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[Sheylos]

Alright after some time of playing this wonderful game i am interested in playing in some more varied and crazy worlds. My question is how the heck you would go about making for example a half frozen world dotted with volcanoes the other half being maybe an evil forest with killer unicorns and other weird wild beasts? I guess maybe the better question i should ask is if there is a guide somewhere on how to make custom worlds.

[Duuvian]

You can set volcano number to the max of 200 and it will not cause worldgen to fail in a near default worldgen recipe.

Many times changing things like adding too many squares of one type will result in the worldgen to fail so it's a good idea to copy one of the default worldgen options. You can increase the minimum number of evil squares though. For a half frozen world I don't know, I leave the temperature alone.

I usually copy the large or medium island defaults. Region instead of island will slightly limit things like volcanos on tiny islands in the oceans especially if you set partial edge oceans lower but island is my preference. I then set megabeast and semi mega caves very high, in the hundreds. I add a lot of normal caves. I increase the minimum number of deserts in the hope of a sweet sand and clay embark somewhere. I increase the number of civilizations to offset the mega and semi megabeast caves and cave civilizations. I might do some other changes like increase a site's population cap on a medium size worldgen. Lately I generate worlds to the year 2014 because it helps me think of relatively how old dwarves are and such without having to do math and or what dwarf year it is.

I then start worldgen and if the living entity number outpaces the dead entity number too much I cancel and fiddle with the worldgen settings. My goal is to keep the population low through megabeasts, under 10k difference from the dead. I think it makes the world generate faster but I haven't done any science on it.

[Bralbaard]

This utility should give you better control over what kind of world you generate, there is probably some helpful advice in that forum topic as well:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=57428.0

Heightmaps (and maybe other maps?) can be imported from image files, so with some effort it should be possible to create worlds with two very different sides. There are a lot of parameters and things to fiddle with though, so getting it right might take some time.

[vjek]

Alright after some time of playing this wonderful game i am interested in playing in some more varied and crazy worlds. My question is how the heck you would go about making for example a half frozen world dotted with volcanoes the other half being maybe an evil forest with killer unicorns and other weird wild beasts? I guess maybe the better question i should ask is if there is a guide somewhere on how to make custom worlds.

That's certainly possible.  If you have a specific set of requirements, feel free to post them in this thread, and myself and others will do their best to provide an ideal world & embark.

However, to answer your question specifically, you'd reduce the temperature range to -75/75, increase volcanism to handle however many volcanoes you want, and increase good and evil values for the region sizes that are typical in your world.  Region sizes vary based on elevation, temperature, and biome features, and can be customized based on Variance range.  Put simply, the higher the Variance, the smaller the regions, if the combinations are sufficiently aligned.

Currently, to the best of my knowledge, there is no utility or tool that previews Evil biome effects (such as blood rain, doom clouds, re-animation, husking, zombie-fication, spawned Corpses, etc) prior to embark.  As such, if you truly want specific types of undead, a bit of trial and error is required at the moment.  This world, though, has much of what you're describing, so you can examine it to see what parameters were changed.

As far as a guide goes, the wiki has some details.

Finally, keep in mind any world that generates with rejections will NOT reproduce, cross-platform.  This only matters if you intend to share your worldgens, or are using other peoples worldgens.  If there is even one rejection on a world generated in Windows, it will not be the exact same world that appears in Linux or OS X, for example.