slabs really weren't showing up in the stock and build menus due to some kind of buggy behavior. Either way it resolved itself when I unpaused the game for a moment and then checked the stocks menu again. I'm sill not sure where the glitch was, my brain or the computer but it resolved itself.

Thanks for the heads up. I will definitely be designing my next fort very differently with the new things I have learned about storage in mind. This was my second fortress so I really had no clue how to properly design stockpile feeder systems. Even after spending an hour cleaning up the stockpile mess I have in this fort it is still running very poorly. It's almost worth scrapping the fort.

You don't need to dump all of the stockpiles, if your book-keeper has the highest setting you can find that single slab you want in the stocks menu, and dump it.
Personally though, I've never seen this issue, only have problems with bins when it comes to the usual, seeds.

That is part of the problem. I do have my book keeper set to the highest precision but due to whatever bug is causing the problem the slabs vanish from all applicable menus including the stocks screen. The only menu I can find that insists that the slabs still exist is the menu in the workshop which tells me X number of slabs have already been engraved for this dwarf. Other than that there is no way to locate or interact with the slabs once they are made. I'm almost certain its another bin bug as it seems similiar to the problem with the ammo bins where despite there being several hundreds of bolts in the fortress the marksdwarves can't find any of them because they are lost in a bin somewhere.

Leaving temperature on is pretty important particularly in cold or extremely hot biomes where it has a real effect on day to day play. You might as well leave on all the various game effects until you start to actually suffer FPS loss at which point you can start culling the less important ones. The one exception to that rule might be the population cap since once you have too many dwarves for the CPU to handle there really is no easy way to "turn it off."

A lot of people neglect the military until its too late mostly due to the horrendously poor user interface in the menus that handle it. It takes quite a while to master that interface and even after you have its still a real clunky pain in the rear. Better to bite the bullet early and get at least a bare bones squad put together so they can start training. Marksmen are cheap and easy to equip.

You could also carve out a little bunker with some fortifications overlooking the entrance to your fort so you have a good spot for marksdwarves to rain death down upon unwelcome visitors that are bound to come knocking at some point.

It's a bit hard to tell from the photos but you don't seem to have a well yet so that would also be a great early project. You could cut an underground aqua duct out to the river and even install a couple of water wheels along it for future power generation with a cistern and well at the end. Just be very careful to make sure that it all stays underground because once its been opened to the sky I think your icy climate will cause it to freeze which will cause all sorts of havoc.

 Magma is pouring into the upper floors of my fortress. The offending dwarf lies in ashes. It's a race between the masons and the flow which will decide how many floors I will lose. I think that fool of an overseer must have been drinking while handing out the strip mining orders.

One of my chained wild cave crocs developed a habit of chomping on human diplomats. A couple years (and diplomats) later, the humans sieged my fortress, marching right past the killer croc without a second glance. I'd say if it happens on your map, you're taking the blame for it.

I know that you are held responsible for anything that happens on your land but does the game weigh it any differently depending on how it happens or is it a generic and equally negative response regardless of what goes down? For instance I have lost two elven caravans due to the fools showing up at the same time as mounted goblin sieges yet I have never seen any sort of repercussions for it. I'm sure the elves are pissed about it but I think if I had actually murdered two whole caravans myself I would be getting sieged by them already.