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[PTTG??]

Well, you can uncap the FPS by giving it an absurd limit like 10,000.  Tests have been done to see how worldgen changes FPS, and these tests were done by uncapping FPS and changing world size, world depth, and civilization numbers, and comparing the FPS of a new embark.  A shallow, pocket world with few civs, will get like 6,000 FPS.  Considering a year in DF is 403,200 frames, at ~5,000 FPS you should pass a thousand years in 22+ hours.  Probably closer to 24, because you have to pause it at times, right?

Right.

OK, next time I get a chance to stay awake 24 hours straight, I'm doing this. The principle will be simple; embark with 7 stout Dwarves to some isolated place and establish a secure, stable fortress to last for 1,000 years.

I forsee that there will be problems. For one thing, that is 83 dwarf generations. Assuming they only get married every 20 years, I will still need to provide for at least the occasional immigrant without allowing too many in. I am anticipating having to design some kind of automated migrant smasher- possibly just a meeting area on a bridge that retracts every few weeks.

At that speed, note that a year would pass in less than one and a half minutes. I will have to do some benchmarking, but any kind of annual construction project (i.e., engrave one wall tile per year) would be extremely annoying after a while.

I will do some stress testing and determine exactly how large of a population I might be able to support over the course of a millennium.

As much as it might be neat to design an automated water-computer system to keep the fortress running, I'm not sure what the effect would be on performance. And while I would ideally want to experience this 1000-year/24-hour madness firsthand, I may simply have to break it up into separate sessions.

Still, 1000 years. The ultimate goal was to capture a couple of dragons and eventually keep a breeding population of them up.

[Naryar]

Actually, feed your fortress on plump helmets and wild strawberries and other directly eatable plants. Also a well, and a masterwork dining room, and beds.

However, fun will be had with the assloads of ghosts you will get.

[Sphalerite]

My suggestions:

Farm only plump helmets.  Make many small farms instead of a few large one for greater redundancy against tantrum-induced damage.  Have a large food stockpile that takes only plump helmets, and a smaller stockpile that only takes plump helmet spawn.

It will require some micromanagement to make sure that there are always a few dwarves with the planting labor enabled.  You don't want to enable it on everyone because yields will suffer due to poor planter skill, but you need to make sure that you still have enough farmers to keep the fields planted.

Embark somewhere with a steady, safe water source, and build a few dozen wells.

Embark with a lot of wood, make a lot of beds, and build them all in a single large common barracks.

To keep your dwarves happy while eating plump helmet and drinking water, give them a very nice dining room, and if possible a waterfall under a meeting area.  (Note:  this may cause an unacceptable drop in FPS, so it's best to try and keep happiness up in other ways is possible)

Do not kill immigrants.  You're going to have a hard enough time keeping up with putting everyone in coffins as it is.  Instead, build a safe immigrant airlock using bridges to let immigrants in while keeping ambushes and sieges out.

Traders will be a problem.  If you don't trade with them, they are likely to die, and then their ghosts will haunt your fortress.  The safest way to do this will be to wall off the entire edge of the map with raising bridges.  If you do that properly, nothing will spawn - no immigrants, traders, diplomats, wild animals, ambushes, or anything.  You'll need to take them down periodically to get fresh blood for breeding in, I expect, and that's going to be a problem as your own hoards of idle dwarves will produce enough children to push the population over the cap.

Of course, you need to get a breeding pair of dragons in the first place for this to work.  I did some research a while back when trying to set up a Roc farm.  It is possible by cleverly poking through the files you can export in Legends mode to determine how many of each megabeast there is in the world and where in the world their lairs are.  I don't know if embarking very close to a megabeast's lair makes it more likely that megabeast will visit you, but if it does you could try finding lairs of male and female dragons and placing your fortress as close as possible.  Of course, if you're running a pocket world, your fortress will be close to them no matter what due to the tiny size of the world.  You may actually have to go through a lot of pocket worlds before you even find one that has two opposite-gender dragons in it.

[Girlinhat]

• Access your raws, and set the max age for dwarves as 4.  This way, they will die before they breed, and your dwarves will die during worldgen.
• Generate a world, allowing 1 civ and requiring a player civ.  You will have a few errors until it manages to place a dwarf civ, which will promptly die of old age around year 2 or 3.
• Open the raws for that world, and change the lifespan of dwarves back to normal.

You now have a world with no civilizations, no liaison, no caravans, no invaders.  Luckily, fort creation is magic, and the game will generate 7 dwarves from thin air, and an additional 2 waves of migrants that are generated on the spot.  After that, nothing.  Those two migrant waves seem to always be 8-9 dwarves, so you'll have 15-16 dwarves at the end of year 1.  If they have a good meeting hall, they should get married very quickly, since they'll spend a lot of time around each other.  You can also turn off all game-pausing announcements (namely births) in the init folder.  This should allow your fort to run constantly and only pause when you do something.  As added benefit, you can do everything above-ground, so you can make a nice hamlet with individual housing and a nice temple for your dragons.  Be sure and leave invaders on, so that dragons will actually arrive.  You'll need to mod megabeasts to make dragons the only type, and make dragons attack earlier, otherwise your fort won't reach enough pop to trigger a dragon.

Also, if you remove caverns to max your FPS, then you get no helmets.  Strawberries, fischer berries, and prickle berries will be your main source of farming, so bring a herbalist.

[PTTG??]

Didn't think of ghosts- but I will need to kill 'em off to keep the FPS up. I think that having a few different plants growing will be rather important.

Since I'll at least need to pacify the ghosts, I'll need to keep at least a few dwarves working to make slabs.

Pacifying the dragons by first capturing them and then taming them and everything sounds like it will be beyond a 18-dwarf fortress. I might:
1: Mod them in and embark with two adult dragons
2: Pick some kind of other project to do over 1k year.
3: Go for a pure Dwarven Vault and focus on surviving the entire time. With #3, I would naturally stop all immigration and just stay down there the whole time.

[lanceleoghauni]

Something I'd thought of for a generation capsule fort I'd been working on in theory was to just have multiple layers, the starting seven start on the lowest, most well equipped layer, and each wave of immigrants has to slowly percolate downward, ensuring that only useful dwarves are introduced into the main population. males and Females would have separate quarters to prevent marriage and babies, and the doors to the next lowest level only unlock every 5 years. That's enough time to conventionally train them as a militia, or to get them to a useful specialization at a respectable level, ensuring the lowest areas are lavishly furnished. I need to think of a good way to thin the herd though, cull the weak and only allow the strong to survive. Once they get to the middle (of three) areas I can't think of a way to do so nicely, aside from just looking for all the weak and stupid ones who survived the first level and changing their burrow to the magma chamber.

Eugenics,  Needless Cruelty, Class Struggle, Sounds dwarfy to me.

[gzoker]

You could build a huge graveyard, with a thousand or more coffins set to accept anybody, so ghosts wouldn't appear at all.

Also wouldn't pets slow your fps in a few decades?

[Girlinhat]

Ghosts don't seem to cause any significant lag in .21

Don't have spare animals.

[Vercingetorix]

I'm up to 21 years...I'll try this as well.

[PTTG??]

I'm still carving out the living spaces. Badgers have been annoying the workers, but once we get underground and locked away and we've killed all the pets, frame rates should be pretty good.

I decided to go ahead and have caverns for water supply.

[gzoker]

Yeah but some ghosts kill dwarfs, especially if they died some horrible way, then you can have a chain reaction, like tantrum spiral. I had one dwarf got hammered to oblivion after a failed mood, then he came back to take revenge. He killed my sheriff first, then the sheriff's son. After that he hunted down the other children, causing tantrums, then more angry dwarf ghosts. It was fun, and it killed my fort.

[Christes]

This is an awesome idea.  Do we know how much really goes on in the world during dwarf mode?  It would be interesting to look at the legends afterwards.

[Ganondwarf]

What I can't understand is why you want to do it in 24 hours. Where would the control be? It would basically become a game of setup and wait. I'd love to write a story for a thousand year fortress, but I'd like to take a year to do it so I can actually enjoy it.

[iyaerP]

This is an awesome idea.  Do we know how much really goes on in the world during dwarf mode?  It would be interesting to look at the legends afterwards.

Based on what I have seen from looking at legends mode after the fall of a decade old fort of mine, the world outside pauses, and the only things that happen are things that happened to you in fortress mode.

[Girlinhat]

For the most part, nothing happens after worldgen.  No more births, no real deaths, no expansion, no nothing.  Legends mode is fun in long history worlds, then it becomes very, very boring, and will only list things you caused.