v0.31:Maximizing framerate

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v50.14 · v0.47 · v0.34 · v0.31.25 · v0.28 · v0.23 This article is about an older version of DF. More Info · V

A picture of Dwarf Fortress with Frames Per Second displayed.

Template:L is used in Dwarf Fortress to measure the speed at which the game is running. To check your FPS (frames per second) in Dwarf Fortress, simply change [FPS:NO] to [FPS:YES] in Template:L, and your FPS will be displayed on the top row of the screen.

The graphical FPS is also used to control how often input is received; you may find 5-15 graphical rate too clumsy for fluid text and mouse input.

Ways to increase your framerate

• Limiting the number of dwarves and other moving units (cage or butcher animals!) greatly helps keep speed up.

• Due to bug (0000296), contaminants such as blood, snow, etc, count as items. Since contaminants can spread and you cannot easily get rid of them, try to avoid things that spread contaminants: wells, killing things in high traffic spots, and soap.
  If you have a beast that exudes slime, you might as well save your game and wait for an update. Or kill it and use dfcleanmap.

• Get rid of blood and dirt splatters dwarves and pets are carrying around. Doing so increased FPS from 8 to 33 on my machine(6 embark tiles, 130 dwarves, 250 animals, 3 caverns). to achieve this, you can either build a moat/wading pool around a well-visited area, which keeps the water height on 1-2 by using a pump which will clean the water from the dirt. When the dwarves walk through the water, the contaminants will be washed away. A hacking-tools way is to place some 7/7 water splatters around important paths with dfliquids, and running dfcleanmap continuously to remove the blood that gets washed away from the dwarves.

• Decreasing the G_FPS in the init text file can improve your fortress' overall FPS. Be careful however, decreasing it too much can subject you to "incomprehensible graphic instabilities". G_FPS refers to the "maximum graphical frame refresh rate during play." In other words, the maximum number of times it repaints the graphics of your game per second. Remember, with a low G_FPS, it can be dangerous during battle or when arrows are flying over your Dwarves' heads, because the screen doesn't update as often. The default is 50 G_FPS, but it's been reported that 20 G_FPS is fine. Others report being able to play at even 5 G_FPS. There is no set number, just remember to test out a variety of numbers to see which one is right for you and your computer.

• Disabling Temperature and Weather in the init file increases speed due to fewer calculations being required, but rain will clean the map from blood and broken arrows, so it may actually improve the framerate.

• World size and fortress site size increase RAM usage and decrease speed. Check if you are happier with an embark rectangle of 3x3 or 3x2 and a medium or small world.

(DF .31.12) World size probably doesn't matter at all (except for save file size), but the embark size and how many cavern layers the world has (defaults to 3).

• Lowering the pathfinding cost for normal tiles to 1 can reduce lag created by open space, but then your high traffic zones are the same as normal zones. Alternatively, you can cover the entire map with high traffic tiles, and simply make everything you don't want your dwarves traveling through low or restricted.

• Closing the fort's entrance to the outside world with a raised bridge or forbidden door decreases the number of possible routes the pathfinder has to calculate, thus increases performance.

• Some people try to reduce the number of items in the fort by "atom-smashing" them under a bridge or donating them away to traders. Alternatively, less digging in the first place results in fewer stones and corridors in the world to consider.

Success Stories

Losing is Fun! But there's nothing fun about abandoning your fortress because the framerate has dropped to 6. For many, more fortresses are lost to fps death than anything else, and improving framerate remains a something of a mystery. If you find something that works, please share it here.

From 40fps to 140fps

pc: 2.2ghz 1.5gb ram. fortress: 2x2 embark, 40-50 dwarves, 130 animals. temp & weather off. 1 cavern

This fort ran at 150fps for a while but gradually after 11 years slowed to 27. At this point I've focused my efforts exclusively on maximizing framerate, trying the usual tricks:

• Atom-smashing: no help AT ALL.
• Animal slaughtering / caging: gained 10-15fps for killing about 50 animals.
• Then I notice that my dwarves are FILTHY! Some having over 10+ pages of various blood and pus spatterings in their inventories.

I dig a crude bath, which consists of a hallway which dips down into a brief channel and back up before hitting a dead end. I designate a Pond zone over the channel and the dwarves waste no time in drawing a bath (1/7 deep). After designating a burrow on the other side of the bath, I order the entire fortress to it via the Alerts screen (restricting them to that burrow). Immediately upon crossing the channel my framerate went from ~40 to ~140 and it is decided the fortress will live on!

Conclusion: The amount of items on the map and pathfinding were very minor causes of slowdown in my case. The increases gained from slaughtering animals may well have been from their contaminants being destroyed in the process rather than the pathing they were calculating. Above all, the contaminants were the cause of this fortresses near-demise. --Uninvited Guest 07:27, 1 December 2010 (UTC)