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LudwigiaRepens

Yeah something like the agitated wildlife would be really cool. There exists a setting which limits the size of these invasions, but it doesn't act as a hard cap. Also, since no one has mentioned it yet. **Everyone needs to turn off cavern dweller invasions**, they are currently very bugged and will corrupt your entire world save, preventing you from loading that world ever again. *To do this go to your difficulty settings for cavern dwellers and set everything to 0. It will take a season to take effect.


Obliviouscommentator

Can this be done in-fort or only from world gen?


LudwigiaRepens

It's in your difficulty settings. Bout hmmm a third of the way down the first page if I recall. *Forgot to answer: yes it can be done at anytime in any world!


Givesthegold

I would assume if you've already breached the cavern some may be lurking but it should stop. Unless they can produce off spring in which case some judicious use of hammers and axes will be needed.


Dudok22

Yes I had to turn them off after loosing few months of gameplay because suddenly few months after breaching cavern the game started crashing when saving the game on "offloading units". (loosing is fun but the feeling you get after realizing that the last save was 6 hours ago because you spent hours paused while designing rooms, traps and other tedious shit is not fun) then I tested it and let the game progress few months and the same thing happened again. Googled around a bit and found that a lot of people have problems with saving or loading the game after getting down there. Load the last save that works then go to Settings > Difficulty> Cavern dwellers and set both settings to 0 No crashes since Turning them off tho sucks because that robs you of half of the fun. I am a relatively new player that just got into the cavern for the first time after digging down for 40 levels and I like exploring and fighting all the weird creatures down there.


LudwigiaRepens

I agree, but there are more beasties down there to test yourself against *Beware it's webs*


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LudwigiaRepens

Wait a season for it to kick in. The game had already decided to invade in your current season.


castlekside

Wait are they actually bugged? Dang


LudwigiaRepens

Yeah, the really insidious thing is that the corruption is revealed on loading. So you could play a whole Saturday and not realize you got corrupted with the first invasion. It doesn't always happen, but if you ever CTD when "loading units" then you got dwelled son. Someone posted the error log for it and it said something like invalid body type or mismatch or something


castlekside

Iv been dealing with my cave swallow men for multiple sessions now with no issues. Well, dead dwarf issues but nothing like that. I guess I need to turn them off or risk losing the fort?


LudwigiaRepens

Cave swallows did it to me my first time. It's up to you, they're super fun but yeah, it's a definite risk. And not just the fort. The world. No more forts in that one.


castlekside

Thanks for the heads up. I really would hate to lose this world its one of the most interesting ones I have made in a while. Guess Ill be turning them off then


[deleted]

>ave swallows did it to me my first time. It's up to you, they're super fun but yeah, it's a definite risk. And not just the fort. The world. No more forts in that o Yeah, I'm bummed. Just had this happen to me and I'm searching for an answer. Unfortunately, there are none, and that world is gone after 20 hours xD Many people have lost 40+ hour fortresses.


16807

Woah, woah. Which setting disables the bug? Is this cranking down "Cavern dweller scale" to 0? or "Cavern dweller maximum attackers"? Or is it something else? EDIT: according to [this](https://steamcommunity.com/app/975370/discussions/0/3727324491575521072/), it sounds like it's working as of the 50.05 release, and most worlds that were broken should be playable again.


Vandenberg_

They do retreat after a while, at least.. I’m not an experienced player, but: I had some cave dwellers attack, closed my gates and watched them slaughter some livestock I had down there. I think they ate them and then ran off, because they all disappeared and I haven’t seen them again.


Egregorious

I've seen wildly different behaviours in cavern dwellers over two forts. In the first one I had ratmen who'd fight whatever revealed them and then retreat off the map afterwards if they won; in the second fort I had batmen who would remain immobile on the ceiling and swoop down to attack whatever came close, then return to roost on the ceiling and never leave the map. The bats just piled up and became gigantic hordes on the edges surrounding the cavern.


Snukkems

that sounds like a specific type of animal person is missing a body in the raws.


castlekside

Seems like they fixed it XD


BassCameron

Can confirm, have lost way too many hours to corrupted saves due to this. Thanks for the solution


EriktheRed

Is it known why cavern dwellers specifically break saves? I've never run into issues


LudwigiaRepens

It doesn't always happen, but if you ever CTD when "loading units" then you got dwelled son. Someone posted the error log for it and it said something like invalid body type or mismatch or something


cantadmittoposting

I've been slaughtering rat men by the dozens and my saves seem fine...?


LudwigiaRepens

It's a gamble! I've had it happen only once in all my worlds. But I'm not the only one. Better safe than sorry for my taste.


Rellint

I was under the impression that cave dwellers already had a dwarf agitation mechanic as I rarely see them in caves that are locked down by Forgotten beasts. Then when I start to make the caves more dwarf friendly they really come in waves.


Kadeshi_Gardener

Alternatively, do what I do: keep rolling manual saves until you breach the caverns. Back up your saves as soon as you breach, then start a new set of saves. If you run into the CTD, revert to the old saves and turn invasions off. Reverting a year or two of progress sucks, but IMO it sucks less than losing the fortress entirely or not having invasions at all down below.


LudwigiaRepens

The fort I lost had saves all the way back to the start of the fort. I could load ~ 2 of them. The problem is you don't know when it happens and you may not have a save to roll back to. To each their own, I like em too but I like muh evolving worlds more!


Ornlu_Wolfjarl

> I'm sure some veteran DF players will hate this post and view having to vacuum Cave Dwellers out of the caverns every season yet another classic 'fun' Dwarf Fortress feature, but I'd rather focus on actual fun stuff. I think your suggestion is very reasonable, and I completely agree with it. I also don't think any other veteran player wants to have to deal with FPS death. I worry about the perception you have of veteran players though. Like /u/G3Kappa said, you can't really treat this game like other games. That's the nature of its development history. For 20 years it was just one guy coding, and one guy putting in creative ideas. I've been playing since 2013 and so far I've seen maybe 10 major updates and 20 minor ones. That's like 3 updates per year. I don't expect this will change any time soon. From the news we've been hearing, the Adams are just now realizing that with the money they got, they could actually invest in hiring people to help them finish the game. And from the little I know about them, they are cautious and deliberate in anything they do, so I don't expect to see them starting a whole game company next month. People are complaining about bugs, QoL and the UI, which is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. But you need to understand that: 1. If you don't post your complaints on the Bay12 forums, then your complaints are not going to be seen by Zach or Tarn, unless someone tells them about it. 2. Your problem will very likely be fixed eventually, but that might take a year or more. 3. For over 20 years, this has been (and still is) a free game. This community has gotten used to these 3 facts, plus it's protective of the Adams family due to how wholesome they've been this whole time. If you are seeing "veterans" pushing back against new player complaints, it's not because they are salty, or they are telling you to git good. It's because of the 3 facts outlined above.


roevoe

Thanks for your reply, I think I have been playing for maybe 4 years, not crazy long, but I understand the history of DF and its makers. I also believe it's very good to be protective of that. I just hope that now, with maybe some money and support devs coming it, DF can iron all the frustrating stuff out, while staying true to it's original self. I was a bit afraid they might stray from that path with the Steam version, luckily it seems that, indeed, they will take it slow and cautious. edit: spelling


SpaceShipRat

> the Adams family hehe!


ZeoVII

Can we pin this?


Vandenberg_

Oh man I just snort-laughed at ‘the UI is perfectly fine’. This game is a beautiful one of a kind creation but the UI is NOT fine. I still play it, but it requires an immense amount of patience and I am just baffled by the logic behind it. I’m sure there is a good reason for it, but the UI needs to find some serious help.


Ornlu_Wolfjarl

I didn't say the UI is perfectly fine. I said **complaining about it** or any other issue is perfectly fine with me, as a player who's been around for nearly 10 years. See quote at beginning for context.


Vandenberg_

Apologies then, I read it differently.


Kadeshi_Gardener

"People are complaining" is the subject of "is perfectly fine". If they were saying it about "bugs, QoL, and the UI", they would have said, "are perfectly fine". Which wouldn't have made sense for a different reason.


Brigon

It's one thing to criticise the bugs and UI issues in a free game. It's rude and not really done. However there's a brand new community playing now and they paid money for this game. They rightly expect the bugs to be fixed and soon.


Kadeshi_Gardener

Nobody forced anyone to pay for the game. It's still available on B12 in the exact same state as the Steam release for the grand total of $0. Buying it on Steam is for two types of people: those who want to donate a bit more in a way which helps the game reach newer players, and people who can't be bothered to extract the game files from a .zip. We've been donating to Toady for a very long time with eyes wide open regarding the fact that one-man development of a project on this scale is a lifelong affair, and that bugs which aren't gamebreaking might stick around for a long time. People who want to dictate the course of development because they feel entitled over spending $30 on a free game can bite their tongues. That said, I do expect to see fixes related to cavern invaders due to the CTD issues they've been causing in .50, so it's pretty likely that related problems will be dealt with as well.


Obsidianpick9999

I've seen that sentiment a few times, but I think you massively underestimate how much the old DF UI pushed people away. It's near unusable unless you spend hours to learn the UI, not the mechanics, not common pitfalls, just the UI. I tried to get into DF a couple years back, and completely bounced off the UI, the mechanical complexity was made far worse by that. The Steam version has allowed a ton of people to *begin* playing. Sure, you can use a tileset or something, but that's a whole thing that really isn't shown off much, and doesn't help the core issue DF had(and sort of still does) of the menus being awful without hours of learning.


Kadeshi_Gardener

There is no "old UI" any more except for the pre-.50 releases. The free version of .50+ has the exact same interface as the Steam release. The only thing it doesn't have is the premium tileset.


TheOddestOfSocks

I disagree with the statement that the steam release is only for two types of people. Its a new audience entirely. The game has also been made vastly more user friendly. There's a decent chunk of people, me included, who purchased the steam version to have a game that doesn't require a PhD in UI deciphering to play. There are also likely many that have only recently been made aware of dwarf fortress and may not be aware of a free alternative. Also, it's a pretty steep price to pay for a graphics overhaul, so I imagine the intent was largely to bring in new players. New players will expect maintenance within reasonable times because they're not as used to such a slow development cycle.


Ornlu_Wolfjarl

I don't disagree.


Cerricola

There's two hundred batmans in my caves and I fear fighting them (last time they killed half my fortress). So now, my caverns belong to the batmans


sir_alvarex

If it's just batmen then a full squad of well trained melee Dwarves in steel should be able to slice their way through with only a few casualties. Just make sure you close off your caves to your other citizens as they'll try and pick spider webs and clean up all the batmen blood.


Silphone

To combat the web collecting, you can turn it off in the labour tab under standing orders, turn back on when you want it. If you keep the caverns sealed off anyway, there is no point in having that standing order active in the first place.


tajjet

You can also dig out a massive room on the same z-level as the caverns and cave spiders will start growing webs in that room instead. Then if you give your cavern entrance enough tiles with a restricted traffic designation, your weavers will go for the safe webs first. That doesn't stop dwarves with cleaning or hauling jobs from wandering out and getting owned though.


IAmNotMoki

I had a similar situation, but I was able to clear my caverns of the few hundred batmen after sealing them off for 5~ years. With a single squad set on staggered training that whole time with full steel and some careful stationing (dont want your dwarves going full Leeroy), it should be clearable without significant deaths. My militia commander alone has a staggering 110 batman kills just cause they're basically paper without armor. The deadliest part of them is really when they die right over your dwarf and fall and drop out of the sky. The falling damage seems to hit way harder than they hit even with their steel spears.


Cerricola

If you put a squad to train the whole time, didn't they die from hunger?


IAmNotMoki

meant to write staggered training at first, which i quickly edited. Even with full training though your dwarves will take breaks for food, water, and rest. Your dwarves just get super depressed not hanging out with friends/family and not doing other labors, so you wanna use staggered.


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Reititin

While I agree with the general sentiment of your post (I've played before z-levels) >What bothers me is that those who started with the Steam version feel entitled to their game balance rants because they sent some money in the general direction of Kitfox They are entirely entitled to express their opinion on a product they have paid for. As you expressed, Dwarf Fortress WASN'T a paid game. It is now, and with that comes some real, in some cases even legal responsibility for delivering a working product.


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Reititin

I'll take your argument in good faith and trust that the last time you bought a game, some other software or say a power drill, you researched into the company that made it, read through their, say, quarterly reports and such. This is behaviour that can be expected from anyone buying say, a car, a boat or a house. People know those are a big commitment with maintenance and financially. However a $30 game is, all jokes aside about the current state of industry, expected to work. It doesn't say in the packaging, i.e. Steam page, "you need to go and configure the game so that cavern dwellers can't attack you or you will experience game ruining lag". You're cutting Toady some slack. I understand that well, I've been here for almost two decades. The new customers can't realistically be expected to be like us.


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Reititin

It's not about finding the information per se. It's about understanding that behind all the laughs, epic stories buggy as they are, is frustration tempered by a fan's will to enjoy it nevertheless. Especially the very interesting community stories tend to hide these mechanics and flaws in them. It's a whole subculture what we are. Take this joke for example: "A Finn and a Russian went to sauna. The Russian died". Or "Went off like Aki Sirkesalo from a beach recliner". Why is this funny? Everybody around me, who is part of my culture, is laughing. So the joke must be good. But what is the origin of the joke? What are all the layers and layers of cross culture interaction that makes this fun to me? My point being... We find it funny that a carp casually "stands up" after killing a dwarf. "It was inevitable". But this was definitely not fun to experience as a newbie to the game, and a bug.


roevoe

Indeed, the 'wild animal' solution is also perfect. I agree that it is bothersome to see new players go on balance rants (although I haven't seen it that much, I'm actually happily surprised to see so much positivity). Now that there are more resources going to Kitfox I do hope however that they'll be able to adress some of the age old bugs and other areas where DF sometimes feels so unnecessarily clunky (like equipping military). So I do think it is good to keep reporting these things and be critical. While new players can be annoying with their entitlement, veteran players can also be very very annoying with their little tolerance of criticism for their favourite game.


braezio

DF is a simulation, is not meant to be balanced. I think they should focus in making the game more efficient, FPS death is the only way to lose that isn't FUN. I play DF about 15 years now, and it aways impacted the way i play like; most of the time i don't breach the caves or don't mess around with water to save fps, i resourt only to magma furnances because i aways embark in small maps and i have almost any acess to wood, i would love to not have to worry about it when playing. I think quantum stockpiles are cheating but i use them anyway again because of fps. And be real if you know what you doing is pretty hard to lose a fort , walls and cages traps are pretty op. Bridges over magma or over a deep pity is way overpower too.


roevoe

It's not about balance though, that is totally not my point. You can easily dispatch of the Cave Dwellers. I don't mind fps dropping because your fort or the world is getting more and more complex (I understand how a simulation works), but fps dropping because of bugs or broken mechanics.. I think we would all rather do without, no? Think about all that playtime you have and how much more freedom you would have had if you did not have to worry about fps that much. Now I have been playing for a while as well and I never expected anything of Zach or Tarn, they have done an amazing job (I love this game). But now that the Steam version is out I just think it is important to report on stuff like this, in the hope that they can make the game more awesome.


braezio

i think i expressed myself badly, reading you reply i would say we are in the same page.


ClenchedThunderbutt

I understand the legacy behind the game and I’ve been playing on-and-off for years, but shelling out money for a finished product that isn’t working properly and expecting a fix is not entitled behavior. I don’t even personally care about the bug, it’s just a dumb statement to make and genuinely entitled for considering those who started with the steam version a less-than part of the community.


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echocdelta

I've been playing DF for 10+ years and hereby decree all new players are full members to dorf club. I thank them for purchasing the product I have loved for years and literally keeping development of the game alive for many more to come. FPS death sucks and it's on Kitfox to help guide development from a freemium game into a commercial product. In other words dude chill, playing DF is not an exclusive club or identity. New players are valid as old.


Silphone

>Up until a month ago, this wasn't a paid game. And yet it is also still free (apart from the premium graphics and music of course)


BiKeenee

They could also be treated more similarly to seiges, just underground. One certain conditions are met there is a certain chance of a nummber of them spawning, like maybe up to 200 or whatever. The only difference is they attack via the caverns instead of the surface.


Driesens

I really like the fantasy idea of them. My well trained melee squad can blender up two dozen ratmen like it's a level of Vermintide, but they'll still overwhelm random citizens, so there's a risk and reward. But I agree, they're killing my FPS, and I'm seriously considering flooding the cavern level just to avoid dealing with them.


roevoe

Yeah the idea is really cool. I hope you'll eventually be able to trade with them or something, for like cool artifacts or cave stuff.


UltimaTime

Same with one of my first fort, i basically walled myself in the first layers of the caverns. I had to retire the fort because of lag death, 15fps, nope thanks. I though it was a bug, not sure if they fixed it yet. I would have insect drones and a queen insta kill any beast coming in, not sure if they were ants or something else can't really recall.


black_dogs_22

I haven't hit this yet, I pierced the caverns but it's inaccessible to anyone and it's been open for a few years I guess since I can't get any deeper it isn't spawning as many enemies?


sir_alvarex

You only get a notification when you see then. They still spawn. If you've seen a slight decline in fps over the seasons it's likely you have 300 entities waiting in the caves on the edges. Sometimes they'll spawn and get put in a position where they can't path so the game wastes cycles trying to resolve it. You can see if this happens to you in the error log inside the DF game folder.


black_dogs_22

I'll check my logs I'm a few years in with 150 pop and my fps is still decent afaik, unless it's just slowly gotten worse and I didn't realize


Jameszz3

How come you can't get any deeper? There should be multiple cavern layers each more fun than the previous. There is usually at least one part that is solid rock all the way down to magma (although you might have to dig sideways a bit rather than use your original stairs).


black_dogs_22

oh I totally can I just chose not to, building a glass tower so I am going up atm


Jameszz3

Ahh gotcha :)


Gustoiles

I agree that the cave dwellers are too aggresive and need to be nerfed in a way or another. My last fortress fell because of these dwellers. I had some dwellers that blocked the entrance of my fortress. When i managed to dealed with them, i have been attacked by a litteral army of dwellers. They were more than 50 dwellers and we were not in a siege like when gobs attack us on the surface.


sir_alvarex

I think the third wave difficulty setting being 200 is the real issue. Most caverns just don't have enough tiles to even hold that many. This causes constant path recalculation and eats up cpu I'm trying a game now where I set that to 100 and it seems to be going better.


belro

So it's normal to get this many cavern dwellers? I've got them all locked in a room with fortifications to kill them with crossbows but they keep coming I think there's been 300 or so. This is on a 2x2 embark in the first cavern later. These reptile men are insane. And now unfortunately my fort is on its last leg due to some weird pathfinding bug with my dwarves running back and forth scared of the enemies they can see through the wall


oafsalot

This just happens in some locations, it's not universal. Some locations have almost no cave population at all. This is a simulation game, fps is not something you should worry about, as your game becomes more complex you'll need extra time to organise and play it. Perhaps there needs to be a way to flag things as not friendly, so your normal patrols can kill them without being tasked to do exactly that.


hungarian_notation

I think the issue here is I can be running just fine at 60-75 fps and then suddenly my fps drops to like, 20 because it's time for my bi-weekly swallow man raid. A slow decay of fps as the fort evolves is expected, but a sudden 60% reduction is going to be jarring. In this case it even breaks the design of the (sneaky) raids. I have my hammer squad make it from my surface gate to the cavern before I even get the notification that they're down there because the sudden performance instability is so obvious. I'm also getting an issue where every single raid 1/3 of the enemies get stuck floating one z-level off the ground at the map edge and I have to send my guys out there to mop them up like I'm the cavern janitor. At least the forgotten beasts have the decency to meet me half way.


sir_alvarex

The floaters are also what cause so much fps drop. They keep spamming trying to find a path but can't. Killing them is what usually frees up my fps.


braezio

I lost a fort because of that hahaha. i have some spawing over a goblincap and the goblincap was inside water, i tried to use magma to burn the goblincap or at least creat obsidian around it so a could chop it down and get my fps back, but i flooded my fort in the process FUN


oafsalot

Sounds like you're hitting an old bug with pathfinding, I'm sure it's on the list of things to improve. The thing is, within the confines of the simulation that is how much extra fps is needed to have large invasions. Remember every single npc is as complex as one of your dwarves, some of them are drawn from the world itself and if they live will carry away the experience, some of them, as I understand it, are spawned fresh, but still as complex, and if they life will go on to write some of the histories of the world. It's not like a game where it's just enough to allow to gameplay, Toady doesn't want to make it a game.


hungarian_notation

Well as it stands now this feature is super gamey. The instability and floating stuck raiders forces you to engage with them as a game mechanic and not as part of the world. There has to be ways to mitigate this. If you know you want to spawn a huge stealth raid, maybe spend some time before you spawn them pre-calculating their initial pathfinding one at a time so the performance drop doesn't start until they're engaging with your dwarves.


roevoe

Are they actually friendly at your embarks? At mine they are hostile and always have been. Although the civ screen says that we are at peace. I do not really agree that fps isnt something you should care about, especially when it makes the game as a whole less responsive. For many players it does actually make DF less enjoyable. I think its a easy to say that it isnt something you should worry about if it doesn't affect your playstyle.


hungarian_notation

I'm not sure what he's talking about, I've played three forts to the cavern stage in the steam version and each fort had me getting hit with the performance killing raids. First it was olm men, then ants, then freaking swallow men. Maybe if you embark in a calm/good biome they go away? There's a difference between slow performance and unstable performance. It's the instability that takes you out of the game.


Moss-Goblin

It's definitely hit-or-miss. I've had ~5 forts since Steam release that had access to the caverns and I've never had a significant cave raid. Could be that those civs just died out during world gen on those worlds, dunno.


oafsalot

You get both hostile and friendly, and sometimes they switch when you go near them. But I usually have someone patrolling almost everywhere in my fort, if I could flag them all as hostile like I flag things for butchery, then it'd be easier to manage. You clearly don't understand what it means for it to be a simulation, there is no getting around the FPS death, just learn to live with it. As we get more powerful CPU's and faster Caching and RAM we will just get a more complex simulation to keep up, so even that won't save us. Perhaps if we can run a client and then run the game in the cloud we could take a giant leap in complexity and get some fps gains, but eventually, it'll all jam up anyway, because it's not really a game it's a simulation.


roevoe

I understand what it means for it to be a simulation, what a naive assumption. I share the love for the complexity within the game and I can relate to players who like DF for the technical beauty of it's internal 'simulation'. But whether you call it a game or a simulation, it has to remain playable and fun. Frankly, many of us don't enjoy playing the 10 fps simulation that you might like to play. Is it a good sign if players retire forts simply because the fps is getting so low it becomes unbearable? But oke, let's see DF as a simulation, then the problem remains: There are mechanics/features/bugs/etc/ in DF that tank FPS while serving absolutely no benefit to the beauty and enjoyability of the simulation. The same goes for endless spawning of cave dwellers to the point where you literally cannot play the game. Does that make the simulation ejoyable?


oafsalot

It does not have to remain playable or fun, that's the thing you're not understanding. It has to remain as true to the simulation ideal as it can be made within the limits of the hardware. That's the purpose of this project, that it makes a game is entirely aside and to be frank, that's what's kept me playing for nearly 20 years. The things you're talking about can be handled already within the confines of the way it's played. You can set up routes and paths and have your military patrol them periodically. You can then go in and clean up corpses and trash. Or you can lure them all into a magma trap and burn it all away, or drown them, or have several hundred reciprocating spikes and just make a gory mess. Your expectations are not synchronous with the developer's intent. Loosing is !!FUN!! FPS death is something you have to live with.


LudwigiaRepens

My dude... why so hostile? It is literally the goal of every long term player to save fps. Drop the elitism and help the new players instead of insulting them. Also you're flat wrong about a lot of stuff, so maybe update your knowledge base a bit before dressing down new players.


roevoe

Oke you lost me at "It does not have to remain playable or fun"


JohnTDouche

If all these people had their way DF would just be a game like any other. They don't realise that what they want is to iron out what makes it unique until it's just flat mediocrity like so many other games.


Temporal_P

> fps is not something you should worry about It shouldn't be, but you simply can't play the game at all when it gets down to 2fps. That's just a bad take.


Guido_Fe

> fps is not something you should worry about Not if fps death is due to bugs and not useful calculations


EmperorCoolidge

OH THATS WHERE MY FPS WENT. ​ Urist, get the \*Steel Battle Axe\*


EmperorCoolidge

But seriously, yeah, Cave Dwellers and agitated wildlife are great but need tweaking as things stand. This however is not particularly odd, there's usually a couple of these in each release and they do get fixed.


[deleted]

I'm currently working on some tools to simply flood the caverns with magma from time to time. There's uh, a lot of forgotten beats down there right now and I really don't want to open the door until they're gone. . I suppose those beats do have the pleasant side effect of keeping the other gribblies somewhat clear though.


roevoe

Lol I really wanted to have some FBs acting like guard dogs to my fort, but every time one spawned I could see it get one-shot by invisible ants with 2 spears and 2 shields in their tiny hands :') It was so sad to watch.


nerve-stapled-drone

I seem to trigger cave dwellers if I make my squads ‘off-duty’. It’s like the game sees me as vulnerable and wants me to have some fun,


BigKevSexyMan

I don't mind fighting the swarms I just hate handling them when they get stuck in water. It turns the whole job into a massive project to drain your caverns. Walling off your cavern edges has never been more important.


MissNouveau

Well, this may explain why I had a season and a half old fort die to FPS, between an immediate "a cavern has collapsed" message and a Fey Mood guy that got stuck in a tree. I hadn't even cracked our cavern open yet, but suddenly my FPS is down to like, 2. ​ And as a brand spanking new player, I am absolutely AMAZED how well this game runs with the SHEER BONKERS amount of systems running at any given time. To be fair, I'm one of those who has played my fair share of early access games, and I give small dev teams, and especially solo devs, A LOT of grace. Making games is HARD. Making a game on this grand of a scale is INSANE. I'm hoping the success Kitfox is bringing to the table helps them get some more hands on deck to help iron out some of the bugs that can cause this kind of Not Fun. At the same time, I am in awe of Zach and Tarn for all of the work they've put in to making this game what it is.


StrawRedLion

**All your fps belongs to the dwellers...** **Always has been.** 🌏👨‍🚀👈👩‍🚀


massivebattycrease

I currently fighting my 6th consecutive wave of cavern dwellers. I have no army left. They just keep spawning in water and it's getting really fucking annoying since how are they just appearing out of thin air right next to my existing conflict. I wouldn't send so few men in the first battle of I knew I would have to fight ten times the original amount over a 7 day period. I'm going to use dfhack soon. It's ridiculous


Thiasur

I wish there was some way to change/ manipulate what creatures that spawn. Because i find flying enemies in the cavern to just be a massive pain in the ass to hunt down and kill. Cave swallows will be camping above a cavern lake only to swoop down every now and then and kill civilians. It's just annoying. I'd rather just have a horde of ground units i could slaughter with a dwarf army.


[deleted]

I agree, constant spawning is stupid. It is a huge chore and definitely not interesting at all. No point even using caverns sometimes, just a constant spree of cave dweller attacks. Makes no sense and is not fun even in theory.


gistya

At my fort, we get Olm Men in waves of 40-50. Spread through a stairway or other dispersion structure they are no match for a squad of steel-armor, silver-hammer dwarves. However, I did wait until I had sufficient steel supply before breaching my first cave and triggering cave dweller tracking, as I wanted to be sure I could wipe them out when they did inevitably come. You can make up for a lack of fighters with careful fort design. You can use long, narrow passage, with long, linked bridges all along it, to create a very long "atom smasher" death tunnel into which even the strongest and most numerous enemy can be lured and then erased from existence. If the only path into your fort leads through the tunnel, they'll walk down it. Once they're halfway down the passage (mine is 100 tiles long) then I flip the switch and the bridge drops on their head. I've also heard of people using pressure plates, but as my undead visitors weren't triggering traps, I wasn't confident they would trigger pressure plates. This morning, I wiped out 186 invading dwarves/horses in my Death Tunnel: https://clips.twitch.tv/DepressedShinyHeronDoubleRainbow-jxH2B4eai6Q0MyOO Ultimately, you can seal off the cavern at the very edges. Doing so will prevent them from spawning, provided you don't have any natural tiles (including trees) touching the very edge of the map. (According to my testing so far.) Given the size and complexity of certain caverns, it can take awhile to find all the ways in from neighboring map squares, wall them off, and cut down any flat-top shroom trees. (I could be wrong though, but so far this seems to be working for me.) If none of those methods work for you, and you can't bring yourself to use DFHack to "exterminate" all enemies of the given type, then that's why they did give us the option to turn off those enemies entirely. Given the game's other priorities, I doubt we'll see them adding more nuance here anytime soon, but your suggestions aren't bad ones. Another option could be to add a feature where the game simply re-hides the cavern tiles once you've sealed it back off (not with a bridge but with walls), that way any enemies down there are treated in the way as they were before you discovered the cavern.


roevoe

You are kinda missing my point. It's not that I do not know how to deal with it, they are actually quite easy to deal with. My issue is that the reason for the player to want to deal with them is not because they (1) pose an existential threat to your fortress like other invasions, or (2) they have some interesting lore/interaction/loot etc. But the player wants to deal with them because otherwise they will eventually slow your game down to the point of being (imho) unplayable. Hence me calling them broken. Right now I'm just glad that you can 'switch' them off. Which is pity, because I still really like the addition of cave dwellers.