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Low Population Tweaks
Description Discussions0 Comments17 Change Notes
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balance, difficulty, tweak, entity
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2 Feb, 2023 @ 5:02am
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Dapper Raptor
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Low Population Tweaks

Description
Tweaks a number of values in the game to balance the experience for smaller population forts.

This is useful if you are keeping your population lower to manage fps issues, or just like to be able to track your dwarfs more easily in a smaller group. Current values are balanced around a population cap of about 80 with a strict cap of 120 (compared to 200 and 220 as the default) and aims to offer a similar progression curve as the base game.

You could also use it with the default cap to just have things start happening earlier!

  • Mayor, Captain of the Guard and Dungeon Master now become available at 35 dwarfs, instead of 50
  • Monarchs demand 40% less
  • Population numbers at world gen lowered by about 20%, as well as site populations cut by about the same
  • Goblins will now start to visit your fort at a population of 20 rather than 50

Additionally, event triggers for sieges that are tied to populations have been lowered by one tier. In most cases this takes the population at which sieges start from a default of 80 to 50, though this does depend on your difficulty settings.

Questions

Q: Is the mod compatible with <insert mod here>?
A: It should be compatible with most mods, but it will not be compatible with any that make changes to the default civilisations in the entity_defaults.txt (so - dwarfs, elves, humans, goblins and kubolds). Unfortunately there's no way to edit default civs without replacing their entire section in that file. A mod that ADDS new entries to it will work, but not any that change it.

Q: Can't you just do this via difficulty settings?
A: Some of it yeah... but you have to set them up every single time you start a new fortress... which is pretty annoying tbh. Also, you can't change the population limit that triggers the mayor and other nobles like this mod does.

Q: Er... I have more than 80/120 dwarfs with this mod. What gives?
A: The mod doesn't actually cap your population - you do that through the in-game settings (Settings > Game > Population Cap and Strict Population Cap)... This mod aims to bring the same sort of progression-per-dwarf that you get with the default settings if you lower the caps to about 80/120.

Q: I have 35 dwarfs but no mayor... YOUR MOD IS BROKEN AND I WANT A REFUND
A: Nah... the way DF works you become eligible for a mayor (and by extension, captain of the guard, etc.) once you hit the population defined. So once you hit 35 you will get a mayor when the next election period happens.

Q: Why does the Messenger noble description say something about testing if the mod works.
A: Yeah... that's my bad... Because you have to get a fortress to 35 dwarfs to even start to see any of this mod working I added in a little thing to make sure it was loaded... I forgot to remove it. I'll remove it whenever I update the mod but in the meantime it doesn't change anything else. There was only placeholder text there before anyway.

Q: Can you make it so that migrant waves are smaller? After a few waves I'm already at the cap...
A: Unfortunately not. I'd love to change this too but as far as I know this isn't exposed for modding currently.
17 Comments
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Мир 4 Nov, 2024 @ 5:33pm 
Было бы замечательно, спасибо за мод.
Dapper Raptor  [author] 23 Oct, 2024 @ 8:41am 
@Trapito222 I haven't played Dwarf Fortress in about a year at this point. I think you could do it pretty easily with a similar method to this mod as goblins are just one of the other races outlined in the entities, so you could probably just tweak those values, but I don't really know for sure. I've been considering firing up the game again recently - if I do so then I'll take a look but no promises I'm afraid
ึ ึ ึLigma9281 ึ ึ 23 Oct, 2024 @ 8:03am 
Can you make a mod that limits goblin population so goblin fortresses are not so laggy?
Illustrious Illusionist 28 Apr, 2023 @ 10:32am 
If you think you could find the specific lines, that'd be great. I definitely don't mind modding the raw entities files myself - I've done it before, to make modded workshops available in other modded civs - I just usually have trouble finding which lines are doing the thing in the first place.
Dapper Raptor  [author] 24 Apr, 2023 @ 7:08am 
@IllustriousIllusionist - Unfortunately the only way to do this mod, currently, is via editing the entities. There's been a bunch of talk by Putnam about making some changes to the raw files, so maybe this will change in the future, but unfortunately its not possible any other way at the moment.

You could look into the mods you are using as they will likely have similar entries to what vanilla_entities have with all the same values that I changed in this mod - so you could look at their files, find their entry for whatever races there are, and set all the values to similar ones that I used in this mod to get the same result with the custom races. That's about the only solution I see for that currently though. Its been a while since I made the mod, so if you want specific lines that I edited... let me know and I'll take a look and work it out again haha
Illustrious Illusionist 22 Apr, 2023 @ 1:25pm 
Hi there - do you know if there's a setting I can adjust in the files to get only the 20% population redux? This is a great mod and I've enjoyed using it, but it conflicts with a couple of other mods that require vanilla_entities to be removed. Which is not your fault and I appreciate you making this mod for folks like us! But if I can do a bit of fiddling in the background to achieve both, I'd like to.
Dapper Raptor  [author] 21 Apr, 2023 @ 3:31pm 
@达特DHAT That should be possible. You'd really just need to change the same values that I did for this mod and set them all to 7. You would likely want to change a bunch of the difficulty settings to ensure enemy attacks aren't too big I guess, but that aside you should be able to do it :)
DHAT 20 Apr, 2023 @ 11:02am 
My man, thanks for this. I'm one that always play with a very low cap since I like to play it super slow and aesthetic instead of min-max.

Plus less dwarves means I form a bond and actually care for them.

I was wondering if there is a way to make a similar mod that gets rid of pop caps all together and just base the events on time or wealth itself. As in, everything can occur with 7 dwarves or more. In that way you can play with whatever population you like and the game would have all events and situations.

Do you think that is possible? I might research and try doing it.
Dapper Raptor  [author] 10 Feb, 2023 @ 1:35am 
@Dembeor I tried selecting it first yeah, and when it didn't work I consulted the discord and got feedback that the entity entries can't be selected unfortunately, only cut and re-added. This was also confirmed at one point by Putnam (who now works on the game officially) so... hopefully it will change in the future but right now mods can only add new entries for the entity file, not change it sadly.
Dembeor 10 Feb, 2023 @ 1:28am 
Hey, kudos for the mod! I found test msg on messenger and got bothered enough to comment. :steamhappy: Did you test if just SELECTing Mountain entity and setting secondary (lower) pop required BEFORE or AFTER could be used instead of rewriting whole file?