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[Apegrape]

I have NEVER, EVER found a single cave river, cave pond, or HFS chamber. And I've been playing since version 31 or something.
How can I increase my chances of finding these? I know that I can use the site-finder, but they show up far into the mountain or something.

[Phazer]

pregenerated worlds/seeds if you really want a good location otherwise spamming create a new world and search in each of em is a good idea too

[Musluk]

Gen a lot of worlds, play with the world gen and hope for the best. By default, HFS, cave rivers/pools and caves mostly form only on mountain tiles, thus crippling your log income. If you can eke out till the first autumn, you can live by imported tower caps. Or make a tower cap farm underground. You'll need an underground pool, and to, like, devote a FULL z level for it, though, tower caps grow slow. Farming underground will be easy with an undergrond river too. But mountains mostly don't have sand or arable soil, so you have to either hack some of your tiles to be sand, or muddy them and hope some grow trees/bushes then turn to sand. even a 1x1 sand tile works for sand gathering, anyway. And instead of checking every tile if they did turn into sand, just try to build a dirt road (b-O). Enlarge it and hover over your muddied rock field. If it's light green, it's sand.

You can try looking for underground water pools AND rivers, or underground rivers. Try genning medium or large worlds, small worlds have lesser chance of containing a tile with all of the fun stuff.

[Mephansteras]

In the init options you can set whether or not underground features are visable on the embark screen. I just have that enabled and tell my world-gen to show me them, then I can easily find a decent spot. Or an 'interesting' one, depending on what I'm going for.

[Kanddak]

You can use your init options to make all features visible on the embark screen.

You will quickly note that HFS, cave water, and chasms appear only (not mostly) on mountain tiles... and that every region tile that appears as a mountain has each of those things somewhere.
Caves can appear anywhere, and each region tile with high enough volcanism to have an igneous extrusive layer has a magma vent and a magma pool.

To get better odds at finding the combination of features you want, you can max out your elevation x and y variance in worldgen, and set minimum and maximum elevations closer to 300 (the threshold for a tile becoming a mountain.
This will give you a lot of tiny mountain ranges with more accessible perimeters, instead of a few giant ones where most of the region tiles are on the inaccessible interiors.

[Apegrape]

Thanks for all the tips, guys. I've set the options in the init file to show 'em, but as I said, they're either buried so that it'd be like finding a needle in a haystack, or simply too far into the mountains to be embarkable. Remember, mountains=lots of z-levels=lag=unfun times.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm...shouldn't be too hard. I can usually find a spot with at least one of those features bordering a good forest/swamp/whatever pretty quickly. Getting all of them (or some of them with other features, like sand or limestone) can be tricky. But just getting, say, an underground river shouldn't take more then going around the edges of a mountainous area.

[Murphy]

Try increasing elevation X- and Y-variances a lot. That should give you lots of narrow mountain chains to delve into and look for features close to non-mountain tiles.