Bay 12 Games Forum

Bronze is excellent for all purposes.

Billon (Copper + silver) is decent and a good way to exploit "low quality" silver sources, the wiki explains, it's more valuable than bronze.

Brass (Copper + Zinc) is more valuable than billon and you can't do anything else with the sphalerite. It tends to look pretty.

You can use the dfhack autodump command for that - you might want to imagine a justification, like the dwarves invent a stick with a hook on the end...

There is a way without using a pump, which also works well if the cistern is deeper than 1z. Dig an up/down stairs column from below to under the corpse, the staircase should drain into the caverns or off the map edge or into a large room. Include a lever-operated hatch or retracting bridge in the stairs column, open it up, dig the downstairs in the bottom of the cistern, collect the corpse (dwarves can use the staircase even though it's flooded with water) then close the hatch so the cistern refills. If you ever want to re-drain in the future, just use the lever operated hatch again.

The best animal is really no contest. Dogs.

A male cat is a fair idea if you want to keep down vermin. I normally don't bother.

As for other animals, the thing is, the food situation in dwarf fortress is just not hard enough to justify animals for food. Between slaughtering the pack animals, immigrant's animals, slaughtering wildlife (with hunters or even better military) and caravans (which always bring A LOT of food if you are low) you need never want for meat. That's not even accounting for farming, which especially with processing (quarry bush, sweetpod, booze cooking) and seed cooking can easily provide all the food the fortress needs.

If you bring animals it's for flavour and fps reduction so you may as well embark with whatever you like - the difference in value for points is not that great for most animals.

But dogs are good from a pure strategy perspective, I normally embark with 10 of them (5 boys, 5 girls), for a strict breeding program you only need one male, but I bring dogs more for running into battle and dying especially in the early game, and I don't want to max out my dog cap in one breeding season (not that there's anything wrong with that). If I hit a food crunch early on, and it happens, because I'm often lazy with food (relying on immigrant's animals and caravans) then I just slaughter a skinny, weak male dog to improve the genetics.
Dogs are great at generally making life difficult for thieves and snatchers, they can also distract ambushes and sieges. I basically make a lot of trainers (especially my important dwarves), and just let the dogs chase their trainer around. There are more organized ways you can use them but essentially I just use them for randomly getting in the way of attackers.

They are also great for savage embarks since a pack of dogs are a very good distraction for nasty megafauna beasts which can easily rip limbs off. Dogs have low lethality, so you really want a dwarf with a weapon for execution, but it's much better that the giant badger be wailing on your dogs, than your barely-armoured military dwarf. Avoid dogs and all other animals on zombification embarks.

On embarks with really rude wildlife (or undeadlife) the pack animals can also be used for defence, pasture or restrain them in the entrance and they might give an invader a lucky kick to the head. Horses and such are very powerful (I learned this when I stationed 5 dwarves with training weapons in a room with a wild horse), but they're cowards and run away unless cornered, so I couldn't recommend embarking with them for defence, but the freebie pack animals can be used that way.

If you have a lot of immigrant kiddies then they'll grow up at quite a respectable pace. It's not as annoying as the sucklings which take 12 or 14 years or whatever it is until they can swing a pick.

If you build constructions out in the open then you can occupy all your adults with a big dump order or something, then order the constructions deconstructed. All the children will run out into the open to deconstruct the walls. If this is timed with the arrival of a siege, then the attackers will be occupied chasing around and murdering children, leaving the attackers in a perfect state of disarray and distraction for being stomped by your military. It's like the female military dwarf who carries her baby into battle to act as a shield, but at a fortress level instead.

Cool thanks for the tips guys. I didn't know that about dormitories and bedrooms. As to the training I figured I would set up a danger room, as I think thematically it is somewhat consistent.

Another question not related to theme but fortress design in general, anyone have any tips on farming? I still run up against the odd food shortage and I only ever manage to have just enough food and booze, never really a surplus.

I typically use plants for booze and animals for food. However, if you do want to be vegetarian, then the way to get lots of food from plants is to exploit quarry bushes and sweet pods which, once gone through the processing and cooking process, provide 5 food per plant. Booze cooking is equally effective but some consider it bit of an exploit. The other thing which quite dramatically increases plant food output is seed cooking (dfhack seedwatch is very helpful here), cooking seeds will more than double food output for many plant types such as plump helments (assuming you are not using booze cooking, but you can combine seed and booze cooking) and even lets you extract food from unedible and unbrewable plants like dye plants. Aboveground plants are also good in many ways because most are edible uncooked, they grow all year round, and although there are no special quantity multipliers like quarry bushes/sweet pods, you can still use seed and booze cooking.
Herbalism is also a very effective way to get emergency food, combine herbalism with seed and booze cooking to create a lot of food in little time without needing to worry about seeds for planting.

However some thread's tasks like SDL's event handling thread use a truly trifling amount of CPU. It might be like 0.01% of the total processing the program needs to do. One of the major challenges of programming to exploit multiple cpus is to break up the workload into approximately equal chunks. There are various programming frameworks or approaches, one example is microthreads - it might be very difficult to break the processing into two approximately equal large chunks, it might be relatively easy to break it into 1000 approximately equal tiny chunks (and in fact, if you break it into 1000 sub-tasks, approximately equal becomes unimportant). However in any case, it requires writing code from the ground up to fit a particular multiprocessing framework and it might involve sacrifices (like reproducibility). There are other reasons too why getting performance out of multiple threads is difficult, one is switching overhead, another major one is communication between CPU's, if one thread runs on one cpu core, and another on another cpu core, then it's slower to talk between the threads, than in a single thread or both threads running on the same cpu. The worst performance killer is blocking - while SDL is handling events in the event thread, it probably blocks the execution of the main thread, blocking is commonly used because it's much easier to avoid obscure bugs if two threads aren't running simultaneously, code is simpler and hence more reliable and there are fewer obscure crashes which are nightmares to debug. (In this kind of model, threading is not used for performance at all, instead it's used for compartmentalization and to provide the illusion of simultaneous execution), suffice to say applications which use blocking enjoy *no benefit at all* from multiple cores since only one can run at a time.
Because of the overheads involved in multi-threading certain very high-performance programs (like web servers) avoid multithreading entirely, they instead run a single-threaded process on each cpu.

Even dwarves who have lost the use of their hands and feet and move around. If they can still grasp, they can still carry out their duties, civilian or military.

I'm not sure, but I think if a dwarf has lost both feet he can't use a crutch, and just has to crawl around. A high level military dwarf has a big speed bonus, so even crippled they might get some decent speed.

Remember the OP was asking about faster ram vs better cpu, not more ram (that's tangential to the faster ram part, but these days you may as well have 8gb ram if you're going to use applications like Chrome and other modern complete ram pigs). At least in principle, if everything else could keep up (CPU and mobo), then ram which is 20% faster, could provide a 20% performance boost by allowing the program to get through it's work (for each frame) 20% faster. Hence the potential boost is quite big, but the real question is how well everything works together to enable that potential boost to actually manifest.