Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Callista]

I'm having trouble figuring out how to generate a shallow world--one with fewer than 100 z-levels between sea level and magma sea level. Preferably, 40 or less.

I've looked at the worldgen cookbook thread and I'm still confused, sooo... Halp?

Here's what I've tried:
--Setting caverns to one layer
--Setting all "number of layers between" settings to 1
--Setting the allowed elevation range to the bottom half of the default range

If it matters, I'm generating pocket worlds; that's faster.

[SyrusLD]

I searched for an embark with very few z-levels for a long time until I figured out that it is not about how you generate the world (at least not entirely), but much more about the embark you chose. My current embark has only 19 z-levels between topside and the lowest stone layer (already inside the magma sea). (z-19 is the last layer containing any stone, the next layer is magma flow only.)

The way I found it was by looking on the embark screen for embark locations with very low "Relative Elevation" (hit TAB three times). This doesn't always clearly represent how many z-levels a spot has, I had some which showed as "low" but actually had many z-levels, and some which showed as "medium" but had only ~20 z-levels of ground, but it gives you somewhat of a decent idea. I even had one spot with only 15 z-levels above magma...
For world gen I used lowest settings for all "z-levels above ..." (except "... above ground") and only 1 cavern layer. Elevation variance set to 600/600 on a medium world. Unless you want specific things like I did*, finding a good embark with few z-levels shouldn't be too hard - but also not easy.



*My biggest problem was to find a low lying embark without a sedimentary layer (but still having flux stone) ... I wanted no iron on my embark, by now I saw that I still got some hematite around, just ignored it though. There is very little chance - if not none - to find a low lying embark at a vulcano. I'm pretty sure I once found a vulcano at ground level in adventure mode, but it is impossible to tell how many z-levels there were at this spot.
I was lucky, found an embark in a region around a vulcano - igneous extrusive layer! - which even had two rivers causing a nice waterfall - as one river is actually at z-level -6 - which I sadly have not yet been able to utilize. It also has sand and fire clay, and I discoverd that it has an aquifer... Pretty much has everything one can dream of. It is CONSTANTLY raining though. Like more than 95% of the year it rains.

[Callista]

I've given it a try and ended up with a 30-layer embark. Not bad. Thanks for the help. Now let's see if I get all the usual cavern fauna or not...

ETA: Well, I got a troll. That's level 2, right?

In other news, there are also elephants and carp. I kid you not.

Nowhere near as deadly as they used to be, but I'm not getting anywhere near the elephants until I have either a good animal trainer or a good army.

[SyrusLD]

The one cavern level I have has all "tree"-types from all three cavern layers.
I also set cavern openess to 100 and passage density to 0, water min to 22 and water max to 33. This way I have huge open caverns which always will have some water. Really don't like the small-passage kind of caverns.

Creature-wise I found Crundles, Hungry Heads (lots of them), Giant Cave Swallows, Giant Toads, Cave Crocodiles, Troglodytes, Gorlaks, Blind Cave Ogres, Reachers, one Giant Cave Spiders (going by the list of dead/missing), one Cave Dragon and one Troll.

Downside of having one cavern level (on a 3x3 embark) seems to be that only one (or two?) group(s) of creatures ever spawns down there. My way of getting more interesting creatures than the constant crundles or hungry heads is to have two big strips of cage traps dividing the cavern level. At some point or another everything will run into them, getting caught and causing new creatures to spawn. (An army of egg-laying crundles is a good food supply though, I must say.)

Pretty sure everything can spawn, but most of the time till now I had a bunch of hungry heads multiplying in one spot, causing no new creature group to enter the cave; ever since I devised my trap-system I had a lot more variance in what ran around down there.

Weirdly the whole floor is slowly turning into sand, I'd guess it comes from more and more trees trying to grow but failing - either because too many already occupy that spot or at other spots because the ceiling is too low. I hope that doesn't cause no trees to regrow though...

[Quietust]

First off, are you generating REGION worlds or ISLAND worlds? The latter are known to result in tall embarks, while the former tend to be more reasonable. However, I've found that this tends to be more reliable when the world size is at least SMALL - POCKET worlds tend to be too small for the geology to work out correctly in that respect.

[MobRules]

I've had the first cavern layer be anywhere from four levels down to over a hundred levels down (I was beginning to wonder if there WAS a cavern layer). It would be great to know what controls that in greater detail.

[Eldin00]

In my experience, it is large inclusions of ocean which result in embarks with a very large number of z-levels. This is why the island settings almost always create vertically tall embarks, while the region settings have a good chance at creating vertically shorter embarks (but occasionally will still create a "deep" world).

[milo christiansen]

My current fort is ~25 z from magma to surface, and the only change I made is not generating the HFS (as this world uses the First Landing mod, and HFS doesn't fit a scifi mod like that).

I think I just got lucky (or unlucky?).