Game time vs real time

[Isolated Matrix]

I'm not sure if anyone's asked this before, but when people speak about bugs and slowdowns and other issues, they either say 'in x+ hours' or 'in a x-year old fort'.

How long does a year in-game take in real time, approximately? I can't play the game for a while—waiting for them to release the Mac version—so I have no idea about how things scale in DF. Or is there a time speedup mechanic, which might make this question a bit difficult to answer...?

[Empath demon]

Well it's a turn-based game and you really do need to pause often to play I think. And the speed time passes is based on FPS so time "slows down" as your fort grows. I guess maybe a couple hours might be a year in a medium sized fort of 100-150? It's really hard to say though, it can be a lot longer too.

[malthenielsen]

It's more like there's a slow-down mechanicm, the pause button.

Nearly eveything you do, you can choose to not care about the details then it takes a few seconds, or you can choose to care, and then it can take 15 minutes or an hour.

[Fletch]

See the wiki article on the subject: Time[dwarffortresswiki.org] . One dwarf fortress "year" = 403200 ticks (frames).

Depending on the (internal, not graphical) framerate performance of your fort (FPS), the wiki article gives these equivalences:

At 100 FPS: 1 day = 12 sec ; 1 month = 5 min 36 sec ; 1 year = 1 hour 7 minutes 12 seconds
At 60 FPS: 1 day = 20 sec ; 1 month = 9 min 20 sec ; 1 year = 1 hour 52 min
At 30 FPS: 1 day = 40 sec ; 1 month = 18 min 40 sec ; 1 year = 3 hour 44 min

Note that the words "Frame" and "Tick" are interchangeable in this context.

For a very poor performing fort at 8 FPS, it will take 14 real-world hours to pass 1-year in game, as compared to a little over 1 hour for a good performing fort at 100 FPS.

[Nautilus]

If you max out your fps at 1000 you can get a year in just under 7 minutes

[TPark]

Those times are for the game unpaused. During play, you pause the game to set things up. So actual real time vs game time will vary depending on what you are trying to do. I don't speed my game up past 100 fps, so the minimum time for me to play an in-game year would be the 1 hour 7 minute figure. But I think it's usually more like 2 or 3 hours.

[Isolated Matrix]

Yeah, i expect it's similar to a Paradox game in that sense. Thank you for that!