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v0.34 Talk:Maximizing framerate

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Revision as of 05:32, 31 January 2014 by Doktoro Reichard (talk | contribs) (→‎Forbidding and FPS increase: new section)
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Contaminants[edit]

I removed the following tips for now. My reasoning being that contaminant spreading is currently off by default. When this is turned back on by default (after the bugs are fixed I'd assume), please add these back in. For now they can do little more than confuse players. Calite 23:31, 22 May 2012 (UTC)


  • Contaminants, including blood spatters, accumulate on the ground and on dwarves and creatures. When they walk over contaminants, these sometimes get smeared and spread. There is a bug (Bug:296) which makes contaminants continuously multiply and another bug (Bug:3270) which prevents blood spatters from ever disappearing.
    • There is a setting in D_init.txt (as of v0.31.16) that prevents them spreading from dwarf (or animal) to ground. For Fortress Mode, this is WALKING_SPREADS_SPATTER_DWF and is already turned off by default.
    • If the contaminants are outside, isolate the area and let rain slowly wash it away. Pets can be kept out with a pen/pasture or a pit. Similarly, setting the traffic designation to restricted and/or assigning Activity Zones strategically may keep dwarves away.
    • Add in some in-fortress means of cleaning dwarves and pets. The "Dwarven Bathtub" is one example. And make sure you have the cleaning labor enabled. Details of these and other suggestions can be found on the cleaning page.
    • Finding the above cleaning measures too tedious or lacking, some players opt to cheat by using the dfcleanmap tool from the DFhack library.

I strongly disagree with your assessment that this information has no value now and does "little more than confuse players." The WALKING_SPREADS_SPATTER_DWF option may be off by default. But this does not change the fact that large amounts of contaminants on a map has a noticeable impact on FPS. Cleaning contaminants or removing them with DFHack proves this. For that matter, the bugs I mentioned which multiplies contaminants uncontrollably and does not allow blood to evaporate away (like it's supposed to) remain unresolved, meaning this info is as valid for v0.34 as it was for v0.31. Improving FPS is the whole point of this topic. As such, players should still be able to learn about the effect contaminants can have on FPS and find suggestions on how to deal with it.
Relocating or editing content is fine. But I expected a discussion in Talk before removing large sections like this if the removal could be controversial. Considerable time and research was put into it and the removal discourages me from further participation. I am updating this info to be more relevant and reinserting. --Thundercraft 13:10, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Disabling Clothing as a Mod[edit]

I will remove part of the following as it is not relevant to recent versions. My reasoning: 1) All clothing bugs are fixed now. Many of these, including Bug:3942, were resolved a while ago. 2) Unlike previous versions, dwarves will get unhappy thoughts for going naked. 3) No details or suggestions are offered on how to mod a game to disable clothing. 4) There are much better solutions and I've added them.

However, the suggestion of dumping excess/worn clothing may still be useful. As this fits in Fortress Design and not Mods and Utilities, I will move it. --Thundercraft 03:40, 7 February 2013 (UTC)


  • Disabling your dwarven civ from wearing clothing as a mod (would require a world regen) may help maintain higher FPS later in the gameBug:3942, if you don't mind naked dwarves running around. Alternatively, dumping excess/worn out clothing might help restore FPS on an existing fortress.

Forbidding and FPS increase[edit]

I've run a fortress to it's knees by producing thousands (as in 25k) of goblets. When I noticed the problem, my FPS was at 8, which is quite low, even by my standards.

I noticed that by forbidding the goblets (using autodump, or whatever), I gained an increase in FPS right from the start. To explain: without forbidding, the game would crawl to 0 for some half minute then resume to 8 whereas forbidding gives me the "standard" FPS of 20.

Forbidding everything in the fortress doesn't seem to pack a punch, however (the stocks were under 5k). Also, I never had problems in my testing colony, where I produced thousands upon thousands of different items (although there weren't as much as 25k). The main difference here would be the number of workshops, that prosper in my main fortress and I keep one or two in the testing one.

I suppose that (regardless of pathfinding issues) one of the factors might be the fact that the items are looked up in all workshops; the fact there are different positions where the items could be somehow increases calculation costs. There could also be stockpile considerations, as usually, whenever I designate one, the game slowly calculates something.--Doktoro Reichard (talk) 05:32, 31 January 2014 (UTC)