I'll admit it; in all my DF play sessions, my goal almost ALWAYS becomes creating huge castles or other constructions above ground.
Problem is, these forts usually die a slow and painful FPS death. I'm starting to consider that maybe it's because of my massive amount of built walls and floors.
Consider my current fort: ~80 dwarves. I started building my castle with a FPS of ~75. Now, I'm at 35 FPS with my castle half built. My CPU load doubled. I'm afraid it'll drop down to ~20 fps in not too long, which is usually when I give up.
What has happened:
- No significant boost to the number of dwarves (some babies)
- Digging out huge areas underground, including 2 full Z layers.
- Few thousand plants built up in my stockpile. Stopped the majority of my farming operation, and now it hovers around 8k plants with ~2k drinks.
- Several invasions/etc, building up the body count and random clothing items.
- Over 10k constructed walls/floors built.
- About 20 new pets.
A build up of various items (mechanisms, random things like doors/coffins/pots) might be contributing, but my dwarves never really touch those. I've yet to start constructing good bedrooms/etc with furniture, so there's a few thousand of those sitting in my workshops. But as I said, they never touch them. I don't see how those could cause lag.
I *am* mining out a lot of stone, but those items quickly get converted to walls/floors. So, no huge buildup of those.
I thought maybe it was the new space from my mining and construction. That's a lot more floor to check for pathfinding, right? Well, I walled off one of the Z layers that I mined out. No boost to FPS at all. Since I cut off nearly a fourth of the available pathing area, I'd expect *some* boost. I'm no longer so certain the expanded area has much effect.
That leaves my huge amount of constructions. What tips me off that it might be a problem is the stocks screen; it shows over 12k stones, despite most of those being used in constructions. Are they still considered items, and thus pathed to when determining things like finding the nearest stone to build another pot?
As a side note I've already done everything the wiki suggested. Already limited dwarves to 80, set the GFPS to 20, etc. I used DFhack to get rid of all the blood and crap, too. Marginal boosts, but I'd like to be back up to ~75 FPS.