Dwarf Fortress – Tips to Increase FPS (That Don’t Affect Gameplay Too Much)

How to Increase FPS

A Few Major Tips

1. Deploy your embark into a desert with zero vegetation. Every naturally growing plant and tree consume a huge amount of FPS. Like unbelievably so. In addition to this: Do not break into the cavern below your fort. If you’re digging down, pre-save, and take a screenshot and avoid it. It “activates” those processes for everything growing there and causes things to grow in your soil layer adding even more.
2. If you are going to embark on any area with vegetation make the embark size 2×2 and nothing more.
3. Just turn off temperature until it’s actually doing something. No lava? No fire breathing enemies? etc. It’s just eating FPS. A lot. more and more items/entities/etc the harder it hits. It’s a pretty harsh rising curve. You can carve this down a bit by making nanostockpiles (make a hole, dump everything into it, reclaim it with 0 stockpiles to put anything in, nano stockpile)
4. Pathfinding is not that huge a hit to FPS as people claim and when it does hit hard it’s always a reaction pathfind. The most common obliteration of is due to people running away from agitated/hostile flying ♥♥♥ over and over and over and over and over (PS. Deserts dont have flying animals). In any case, build a roof over your walls/fort so they can’t annoy you forever and kill children at that.
5. No matter what the more sentient entities (dwarves, visitors, etc) the more decisions they’re all making and checking for thoughts and most importantly: line of sight checks. So cap your pop to what feels tolerable.

I personally with all the tips i have presented can maintain 110 FPS with 270 citizens + visitors + 100 chickens with it swinging to about 90 depending on just how active everyone is. I also have a pretty good computer. i7 12700, 3600 Mhz RAM, SSD. But if I didn’t follow these rules I would have been at 40-60 FPS with 150 dwarves as I did the past 3 attempts trying to test the performance of this new release.

On a similar note, I am disappointed with the performance of this release. That was the #1 issue that plagued the game for eternity and it seems little to nothing was done to tackle it. At the very least it seems some basic dfhack solutions to bugs that were around for YEARS AND YEARS have been applied. (ie. entities never leaving line of sight checks after death).