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[AutomataKittay]

Also digging down at the border between embark tiles tends to avoid caverns in the first place. So for a 2x2 embark, drill straight down on one of the 4 tiles dead center (They will be 47 or 48 tiles from either a top or bottom edge. And of course 47 or 48 tiles from the left and right edges). For a default 4x4 embark, you have 9 "sweet spots" for drilling down. Or you could just pick a place at random. Drill down until you hit a cavern or the magma sea. If you hit a cavern wall up the breach tunnel sideways to get to another clear spot and resume your downward progress. It doesn't take long to reach the sea then.

My normal procedure is pretty much dead center drilling down and I almost always uses 2x2 embark, and that only gives me fifty-fifty chance each cavern of not hitting empty air. So that don't works, plus a lot of caverns I've looked in have hollow corners too. Rest of that is sound advice, though, just as much chance digging randomly.

[Garath]

As mentioned, it's not that hard to quickly go down to build magma forges. It just takes some extra effort to get all the metal and ores down there, but it's worth it. Meanwhile, it doesn't require that many trees to get you started in metal. It's not like you're going to be melting 100 pieces of ore this early