Dwarf Fortress - 8 Ways to Help your Framerate

hello everybody and welcome to a video about Dwarf Fortress and frame rate in this video I'm going to be talking about a few ways to optimize your frame rate if you are running on a lower powered PC personally in my experience I feel that frame rate depth isn't something that really happens anymore at least to a degree of course one can cause frame rate death to happen but it's mostly mitigatable from the player's point of view in this video I'm going to be covering several different methods that I just use on habits to automatically increase your frame rate as well as some methods for increasing frame rate on Lower power computers we're going to be generating a world really quick and I'm going to be doing a real fast Embark and just showing you a few basic start methods that you can have at the beginnings of a fortress to improve frame rate and then I will be jumping into a larger Fortress and explaining a few ways that I keep my main running for its frame rates down a little bit this isn't going to be a super long video and it's not going to go crazy in depth on things but what I'm going to do is hopefully just give you a couple techniques that maybe if you're having some frame rate problems in a current running Fortress you can improve the frame rate there and also theoretically if you're starting a new Fortress I and you've had problems in the past you could have a better experience going forward so the first thing that I'm going to talk about here is World size so when you generate a brand new world if you are running on a lower power computer consider generating a smaller world now what what this means is whenever the game is constantly processing stuff in the background as you are playing the game the game is kind of thinking about what's going on in the rest of the world it's not processing every individual dwarf in their location or anything insane like that but it is doing a lot of behind the scenes math keeping track of population counts locations of enemies and locations of armies locations of groups and different things that are happening on the world that you will never see as the player unless you then go specifically looking for it so if you're on a lower power PC I highly recommend running a smaller World either small smaller or even pocket-sized world the large world for comparison's sake is about the size of New Zealand if not a bit bigger if you get a lot of land mass whereas these smaller worlds are more the size of your average video game map up and because we don't currently have adventure mode in the game there's no real reason unless you're a crazy person like myself to generate large worlds or unless you just like looking at a bigger map generally if you're running what I would what you would consider to be a computer that's maybe 10 years old or 15 years old or even made in the last eight years but was much more of a budget PC with a much smaller CPU or a smaller laptop definitely consider running a smaller world now I see some people talking about frame rate in relation to years the age of the world yes can impact frame rate but keep in mind mostly what that impact is the speed at which the game saves and not so much the speed at which the game runs so in my experience I've had absolutely no frame rate difference between a 1500 year old world and a five-year-old World while in game however the difference at the speed at which the game can save is the difference between a couple of seconds and uh upwards of two minutes so just keep that in mind if you're okay with longer Save times when the game is doing its audio saving or when you're saving and loading keep in mind that if if you're okay with longer Save times that's not going to impact too much uh the speed at which your game runs that being said more visitors might show up if the world is older and visitors definitely can impact your frame rate so we're going to generate a 100 year old smaller world and once that's done I will continue talking so now that the world is loaded up and we're settled to Embark in Fortress mode something that I would like to mention is Map size so once again if you are playing on a smaller PC or an older PC perhaps when you click on this Embark button it gives you this little flat Square now it's very tempting to just crank this all the way up to six by six and make an absolutely massive Embark site also keep in mind in the options menu you can actually turn this up to 16 by 16 if you want to go fully crazy but this is really tempting to crank up and make this size of your map really really large which is why the topic of this is Map size uh like Embark size if you want a fortress that runs better more consistently for longer make your map Embark smaller so go down to three by three or maybe even two by two maybe you're on a really really small laptop crank it down to one by one and using a few settings you can actually have a fully Dwarven experience with these small Maps than you would with a large map the main concern is like oh well I'm gonna have too many dwarves that's going to overpopulate the area and it's like well think about it this way right indoor Fortress you're not just settling on a one by one tile map like in Minecraft you're settling or or like in uh in SimCity you're settling on a 250 map tall tower that you can tunnel down in so if you are settling in a smaller map if anything it forces you to play more vertically and can definitely positively increase your frame rate while also giving you um like just as much freedom to play something else that I would worth note that I think is worth noting though if you do decide to increase the size of the map the issues that I've had are not constant frame rate issues the issues that I've had are when creatures decide to wander onto the sides of the map I can get some definite hitching where the game just locks and then continues I only noticed this when I make the maps bigger don't notice this when I make the map smaller as for General frame rates uh just having more things going on on each map will slow the game down so keep that in mind so we're just going to quickly Embark here and then I'll continue talking so the next thing I would like to talk about now that we've embarked on this lovely little map here as you can see it's still a very sizable play area even though it may appear to be significantly smaller than some maps this is still a massive space to play in but the next thing that I would like to talk about are game settings so there's a few things that I think are worth noting in your settings menu that can also increase frame rate if you're encountering a massive frame slowdown and you have a big Siege attack and you've constructed a lot on the surface this next one is very very notable and what it is is weather so weather in Dwarf Fortress is constantly being processed water falls from the sky uh temperatures go up and down the Sun comes out and goes away clouds come over if you disable weather specifically on the Fortress of rope Gorges which I did on my community Spotlight a couple of weeks ago or a couple of days ago if time has no meaning uh rope Gorges was a very large surface Fortress which ran at about 30 to 25 frames a second on my on my computer when I turned off weather it jumped up by 15 frames which is kind of massive because every single object is constantly being contaminated by water on the constant rainfall of that map and just simply disabling the processing of weather and water falling from the sky was a massive boost now keep in mind this isn't going to break your game you're still going to get dwarves thinking about rain but you won't have the CPU processing power of literal water like contaminating the existence of every single thing you've built on the map so keep that in mind the next one here is temperature now temperature can break some fire-based enemies so maybe if a creature that's made of fire spawn like shows up on your map you might want to turn this back on but disabling temperature especially if you're doing a lot of things close to Lava or in a volcano Fortress every single item that every single character is wearing and is scattered around the map is being processed for its temperature it's getting temperature checks run over it so if you get attacked by an army of let's say 50 goblins and each of them are wearing 12 items and holding a spear and a shield every single one of those items on every single one of those goblins is now suddenly being tracked for its temperature so if you have a lot of entities on the map or alternatively if you're doing a lot of things with weird things will be hot and cold all the time you might want to disable temperature this again won't break your playthrough you'll still get ice in the winter you'll still get like weird you'll still be able to do fun stuff with lava it's just simply removing temperature from items on everything in the map so that is another big one and it's been a long time frame rate saver for people who play this game a lot I almost never turn it off personally because I actually don't mind if the game slows down to 30 frames a second or 25 frames a second in some cases I usually just want to find the other thing that's causing the problem another thing that just kind of goes without saying is doors so if you've built a lot of doors in your map and let's just say you have all of these areas down here and they are digging around and you have doors in these spots and they're running through and they're interconnected let's say you lock this door you may have a character that goes Funk bunks bumps into it and goes I want to keep going through that door but they can't go through that door but they want to go through that door and there was a there was a mechanic that was changed in this version version 5.0 where you previously could have a door that was tightly closed or a door that was locked and tightly closed basically stopped animals from walking through but dwarves could still walk through and this was removed as a frame rate saving measure I feel that while it has been removed locked doors locked doors can still sometimes screw with frames for some reason so be careful about locking doors and if you suddenly have a large drop maybe look around and see if you have something stuck behind a door um the next thing I want to talk about now just in in Fortress planning side of things is stairs I see a lot of people doing stairs in this kind of pattern a two by two and I see a lot of people doing 4x4 and I sometimes see people going crazy with it and doing these don't do this it's that simple now the reason for this is if a dwarf is moving up and down in this stair or any character for that matter they're constantly pathing they're constantly thinking about what direction do I need to go that's optimal and they want to path around other characters that are going up and down the stairs which is also an issue for single frame for a single staircases like this if you are pathing in a lot of different directions and there's other characters in traffic on the stairs they have to lie down in order to go underneath the character that is coming down the stairs this tile set does not display this very clearly so a way to avoid this is by simply giving them the most possible directions with the minimum possible options so mathematically I'm an idiot but this I think is 29 possible directions they could have and this is exponentially higher to get around characters that are coming down the stairs because they still want to take the optimal pathway what I would recommend doing is building something like this so if we go to these stairs tool we can build a little cross pattern or if you want to go full chaotic evil you could build a circle pattern now these two options on the top allow the dwarves to pass around each other with the minimum possible options of directions they can go I personally really like the cross pattern as it doesn't uh as it it's it's nice and symmetrical and it works really well with a lot of my building designs as well as you can smooth and engrave these Center tiles same with this pattern another option that I see a lot of people talking about is ramps so instead of uh building stairwells they will just simply on each layer uh carve up well in this one it's an up uh an upramp and then they'll carve a down ramp next to it and then a down ramp next to it and then a down ramp next to it and then a down ramp next to it and then a down ramp next to it that these are both completely valid options as stair Alternatives that are significantly more efficient for frame rate when you have a lot of traffic on them than the blocks now another thing I would like to show you in before we jump over to a larger Fortress is population caps now if you look at this Fortress you can see that we have several different options here a range from zero to five thousand now these are your population caps if you have a smaller PC it is wise to lower this so by default door Fortress will allow you to have up to 200 dwarves in a fort now if you're okay with playing the game in PowerPoint presentation mode it's totally fine to turn this number up but I almost never do there was one Fortress a couple years ago where I set the population cap to 300 we never quite made it there but I think we got to about 280. and let's just say the game ran in about 15 frames a second on my computer which was fine for what I was trying to do but not what a lot of people would accept as legitimate so if you really want to have better frame rates on a smaller PC I would recommend setting this to like 75 or maybe even 50. and then down here is your strict population cap now the strict population cap is for births and babies so you can go actually over top of the population cap if your dwarves are having children so you could lower this as well so you could have a hard population cap of 75 and a soft population cap of 100 and still have a perfectly normally functioning Fortress uh and then of course there's the maximum number of babies you can have and then there's maximum number of Invaders enemy Invasion caps can be found underneath custom settings underneath difficulty now there's a bunch of different things here you can see enemy population triggers if you've turned your population down let's just say that you've cut it down in half you might want to cut these numbers in half just so that you can have the same kind of invasion difficulty scaling as you would in normal Dwarf Fortress minus the uh like having to have you know a hundred and something dwarves in order to get your actual difficulty uh invasions here now if we scroll down a little bit uh we can see you know various other details here that are pretty spoilerific but there's one here that I specifically want to look at here uh which is enemy population triggers here which if you cut these in half if you've increased the number or decreased the number of dwarves you can have in your Fortress you may want to cut these in half because in order to get the biggest possible sieges by default you need 140 dwarves so if you perhaps would like to have bigger sieges but maybe you only have a maximum of 100 Dwarves you might for example want to turn this down to 90 or a number that more fits with the amount of dwarves that you're gonna have I do have a bug with this menu for some reason where it won't just let me type in and press enter and I have to click these button manually so keep that in mind but if you scroll a little bit further down in this screen here Invasion cap for Monsters and then Invasion cap regulars so Invasion cap regulars attack two the second attack can be at maximum 60 and then Invasion cap three the end Max attack size can be 120. if you've turned down the number of dwarves you have and you want the same balancing for normal difficulty I would recommend turning this up hard difficulty increases the numbers of these a little bit and for me personally I'm probably gonna double these at some point I don't care if the game runs slowly when I'm under attack after all what I do care about is having big fun attacks to fight with so this is something that is also worth noting if you've turned down your population cap you may want to also tweak the amount of dwarves you need in order for things to attack you and you may also want to lower the amount of things that actually attack you this is of course only if you're running into major frame rate comes during sieges simply turn down the number of things that can attack you this is the Fortress of deep orb it is a rather large Fortress that I've been consistently keeping at a usable frame rate of about 50 to 45 and the main way that I've been keeping this Fortress running well is garbage disposal this is a tip that I don't see that I actually don't see a lot of people using um this is my way of getting rid of garbage but there's many different ways of getting rid of garbage and essentially the way it works is right here we have this lava over top of the magma C this is kind of Overkill I also have a tutorial on using atom Smashers if you would like to use a drawbridge as similar technique but just slightly different educate execution so we have these two stockpiles here one for refuse and one for corpses and refuse and essentially the way it works is I every so often I simply go to this spot and I designate this stuff to be dumped and then the dwarves run up here and if I hit Zed on the keyboard you can see that we have a little garbage dump zone right here and this garbage dump Zone starting on one tile going one tile over the dwarves walk onto the first town toss it to the second tile because I have to be in the zone in order to actually dump stuff so they toss it to the over to the right here and it falls down into the lava being destroyed and wiped off the map you could also use a drawbridge for this technique now something else that's worth noting is if you go to the stock screen and as you can see the game actually takes a while to load the stock screen because I have a very large amount of stuff actually in this Fortress so while we wait for the game to load the stock screen I would like to note that what we're going to be doing is I'm going to show you how to mass designate items that you don't want in your Fortress so one of these items that you really don't want to be lying around too much is destroyed clothing so if you hit X and type in X and we go to let's just say leg wear you see these clothes that have the x's on either side well those are just like damaged clothing granted this will automatically filter out all Ibex Leathers so just keep an eye out for that um but if we go to headwear same thing if we go to uh basically any item that could theoretically have damaged items in it will give us a list now keep in mind not all of these will automatically fall in like puzzle boxes as an example but if we want to get rid of an item on Mass now they'll just go through all of those into lava now they'll go through all of those into lava and this goes for almost anything keep in mind as well while you're playing Dwarf Fortress if you have certain items in large quantities remember what I said about frame rate and temperature this is all going to apply here so if you have large amounts of items with weird temperatures that will impact your frame rate so you have two options you can either disable temperature like I mentioned earlier in the video or you can dispose of extra items this can be done either via simply throwing it into a lava pit if they're high quality items it might upset your dwarves so it's better served by mass trading and you can use similar search techniques to mass trade-off damaged items or alternatively just simply getting rid of things that you don't need because this Fortress is starting to get pretty items heavy and we're going to need to remove it remember those stairs from earlier that I mentioned well they're right in the middle thank you very much for watching this video if it was helpful to you I hope that you will give this channel the subscription if you haven't already I have a lot of Dwarf Fortress tutorials where I help people learn the game as well as I stream on Twitch full time uh Tuesday Wednesday Thursdays with optional weekend streams on Saturdays and Sundays thank you very much for watching this video and I hope to see you once again in the next one

Channel: Blind

Views: 34,964

Keywords: Dwarf Fortress, Dwarf fortress gameplay, dwarf fortress bay12games, dwarf fortress kitfox, dwarf fortress review, dwarf fortress playthrough, Talk interview, procedural generation, dwarf fortess graphics, indie games, World building, screenshots, Adventure mode, Legends mode, release date, Bay12games, soundtrack release, Dwarf Fortress Tutorial, Lets play dwarf fortress, fps, fix fps, framerate, frame death, framerate death, fix fps death, fps death, dwarf fortress fps

Id: 7i0j6mzp0es

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022