Effective methods for fighting mining-related lag

dwarf-fortress

I love me some 5×3 embark areas; but as soon as I really cut into the bedrock; I quickly drop from 100/50 FPS to 25/15 FPS (exaggeration alert!). In fact, the most common cause of fortress abandonment for me isn't Goblin Sieges, it isn't lava-related Fun, it's not tantrum spirals, it's terrible lag, even when running a population cap of 20.

From what I hear; it's more or less accepted that in the current version, the main culprit is mining and loose stone; and even turning all of the stone into constructions doesn't seem to help much.

Then again; building a playable fortress while staying squarely inside the three or four levels of soil on a "very deep soil" embark seems very undwarvely…

So how can I undertake massive digging projects and avoid terribletastic lag?

Best Answer

This may be well known (it's mentioned in the wiki), but turning off the temperature and weather features hugely increased my framerate. Edit data\init\d_init.txt, find these lines:

[TEMPERATURE:YES]
[WEATHER:YES]

and change them to this:

[TEMPERATURE:NO]
[WEATHER:NO]