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[Panando]

Sometimes I prefer to play on maps which aren't very deep. I've only done minimal investigation, but what I have found is extremely useful.

First of all, I generate a world with 1 cavern layer, which is set to low density and high openness. This creates a relatively flat cavern.

Then on the created world, I use dfhack 'prospect' to investigate the depth of sites. And here's the interesting thing, most sites, and AFAIK, all sites at the coast, are between 80 and 140 z-levels deep. But when you go inland, near the mountains, you sometimes find MUCH shallowerer land, the shallow sites are normally only about 30 z-levels deep, starting at about 27 z-levels. This is all pretty inconsistent, you can have the map quite abruptly go from 140 to 30. Some maps will have quite large areas of shallow land, and others quite small areas, or perhaps none at all (but I don't know a quick way to examine the whole map - a dfhack depthmapper would be brilliant).

So far I've only examined about 4 worlds (all have been based on small island), and once I found a ~30 site, I embarked on it and played. So my conclusions above are drawn from very limited data. But the most basic conclusion is if you generate a world with 1 flattened cavern, and hunt around with 'prospect' you can quickly find sites ~30 z-levels deep. Such sites are brilliant for magma stacks, and would improve FPS significantly.

[Quietust]

There's a much easier way to do this - go into custom world generation and pick one of the "Region" templates (instead of the "Island" templates) and generate the world with the default parameters.

[Panando]

Okay so the rule is that inland is often (but not always) thin, and coastal is almost always thick.

Do you know if the game decides how thick the land is first, then scrunches everything into the available space? On a region with default settings, hunting around I eventually found sites as thin as 37-39, with those 50-60 found easily. On regions with a single flattened cavern I can easily find sites under 30, and with hunting around as low as 20. Although I've only checked about 10 worlds this would seem to imply that cavern settings do affect the minimum depth with each cavern adding approximately 8-10 z-levels, but the sample size is fairly small.

[GavJ]

No the game just makes it as thick as it needs to do do what it wants. Coasts are thick because the rock surface doesn't begin until further down in the ocean on the ocean side, so it adds that much more. Also they often have cliffs which add depth. You could do a custom painted (or perfectworld) advanced gen map however that only had 1 unit deep oceans worldwide, and boring elevation and no caverns and minimum distance between layer parameters and probably get yourself a coastal 20 deep map or something if you wanted.

[Maolagin]

There's a much easier way to do this - go into custom world generation and pick one of the "Region" templates (instead of the "Island" templates) and generate the world with the default parameters.

Are you just saying that because that way most of the map will be inland, or is there something else in those parameters that makes a difference? The cavern and layer thickness settings are the same between the Region and Island templates, I believe.

I really do wish I understood how the game uses those layer thickness settings, though. Sometimes you get a world that's barely any deeper than those layer settings would suggest. But I remember the very first world I genned in DF2012 -- a completely default medium region -- I ended up with 110 z-levels of diorite between the second and third caverns.

[Panando]

For me poking around with prospect has been very educational. On islands with one flattened cavern I would find the depth varies from 140 to about 30. Sometimes there are abrupt transitions from 'thin' to 'extremely thick', without any real corresponding change in terrain. In other words, by looking at the map, you can't predict how thick it's going to be. You can predict that at the coast it'll be normally over 80-90 deep, but inland is really unpredictable, dfhack prospect is the only way to know.

One of the curious things about mountains generally being thinner than coast is that surprisingly as one would expect Dwarf Fortress is the opposite to reality, in reality continents and mountain ranges have 'roots' which push down into the mantle (comparable to icebergs). In DF, mountains appear to be more like magma-filled zits on the face of Armok.

[GavJ]

Somebody (who isn't me ) should just go through and dfhack prospect an entire map and post the map and the overlay, and any patterns that exist would probably become blatantly obvious