I'm new to adventure mode, but having run a few failed, and then one moderately successful fortress, I felt like kicking down a dungeon door or two.
But I've either run into a bug, or I'm REALLY dense, because, well, I can't seem to locate any towns, get any quests, or trade with any merchants. Which sort of takes some of the fun out of adventuring, as you might imagine.
I created a character from the same dwarven kingdom as my big fortress. I then started on the outskirts of a dwarven fort, and once I figured out that the cliff was down, not right, I wandered in and had a look around.
Everyone, *including the merchants* tells me to go find a merchant to trade. The Mayor is not interested in "Service".
So I wandered across country, and a few characters later (alligators, leopards, and (sob) a gazelle), I realized that the asterisks on the main map were settlements.
But the human settlements seem to consist solely of a patch of land with a piece of trampled dirt (road?) across the centre, and about a dozen humans wandering around. The one merchant I have found was uninterested.
This is true of each of 6 or so settlements I've tested.
Have I just been extremely unlucky, and run into an antimaterialist tribe of nomadic hunter-tramplers? Or possibly I'm missing a magic key? (I use '>' to go from main map to settlement)
I built the world and played using 0.21.104.21b, but after having these problems I upgraded to 0.21.105.21a, by copying the save folder over into the new game directory.
Okay, I'm prepared: Make me feel really, really dumb