Just got the e-book. Very excited to learn this game. I'm having a very hard time finding a suitable site. Every time I think I've found a nice flat, aquifer-free, flux stoned, warm, forested site, I double and triple check my site, then I make preparations and embark, only to find snow all over the place. Or that the only place to carve out a fortress is a level above or below. The book doesn't seem to cover extreme elevation shifts in the walkthrough. In short I'm stuck on Chapter 2. Please help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. Using latest vanilla DF, no add-ons.
Thanks!
The snow thing is easy enough to deal with, but you need to use an advanced feature - advanced world generation. I don't like sites that freeze either, so I simply adjust minimum temperature up by 20 degrees in the world generation system. Not sure if the book explains this. The Dwarf Fortress Wiki does, however, if I'm not mistaken.
As for the drastic elevation shifts, while you are looking for an embark site, there are a few alternate views of the land that you can use. One of them is an elevation view, to show you how quickly the land changes height. A volcano will always be 9 "*" elevation shift tiles in a square. If you find a volcano of 9 "*"'s surrounded by a bunch of 0, 1, 2 numbers, it means there is a volcano on flat land, which is weird, but I find them fairly regularly. About 1 in 30 volcanos on my volcano heavy maps have them. Again, I make adjustments in the world generation settings, which change how the worlds are put together.
*note* raising volcanism on a map is said to reduce the number non-igneous layers on a map, which can cause problems if you want to have a steel industry.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Advanced_world_generation#Temperature