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[Axecleaver]

Given Toady's recent development log update stating "...I've added metal/soil to the site finder, allowed it to mark multiple hits (one per map square), allowed you to break out of it as it is chugging along and made the aquifer readout more consistent." I'd say most bases are covered. Other than spamming worlds, I'm not really sure resurrecting my code would benefit even a decent portion of the community. If I see a gaping void pop up in the future I may be swayed otherwise.

I think Hieronymous described the problem pretty well:

Even with the new underground, I don't relish the though of having to pump magma up 50 z-levels.

In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to search for specific layers, i.e., "sand," "obsidian" "marble."

Sand and relatively easy access to magma are two criteria that many players refuse to play without.
And tefalo had a nice suggestion, too:

The 'trees' option should be able to find if there are trees or not, sort of Scarce|Woodland|Heavy in one option if that's possible to do.

The existence of utilities and mods has always been due to the players desiring more out of a game than is currently allowed, or finding certain features lacking. And this is true for all games, not just DF. Naturally, developers feel their game should go a certain direction and will prioritize certain things, while many players will wish it would go differently. This is to be expected as everyone is different as we have different ideas on what's fun and how things should be done. And we humans have an instinctual desire to explore and push the envelope.

The Location Finder as it exists in 31.18 allows for the following search criteria: Savagery, Evil, Elevation, Temperature, Rain, Drainage, Flux Stone, Aquifer, and River. Of these, the last three are Yes and No only and the rest allow choices of Low/Medium/High. And for the nitpicks among us, there is a "Design New World With Advanced Features" option. Which seems great for the most part, but of course these still do not have all the features everyone wants. (DF seems to be all about endless possibilities, after all.) Also, I'm reminded of how the Location Finder was broken in some versions. (Notably, in 31.03)

What I'm trying to say is that even if/when a metal/soil option gets added to the Location Finder, there are still things plenty of things that UltraFinder can do (assuming it was fixed) that Location Finder can't. And some of things that Location Finder can do, UltraFinder can do better. And then there's that ambitious list of "Current ideas/goals:"

- Incorporate functional, user friendly interface.
- Throw in basic error reporting.
- Turn up multiple sites within a region.
- Find sand (finally).
- Find brooks, streams, major rivers, etc.
- Find deserts, glaciers etc.
- Find oceanside locations.
- Find waterfalls.
- Find sites at crossroads.
- Find settlements (human, dwarven, elven and goblin)
- Find civs at war.
- Export screenshots of embark site screen.
- Better organization of stored regions and associated data.

I have to agree with forsaken1111 in that - even if it is embarrassingly sloppy in its current form - it would be nice if the code were shared with the community for more motivated fans to continue or learn from. At the very least, this would set a nice example to other mod/utility developers. I see some excellent ideas in this tool and I'm sure writing it was some amount time and effort (and fun) on your part. I'd hate to see all that wasted and it could be a starting point for something new and better.

PS: I've also noticed in development blogs that there are plans to add modding support. Once that is incorporated, keeping existing mods and utilities compatible and current should be a lot easier.

Edit: I see on the download page that there are 2,884 downloads for UltraFinder and of these 2,612 downloads were for version 2.8. This tells me that there were plenty of fans who found this useful and interest had grown considerably with the latest version.

[forsaken1111]

Can anyone recommend a good client for sharing code in some kind of repository? I have hosting space I can donate I just don't know what frontend to use. I don't even know if people would use it, but the option should be there.

Or we could just use google code or something

[RedWarrior0]

Pastebin is nice, I'd say.

[Slitherrr]

There's also www.github.com and git.

[Sowelu]

Wow. Didn't really expect this to pop back up. Ever. Good to know this was thought of as a nice utility in its time, though. It was really rough as guts as far as the code structure went. So rough, in fact, that I'd be embarrassed to release the code to public.

While we're bumping the topic, I'd like to say that a coder should ALWAYS strive to make non-proprietary/personal code public without shame of embarassment.  It builds character and builds good habits, and it makes you feel better about yourself.  In the "My code is good enough that other people are USING IT!" way.

[Thundercraft]

Given Toady's recent development log update stating "...I've added metal/soil to the site finder, allowed it to mark multiple hits (one per map square), allowed you to break out of it as it is chugging along and made the aquifer readout more consistent." I'd say most bases are covered. Other than spamming worlds, I'm not really sure resurrecting my code would benefit even a decent portion of the community. If I see a gaping void pop up in the future I may be swayed otherwise...

I think that, now more than ever before, a utility like this would be appreciated by a certain segment of DF fans. Since the beginning of the Caravan Arc with 0.31.19, the embark screen and site finder was drastically altered. Minerals became more scarce and some useful features which could be searched for and reported about in previous versions of DF are now gone.

The info displayed on the Choose Fortress Location screen, as of 0.31.25, are the type of Biome, the relative Temperature, the presence and density of Trees (if any), the presence and density of Other Vegetation, the Surroundings type, the presence and name of any brook or river, the types of Soil, the presence of aquifers, and the presence of Shallow and/or Deep metals. (The  Shallow and Deep metals info in particular has disappointed many who were used to the old system.)

The Site Finder will only allow the following search criteria. And searches are restricted to a few broad categories:

• X Dimension
• Y Dimension
• Savagery - Low/Medium/High
• Evil - Low/Medium/High
• Temperature - Low/Medium/High
• Rain - Low/Medium/High
• Drainage - Low/Medium/High
• Flux Stone - No/Yes
• Aquifer - No/Yes
• River - No/Yes
• Shallow Metal - None/Yes/Multiple
• Deep Metal - None/Yes/Multiple
• Soil - None/Little/Some/Deep
• Clay - No/Yes

Compare that with the functionality of UltraFinder:

What additional functionality does this have over the default finder?
-With UltraFinder, you can specify Either/Or scenarios for things like magma, unlimited water sources and underground water features.
-Stone layers (ie. sedimentary, igneous extrusive etc.) can be added to your search preferences, along with being able to select specific temperature, vegetation, tree distribution and surroundings that you would like in your site.
-For those of you wanting to turn up multiple sites (so you can pick the best of), there is a "Run Indefinately" option, which runs the finder whilst storing all matching sites into a new folder, along with a text file describing the site's contents.

And while it's now possible to find magma on all maps, as Dr. Hieronymous Alloy pointed out, "I don't relish the though of having to pump magma up 50 z-levels."

Also, several features of the Embark Finder and several goals on GFXiNXS' "Current ideas/goals" could help players significantly in finding their perfect embark site.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

- Turn up multiple sites within a region.
- Find sand (finally).
- Find brooks, streams, major rivers, etc.
- Find deserts, glaciers etc.
- Find oceanside locations.
- Find waterfalls.
- Find sites at crossroads.
- Find settlements (human, dwarven, elven and goblin)
- Find civs at war.

The ability to search for sand, alone, would be a tremendous boon to many players - esp. since it is often vital for building traps, creating valuable trade goods, or components for a magma pump stack. And it can become boring and tedious to perform countless test embarks to find that perfect site (because the Choose Fortress Location screen and Site Finder have been nerfed). Some players end up spend hours searching. And game saves just for embark locations have become really common since 0.31.19 was released. A lot of them are like this:
The perfect spot

It took me something like 15 hours to manage to create (my) perfect map spot, so i thought i would share it with you !

Sure, there is the dfprospector tool in the dfhack package, but that has very limited functionality. Those tools are run at the command prompt and were mostly made as examples of what can be done with DFHack and memory offsets. And using it is clearly cheating. Dfprospector lists the quanitity and all types mineral veins, materials, shrubs, and wood in trees on the entire map. And that's all it does. But I suspect the code in DFHack could be used to build an Ultrafinder-like utility.

[Nistenf]

I agree that this would be a very useful tool for a lot of people (including myself, of course)

[greenskye]

I do think that an updated version of this tool could potentially find a Dwarf Therapist-like following. As more and more items are generated in the world, people have more and more "requirements" for their game. It should definitely be easier to setup the perfect map.

Ideally Toady would implement this himself, however he shows little inclination for updating the UI before everything else in the game is complete. A community utility could help plug this gap.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

Not just sand. At this point, with the new metals scarcity, it wouldn't hurt to be able to search for specific metals (e.g., cassiterite), either. Or maybe for a masterwork adamantine weapon.

[Moogie]

Sad that this utility is still dead. I'd love the ability to add "volcano" to my Finder results. Like others have mentioned, I also hate the thought of pumping magma up from the bottom of the world, and prefer to embark at locations where it is more readily accessible. Doing that equals a lot of frustrating time wasted on the pre-embark map screen.

[oasis789]

Necromancer here, any chance to resurrect this utility? I've spent too many hours generating, sitefinding, embarking, dfrevealing and dfprospecting... Something like this would make my life so much easier. 

[Reganomics]

aww, i just found this utility while looking for ways to tweak 'site finder' settings.  this would be so cool!