Bay 12 Games Forum

The latest one as of now, .16. Note: the dwarves with no wounds don't bleed. Only the ones who have yellow wounds do.

I believe that 'negatives' means 'below ground'. It would've been strange had you been digging through positives, which means sky.

Regarding my suicide fortress, the dwarves managed to wall off a secondary exit in time for the undead crocodiles to pass by. They've put up a still and a kitchen and a small farm plot, so they might survive 'till the first caravan after all.
By the way, can anyone explain me how to post screenshots? Would like to share the fort's downfall with you all through images as well.

Update: a ton of new doomed dwarves has arrived, adding 9 doomed dwarves to the fort. Started more farms, expanded the walled-off section of the surface. All the murky pools evaporated save for one, on the other side of the map, in which the most suicidal of them all, the fisherdwarf, fishes. Considering to commence the building of the caravan drowning depot.

Update: MORE doomed dwarves, 3 this time. The fisherdwarf got himself some support in form of a fish cleaner (formerly dissector). Otherwise more of the same.

Update: The dwarven caravan arrived! Offered them a few wooden crafts (as I said, the suicide fortress won't trade, only offer everything to dwarves and drown everyone else). Almost finished the drowning depot, too. The only undead things on the map are three crocodiles from the beginning, walking by every now and then, posing next to no threat for now. Let's see how this unfolds.

Update: Winter has passed, and I'm now expecting elves. The drowning depot is ready.
Meanwhile, the doomed dwarf leader decided to marrry. Perhaps some are less suicidal than others. Goblins won't differ between them, though.

Full list of the dwarves and other notable inhabitants so far:
Pretty much every dwarf is romantically involved with another dwarf. They're not so suicidal after all. But the goblins still won't differ between them.

Additional goal for my fortress, probably turning into the main one: breach the clown car. If those dwarves are sentenced to death, they might as well suicide creatively.

Update: the wagon appeared a few dozens of tiles away from a group of undead saltwater crocodiles. I don't think they will last long enough to breach the clown car...

Update: they did survive long enough to dig out a small room one level below (used a stairway), move stuff into there and wall it off, mainly because they had 7 picks.

Update: there's a gigantic aquifer spanning the entire map a few z-levels below. Time to try some extreme aquifer breaching techniques. But since I can't channel... hmm... wooden fortress!!

Beware of it going thermonuclear.

The idea has caught on but the reasoning behind it is lost to most people.

The original was that having a column of stairs in the middle of your fortress murders pathfinding. If you know about programming you've probably heard of a* but if not here's the standard way of finding the shortest path through a maze for computers: take every space and mark it to infinity except the goal which is 0. Then take all of the spaces adjacent to that and mark them 0+1. Then take all of the spaces touching a 1 and mark them 1+1 (unless they have already been marked like the zero and all of the 1s.) Then 2+1. Then 3+1 and so on. Then when it gets to the entity moving through the maze it's done and the entity just looks at all of the spaces adjacent to it and moves to the lowest number.

Now, if you have a large flat open space the first iteration of this just marks 1*1 square. Then the next marks 3*3 - 1 squares (. Then 5*5 - 9 (16). Then 7*7 - 25 (24). So every step there will be eight more places to check than last time. This is what the surface is like and mostly what it is like inside of a fort that's crammed into one level.
But if you have 3 dimensions to work with? Well we have 1*1*1 squares, 3*3*3 - 1 (26), 5*5*5 - 27 (98), 7*7*7 - 125 (218). These are both just the last 3 steps a dwarf would have to take to get to their target but often times things are a hundred steps away.
*I don't think a dwarf can step up and north at the same time on stairs so the numbers would be a little bit different but you still see the same kind of growth.

Now with a 3x3 up/down stairway going through your whole fort it's not quite so bad. Each step gets 9 more tiles up and/or 9 more down and then you have the 2d kind of growth on each floor it has spread to but only until it has checked every tile pathing cares about- it eventually hits the walls and that's that.

Ramps would only be slightly different. The tile above the ramp is open space so it doesn't get marked at all. This leads to fewer tiles that need to be checked but this is a very trivial difference so we can rule that out of having much impact. If you were to make a column of ramps up and down and make your fort the same way there would be no real benefit. If instead you make one long winding tunnel down into the depths of the Earth- well, that can sort of help but it could also do just as much harm.

With the central column you may just need to take twenty steps to get anywhere but at the same time this means that basically every time somebody goes somewhere they have to check nearly every tile of your fort to get there, or still rather huge chunks of it just to go down a floor or two. If you make one long winding tunnel and they actually need to run the full length of it very often then you're worse off because now they take more game time to get around and they had to check just as much of the fort's floorspace to do it.
But if you have seeds near farms near the still and related workshops? There's Even if they have to take forty steps to get between those they just had to check roughly 40*3 tiles for the hallway and a portion of the rooms things are in. The entire trip only takes about as much calculation as the third step through open vertical space.

There's more to how DF does pathfinding with various efficiency improvements and features scattered about but that's the basic notion of what's going on and why central columns don't give you as much FPS as you could have.
*And of course these numbers are pretty small for computers but you may have 50 dwarves and several hundred animals firing off a new check every few seconds. And if two entities run into each other in a narrow hallway? Well they've got to find a new path around them (or if there really is none they'll lay down so the other can pass.)

And if there's any other reason that stairs or ramps have different impacts on FPS? Nobody's ever been able to tell me what test showed that or why.

There is one other place that this idea comes from though: mining out large areas. When you make anything that changes where dwarves can path to, like if you built a wall in the only space connecting two large areas, the game has to do this big rescan of the area. The reason for this is simple: you wouldn't want to run pathfinding to things that you can't actually get to. It would just fill up the entire space of the map that it could get to and then run out of spaces to change. Lots of wasted computing there. So instead DF looks beforehand and says "here's this chunk of connected space, this other one, that one, and that other one. If items and things are in different chunks then DF knows not to even bother looking for a path to it.
So naturally when you channel out large areas you make it rescan the area quite a bit. Likewise if you set up some drawbridges in a room to atomsmash a bunch of water and have their lever pulled on repeat you get this same kind of slowdown.

So overall I'd recommend against tiling any design for your whole fort. Things like the bedroom areas you'll want a repeating design both for efficiency and your own sanity bu you can tuck those away because dwarves only sleep like once a season whereas they produce hundreds of items and then haul them to storage areas.

Whee! Finally an explanation! Awesome numbercrunching, too.
I will now wall off the unused parts of the fort more quickly.

Start in a scorching biome with little to no water on the surface. Get it from the caverns. Flux if you want, wood if you want.
Magmaproof dwarves living in a magma-filled fortress is more awesome, though. Just remember to magmaproof the buildings/items/everything.

My first fortress where I had some clues about actually playing the game - Bridgedviolence! Where the fine line between creating a waterfall past your dining room windows and flooding the entire fortress was crossed, several times.

I kept a written list of how each one died in a particularly heroic or stupid way, and notes on the engraver who had motor nerve and sensory nerve damage, and had an arm lopped off - he couldn't work, and spent all his time wandering between the two dining rooms.  He had the most friends of all the dwarves and was happy, in hos own way.

Oh, and the human civ in my current fortress - The Confederation of Stupidity.

Aka Idiocracy.

I've finally formulated the plan of the suicide fortress that Encased in burning magma described.

It will be named 'Final Destination', a suicide colony for unforgivable criminals. It will have no doors, bridges, channels, traps, and magma. It will be situated in an evil biome. It will attempt to produce as much as possible, then offer it up to the dwarven caravan, and slaughter the rest using a floodable depot. It will have no military either. We will see how long does it last.