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[Roxfall]

If you play in the adventure mode you may have noticed a horseplosion plaguing procedurally generated dwarf fortresses in the world, which drags FPS down to a crawl. Horses everywhere, horses on top of horses, with horses on top. Too. Many. Horses. And lag. To me this occured in every dwarf fortress my adventurer came across so far.
The catsplosion wiki is outdated and does not provide a working solution. But by trial and error I found a fix that works.

0. Please backup your saves before making changes.
1. For a brand new world, you can open a file called raw/objects/creature_domestic.txt and simply delete the horse entry. No horses in your world, easy-peasy. The entry in question starts with the line [CREATURE:HORSE] and ends with the line [TLCM_NOUN:eyes:PLURAL].
2. For an EXISTING world, this won't work, because the game will complain it's missing an entry for horse and won't load your save. Instead, open the same file inside the savegame file structure: data/save/regionX/raw/objects/creature_domestic.txt then find the same [CREATURE:HORSE] line and scroll to the eyes line: [TLCM_NOUN:eyes:PLURAL]. Insert a line after that and put in the following:

[SELECT_MATERIAL:ALL]
    [IF_EXISTS_SET_HEATDAM_POINT:0]
    [IF_EXISTS_SET_IGNITE_POINT:0]
    [IF_EXISTS_SET_MELTING_POINT:0]
    [IF_EXISTS_SET_BOILING_POINT:0]

This will make any horses you encounter in your travel simply evaporate out of existence. Literally 'poof!', harmlessly. Some horse owners might get upset over the loss of their pets, but I didn't see any fighting as a result, so that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for my FPS gains. You can also remove this addition to the file later so you don't poof normal-sized packs of wild horses that you encounter in the wilds that don't affect framerate, and then add it again when you run into a problem area (all dwarf fortresses in my world seem to be affected).

Until Toady fixes the bug that causes the horse population explosion in question, this seems like a good temporary solution.

[Brunste]

I believe you should also be able to add the [DOES_NOT_EXIST] tag under the horse's properties to make them not generate in world gen. You can also do this with trolls to make Goblin sites not lag. The only downside of this is that horses and trolls will obviously not exist.

[Tilogour]

You can also do this with trolls to make Goblin sites not lag.

Don't do that.
Instead of this you should do this
I'm not sure it can still work in 0.42.1 but you can always try.

[Roxfall]

Well, both of these solutions involve rebuilding the world.

If you have a savegame you'd rather continue playing instead of starting over, then you may prefer to 'poof' the annoying obviously overpopulated creatures.

[IndigoFenix]

If you're going to do that, you might as well just remove the MOUNT tag from all creatures.  That seems to be what causes the problem.

[Roxfall]

Is there a way to use mounts in adventure mode?

[Rumrusher]

nah mostly you don't want to as mount works the same as babies and mothers
in that the mother carries the baby.
horses carries the rider. and the rider ala baby can't do diddly squat as actions.
if you say dfhack yourself as a rider you basically softlocking yourself.
you can set up mounts in arena mode.

[DeKaFu]

Oh man, this is really nostalgic...

I was evaporating horses in fortress mode way back in version... uh...
Well, some version before they added tissue layers and necromancers/reanimation, and skeletal horses were just a thing that would randomly show up as wandering wildlife in evil biomes. Show up and kill 6 of your starting 7 within seconds of embarking.

The raws were much simpler then, so I'm delighted that this is still easily possible.

Edit: I guess it was version 0.27 or early 0.28, wow.
Discovering that this was a game where you could solve your problems by adjusting the boiling point of your enemies was one of the things that made me fall in love with DF in the first place.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Yeah, mounts are buggy. Scared horses run away, despite the angry humans on top trying to kill your dwarves.

[ZM5]

I love how the DF solution to an overpopulation glitch is to simply make all horses stop existing or alternatively evaporate.

[aralkis]

Isn't there a solution for the horse explosion yet during world gen? No one knows what is causing it? Is there a way to delete horses (and beak dogs too for that matter) out of the game without breaking it?

I'm using LNP 0.42.06 alpha.

I would gladly play 0.40.x but for some reason that version runs in a very low fps, that doesn't occur with other versions...

[Shonai_Dweller]

Isn't there a solution for the horse explosion yet during world gen? No one knows what is causing it? Is there a way to delete horses (and beak dogs too for that matter) out of the game without breaking it?

I'm using LNP 0.42.06 alpha.

I would gladly play 0.40.x but for some reason that version runs in a very low fps, that doesn't occur with other versions...

That was fixed ages ago, wasn't it? 42.03 I think. Certainly none of my worlds have 10-50 times as many horses as humans any more.

[aralkis]

For sure its a lot better. No more thousands of horses in a single place. Still, when we are talking about site populations, there are more horses then dwarfs or elves. And if you put horses with beak dogs, there are more of those than humans. It is still common  to find hillocks with half dozen dwarfs and 300 horses.

I just want remove them from the game and see if it has impact on demographics dynamics in site population.

Thx for the reply tho

[Untrustedlife]

Yeah, mounts are buggy. Scared horses run away, despite the angry humans on top trying to kill your dwarves.

Didnt that happen in real life?

[Droggarth]

I can imagine a dwarf or anybody in such horse armageddon world to go like: "Oh, please no! Not yet another horse! Can't even bloody get a moments sleep anymore! Talk about trying to walk somewhere, at least with cats you could just walk over and crush but hor- *a horse finally barges into his room* BY MY BEARD!! HAVE MERCY ON ME ALREADY YE OVERPOPULATED ANIMALS!!!!" *grabs his axe and butchers that horse into horrible mess and then declares war on all horses and goes completely mental on all horses*

Agh, funny thinking about it.