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[Moogie]

Am I the only one who finds worldgenning nigh impossible to figure out? Not just in my latest attempt, but every single time I've tried to mess with the settings. I've looked over all the wiki help, all the threads here in the forum, but nothing helps. Nothing I do seems to change the outcome.

I just want a fairly balanced world (with healthy populations of humans/elves/dwarves) but with slightly more deserts than usual. After an hour of changing everything and getting endless rejects every time, I've given up. I beg someone to take pity on me and gen the type of world I'm looking for, please? I just can't figure it out.

The main problem is "Initial desert square count fails by -1XXX" (how am I supposed to fix that? Disabling minimum desert squares ends up in a world covered in forests!) but I also get huge areas of ocean/water even though I've done EVERYTHING to disable ocean regions/squares and make the minimum world elevation above sea level.

Is it really that hard to get a few more deserts, without turning the entire world into an uninhabitable wasteland with no living civilizations? Also, I don't want half the map covered in water, but apparently that too is impossible even though all my "minimum squares" are set to "none", as are all the ocean region/subregion settings. Tell me how the world is making oceans when it's set to specifically not have any oceans! >_<

Ugghhh. This drives me to madness. I wish the "worldgen cookbook" had a proper list of "recipes" that I could just copy.

[XSI]

I'm not very familiar with world gen, but I think there are more settings for oceans, such as a parameter that says a world needs 2 oceans at it's edge or more.

You may want to look through those a bit more, that's the best advice I have.

[Knight Otu]

Try the following for increased desert presence:

In the Rain Mesh Size options, use anything from 2 x 2 to 8 x 8. Set the Rain Weighted Range (0 - 20) to 10 or thereabout, and the Minimum Number of (Mid/Low/High)-Rain Squares to None.

And the following to get rid of oceans (you'll still get lakes):

Set the Minimum Elevation to 100. Set Minimum Edge Oceans, Minimum (Initial/Final) Ocean (Squares/Region), and the Minimum Number of (Mid/Low/High)-Elevation Squares to None.

Watch the remaining rejection log messages and nullify problematic options as needed - I find that it helps to get rid of all of the Minimum Number of (Mid/Low/High)-(Option) Squares options at the end of the worldgen options.

[Moogie]

Thanks for the tips. I'm more frustrated with myself than anything else, as all the options seem so touchy that you have to pay very close attention to the numbers. It's not a failing of the game itself, just annoying that it's an ordeal of trial-and-error to generate a viable world with specific characteristics.

[Asmodeous]

I found the WorldGen Cookbook thread to be very helpful, it also has a link in it to a thread about figuring out the parameters that also helped a great deal.

One of those two threads (I think the cookbook?) has a good taking off point for a desert world you might look into.

[Chrispy]

Also, the world-gen will shift all of the tiles up or down some if it finds they are unbalanced, so if you want to get rid of oceans, decrease rainfall, and increase altitude variance.

[Grimlocke]

Also, the world-gen will shift all of the tiles up or down some if it finds they are unbalanced, so if you want to get rid of oceans, decrease rainfall, and increase altitude variance.

I never had this, unless your talking about erosion?

Setting minimum elevation to 100 allways neatly eleminated all oceans for me, if you cant fix your woes without those two topics, maybe you should post your parameter set.

[Moogie]

Also, the world-gen will shift all of the tiles up or down some if it finds they are unbalanced, so if you want to get rid of oceans, decrease rainfall, and increase altitude variance.

I never had this, unless your talking about erosion?

Setting minimum elevation to 100 allways neatly eleminated all oceans for me, if you cant fix your woes without those two topics, maybe you should post your parameter set.

Setting it at 100 minimum did indeed help; previously I was trying much lower numbers. But then I was getting an excess of mountains, so I set the maximum a bit lower, and then the game complained about not being able to place enough peaks, so I nulled that out too but there's still a lot of mountain coverage...

I think the main concept I didn't realise before is that it's okay to allow the world to ignore certain reject types. I was under the impression that this was very bad, would leave me with a lifeless world. Turns out it's not as bad as I thought, and allowing rejections must be a common thing with custom worlds.

The problem with the cookbook thread is that the 'recipes' are spread out over its pages instead of condensed into the first post. There's a lot of discussion to follow if you want to understand what types of world are being posted in response to various requests.

The parameter thread is helpful in explaining what they do, but not how interdependant the numbers are. It explains in general terms without being very specific.

For example:

Minimum Rainfall: Sets the minimum (possible?) rainfall value in the world.  I don't know if it's guaranteed that this value will exist somewhere in the world.  This is used to create biome information.  Areas with high rainfall tend to turn into either forest or marsh, depending on drainage.

This tells me in basic terms what might happen, but doesn't give me any idea on the scale of the numbers or what its relationship is with drainage that causes forests and marshes to appear and in what volume. (In this case I can figure that last part out with a little common sense, but it's still a trial-and-error process with no clear value ranges to work with.)

If I had the time and patience for it, I'd create my own FAQ to solve just these issues, as just complaining about it isn't very helpful, I know. I just get the general impression that most people deal with worldgen without so many problems, and that there's some big secret to it that I've yet to discover. But then it might just be the rejection thing, which I must admit has been the single most helpful discovery so far.

[Ankheg]

The tables at the end of this wiki page shows pretty clearly what the relations are: http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Biome