Bay 12 Games Forum

Putting pressure plates in a high traffic area and letting dwarfs have pets is pretty quick if you don't have idlers to pull levers. I have a 1-9 ratio of sedimentary/metamorphic layer on my embark. The small sedimentary layer all the way in the northwest of the map is the only place I can mine coal, and it just seemed a shame to waste all that foot power for just hauling.

I start my military right from the start and bring a competent teacher novice ambusher/marksdwarf/archer. He'll be legendary or near legendary by the time I outfit the new recruits. Outside of that, as per above wooden bolts/weapons and live targets for them to train on. Cage traps aren't cheating either, I keep a few scattered about to capture the random living thing. If you insist on not using them, weapon traps work just as well loaded with iron disks.

Also, it might be good to mention that dwarfs get unhappy when they're on long patrols. They also get unhappy if they're drafted and don't have novice in a military skill, and unhappy when they're relieved and don't have novice in a civilian skill. I build a quern for half of my military and have a farmer growing cave wheat/longland grass/whip vines for the sole purpose of giving my off duties something to do. I alternate my squad of rangers with my squad of infantry, when one is off duty the other is on and vice-versa.

Elves make good live practice. Buy their animals first, then trap and kill them.

Because ASCII keeps it simple;
His 'audience' are people who are -patient- enough to appreciate ASCII;
H(w)e don't want to attract the 'wrong' crowd. IE, assholes;
ASCII is easy to look at when you get used to, and some people have been used to it for a while;
There are already community graphic sets;
This is a side project of a very bored man.

I for one grew up playing MUD's and other fun text adventures and heard about this game from another developer. Minecraft is nice, don't get me wrong, but DF is far more complex than minecraft and will probably remain that way. That and DF is free. You can't beat free.

I've had problems saving with multiple regions/fortresses and savescumming. Manual saves would create a save file, but it would just be the seasonal save. Only solution I have is deleting all save files and starting anew, and don't play old fortresses when you have new ones, the game doesn't like time traveling.

Sorry all, can't find any tricks for multi-core processors that don't involve either recoding the game or having a couple of fancy degrees. There is a neat trick for having different cores favoring local memory that makes good use of idle cores, but I don't think anyone is going to go that far for DF. Sorry guys

I think I'll start a new thread dedicated for getting the most DF out of your rig for fear of hijacking this one. For instance, did you know that you shouldn't go over 50% of your hard disk drive's capacity? (Actually, I think it was like 64%, but 50% for safe) The innermost disk is a ***** to read from and can slow a computer down horribly.

Here's a question to the people with good .31 performance, is your CPU single/multi core, and what OS are you running? XP? 7? Linux? x32 or x64?

I've just tried running a fortress on 40d (vanilla, no graphics set) for 5 years (sorry it took so long) and have come to the grand epic conclusion on this debate:


I'm sorry, I didn't see a large FPS difference between the two, but for .31's case my 40d fortress consisted of -100 dwarfs goofing around behind defenses while I tried to figure out what was what and what the hell I was doing. I am a shame to all ASCII gamers everywhere

I average 80-100 FPS with a vanilla SDL copy of DF .18 with phoebes graphics set. It may drop to 70-100 if the fortress lasts over 15 years depending on what my fortress is doing. With 196 dwarfs, 11 years into the fortress, all the lakes draining into a large pointless underground reservoir as soon as they fill up with rain, more fancy sticks than I can shake a stick at, and a 2 Z level artificial river 3 tiles wide that spanned one edge of the map to the other (also pointless) I averaged the same as the slacker 40d fortress. Although the goblin ejaculator (ha, it looks like a...) did cause it to lag for quite a while

For reference, I'm on an HP Mini, CPU Intel(R) Atom(TM) N270 @ 1.60GHz with a huge 1 GB of RAM on Windows 7 x32. If you're getting worse than this on a quad-core, I would suggest looking for other programs that are eating up CPU power or physical memory, check your hardware for malfunctions or abnormalities (especially if you're overclocking), and/or upgrade your hard drive. Does it lag in safe boot? Chances are, an SSD would solve all of your problems especially with a multi-core processor.

It's faster if you have one dwarf with high military and teaching skills to instruct them. I embark with a novice archer/marksdwarf, proficient teacher, and competent ambusher. You could probably do the same thing with a warrior, but it's a pain to watch them chase groundhogs around the map (cut them off at the pass! No, don't follow everyone else, oh for Armok's sake)

The alert should be training, you can do this from the {m}ilitary menu or {s}quad menu under alerts. Be sure to read about schedules so you don't train them to death as well.