Bay 12 Games Forum

My approach: Just draft them all, and let the goblins sort them out.

To elaborate a bit, I've got one squad of marksdwarfs, that will at some point patrol the yet to be finished fortress defences. As the walls are not yet finished, currently each and every dwarf assigned to a squad gets tossed at invaders, meaning that most marksdwarfs don't get enough time to properly train and survive those encounters. A few of them are either skilled or lucky enough and make it to the next year. The constant influx of migrants never leaves the marksdwarf squad empty for long (though most of them end up being untrained recruits).
To be honest, I'm still looking forard to having the wall finished, as that will give marksdwarfs fortifications and an elevated position, so they'll have less chance of meeting an enemy in melee, and also some protection from projectiles. Then maybe even the completely unskilled recruits might make it for more than a year, and slowly turn into trained soldiers...

Just a shot in the dark, but how does system resource usage look like when the application hangs (especially RAM)?
Might be that df runs out of physical memory (certainly possible for very large worlds), and either starts swapping (what will slow it down to a near halt), or just have allocations fail (if memory is allocated as non-pageable), what could, depending on how (if) those errors are handled, lead to all kinds of crazy behaviour.

Also, as Shonai_Dweller said, if you're using a 32bit build, you're very likely at the address space limit (which is 4 GB for 32bit applications on 64bit Linux, and less on all other platforms - I don't remember the numbers by heart).

If you're certain that the game is far from using all your resources, it might be worth reporting this as a bug on the official bug tracker, as it seems reproducible.

There's one thing that I'd really like:
o) Build roads to other sites

Given that we now have a world overview in fort mode (c key) that feature might not be too far off, or eventually already there?

Oh, it has already been reported? Maybe I should have taken a closer look at mantis before posting... Thanks!

Regarding the latest Linux build: The archive includes the file df_linux/libs/libstdc++.so.6, which shouldn't be packaged together with software, as doing so causes compatibility problems with system libraries linked against a newer libstdc++ version. In other words: On distributions built against a newer libstdc++ ABI, one needs to delete said file from the dwarf fortress installation (or use some other way to force the game to use the system installed libstdc++, like LD_PRELOAD) in order to get the game to work.

It might be a good idea to force the build to use an older ABI instead of bundling libstdc++. See the documentation for details.

Edit: Please disregard this post, it'd probably not be a good idea as WSL uses rather new library versions, and dynamically linking against those would likely cause issues on older distributions. Thanks, Quietust, for pointing this out.

Old post, left here for reference:

Windows Subsystem for Linux should definitely be an option for compilation.
You can also run the Linux build of Dwarf Fortress just fine within Windows Subsystem for Linux, by either setting PRINT_MODE:TEXT, or by using an external X11 server.
I just tried both:

• PRINT_MODE:TEXT simply works within the Windows Subsytem for Linux bash shell window without any additional prerequisites.
• By using MobaXTerm as external X11 server I could launch the graphical Dwarf Fortress window using the following command line in the Windows Subsytem for Linux bash window: DISPLAY=:0 ./df

The last few forts I've built always had the same phenomenon. Just after a tavern is built, the socialize activity branches into poetry recitals, musical performances, dances and storytelling with a comparable probability, but as time passes, musical performances and dances get less and less frequent, and after some years there is basically only poetry left, with some storytelling in between.
Is this a general trend, or does this just happen to my forts? Is there anything one needs to do to build a suitable environment for musicians?