Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm having an interesting FPS drop whenever I let my dwarves path to the surface.

For reference: I have a single path to the surface, with a 1-wide tile hallway filled with weapon traps, perhaps about 10 weapon traps total with a varying number of traps in each. Near the surface, before the traps, is the wagon-accessible trade depot. I have a number of doors and a bridge sitting somewhere inside the traps.

Most everything was fine - 2x2 embark with a nearly entirely linear fort, so there's not a lot of extra pathfinding going on. Even with 200+ active creatures it was still very snappy. Until I was sieged by a Necromancer. I wittled him down with traps and other tactics until I finally destroyed them all. It took around 3+ game months to clear all the debris from the surface, but now, even with the surface 100% spotless, my frame rate drops to abysmal levels if there is a path to the surface open.

To "fix" the problem, I merely have to toggle one of the (many) doors as Forbidden. Framerate will immediately jump up to normal levels. Unforbid it, and the game slows to a crawl.

I inspected the surface in detail, looking for stray items, stray bodies, refuse, anything of the sort that might explain the dwarves looking for trouble. There's nothing! The traps are all clean, the hallway has no blood splatters, everything looks quite nice and orderly. No stray refuse, not a single item out of place. It's a Glacier embark, so no plants or trees either.

Any ideas what they might be looking for?

this is in version 34.11. For a challenge I wanted to try an embark on a Terrifying Glacier, with the only resources listed as Ice and Deep Metals. Horrid survival even if you live and undead on top of that. I had a few things in mind when I went out to tackle this challenge that I could do to help me get by. I ran into a few problems. They were:

=== Problem 1: No grazing on stone ===
My steps to get underground stone grazing:
1) Breach the caverns
2) Build wells over cavern water
3) Mine out a 10x10 stone area and stick my grazing animals in there (in this case a horse and a water buffalo)
4) Channel out holes in a room above and throw water down in to create mud

Now, according to the wiki, this is sufficient for cave fungus to start growing - muddy stone is sufficient in particular. Well, I tossed water in over and over until I had most of the room covered in 1 deep water. I then stopped and let it evaporate, which did indeed leave mud behind - sufficient for me to build farms if I wanted. However, months rolled by and the mud always just stayed mud - in this case, 'muddy diorite'. Never once did any of the tiles grow cave fungus, trees, etc. So, naturally, my pack animals starved.

So, question: Is it actually the case that muddy stone should start growing cave fungus if you breach the caverns? If so, what was wrong in my technique? If stone grazing is simply impossible in 34.11, would building a floor from imported clay work?

=== Problem 2: No undead ===
The biome I selected is 'Terrifying'. It has no other biomes attached, it's entirely Terrifying. That said, I've now have had multiple dwarves die and even more animals die, along with some local wildlife (a yeti) die. They never revived as undead, which is precisely why I picked Terrifying in the first place. Now, I do have evil weather - I'm getting rotting mucus rain that causes blisters, but no undead. Now, the wiki indicates there's a chance a particular Evil biome will result in undeath, but it's not a guarantee. So, that being the case, is there any way to know in advance if a biome will create undead?

Goal: I am looking for suggestions on how to craft multiple entrances for a fortress, most likely 12 (3 per side of the map), near the map edges.

Reasoning: I'm currently embarking on in a Terrifying location, where the local fauna is all variety of undead nasties and the local weather is enthralling clouds. The clouds roll in frequently, at least a few per week. In this same map, I've lost more than a handful of migrants to the clouds, and pretty much every caravan that's tried to approach my fort was dead before they even made it to my fort entrance. I want to put around 9-12 additional entrances to my fort at the far edges of the map, to allow caravans and my migrants to have at least a chance of making it to the front door.

Ideas on ways to do this safely? Even with an entrance 2 tiles from them, migrants still beeline for the 'main' center entrance.

I tried digging highways at Z -1 and tunneling upward. That works for the first highway, but after that the dwarves *insist* on going back to where I embarked and first struck the earth and then frolicking on the topside to dig the downward staircases. I tried setting the underground highways to high traffic, and that didn't work. A friend suggested I do that, then additionally set the surface to restricted, which I'll try. What I also will try to do is build the highways out 1 by 1, and as I finish each one, stick a door near the end and make it impassible to give the dwarves no other foot traffic option.

It is pretty hilarious to see the elven caravan show up and walk right into the middle of a cloud, then watch them tear each other apart.