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[HatfieldCW]

A lot of my mid-game time and effort is spent on exploratory mining, and all that digging through all those z-levels uglies up my map and turns my nice fort into a rabbit warren of random tubes that I can neither plan around nor put to good use.  I'd like very much to see some way of finding stuff without chewing into it accidentally.  Obviously, external utilities like Reveal can do this, but an in-game function would be sweet.

Either a dwarfy skill, an item, a process or some facet of magic could be used, but the end result, I think, should be the ability to designate a region on the map and have your little guys go about estimating and predicting and divining just what's there.  It could be used to extrapolate the edges of an aquifer or magma pipe, thus dodging all the "hot stone!  wet stone!" interruptions, or it could be used to gaze deep into the planet's crust and spy the good ores and possible Fun, or just used to find the extent and direction of a vein, revealing Magnetite like the discovery of a magma pool shows all the magma.

[Granite26]

Try the search function, this has been suggested many times before:
12 3

[HatfieldCW]

Those sixteen-month-old links do not seem to work, and the search I performed immediately prior to starting this thread was no more useful, since relevant keywords are either largely absent or abundant in unrelated posts.  Since you have such a keen understanding of the topic, perhaps you could bottom-line it for me:  Is this in the works or somehow unfeasible?  Are there compelling ideological reasons for the feature to be left out, or will it be incorporated into some new feature set?  Has it been discussed using terminology that I hadn't tried in my searches?  Is there a good reason that you replied with a flippant and useless quote that's over a year old?  Is it late at night, making me cranky and ornery?  We may never know!

[Capntastic]

It has been discussed at length before.

And for what it's worth, Toady talked about it a bit in the podcast we recorded last night.

[HatfieldCW]

Thanks, Capn.

[Granite26]

My apology, I should have checked the links... The links are to the old forums

1 is one...

Basically, it's usually discussed as geology or prospecting

[Sunken]

Now, at the very least, those searching for "dowsing" will find their way to searching for "prospecting"...

[Silverionmox]

A way to solve this problem is to have less, broader and longer veins. You wouldn't find as much random ones when digging rooms, but once you found a big one it would last quite a while. Random specks could still occur, of course.