Topic: Permafrost v6.2: A parameter set for hard embarks! (Read 1364 times)

NordicNooob · « **on:** May 16, 2020, 12:42:47 pm »

Permafrost V6.2

Behold! My greatest work!

It's made to be the most brutal environment possible, designed mostly around getting a high amount of evil glaciers.

Key features:

Large number of evil glacier biomes maximizes your chances of getting reanimating/thralling embarks.
Plains exist in small amounts to give humans a place to stay and practice necromancy.
Dwarves almost always go extinct early on, limiting your options for population growth and making deaths much more meaningful
There is only one cavern layer, forcing you to brave dangerous wildlife just to get wood.
Ores are much rarer, meaning you'll likely have to rely entirely on goblinite and what little trade you might be able to get from the humans, supposing you can protect their merchants!

It will generate quite difficult worlds even if you just use the param set, but if you're looking for the hardest embark you can get, you'll have to delve a bit deeper. Advanced world gen has its limits, unfortunately.

The first improvement is just... having DFhack. It'll let you find specifically reanimating/thralling biomes rather than getting stuck with some benign evil biome. Don't trust its aquifer, soil, or ore finding, though. Do remember that thralling clouds cannot exist alongside evil rain, so don't try to search for both with embark finder or you'll always come up empty. Also I removed evil rain to maximize thralling clouds, so yeah.

Further into DFhack, you can use a script to get heavy aquifers: I've got drainage in a pretty small range (necessary to get the glacier/tundra ratio balanced) that doesn't permit heavy aquifers. Here is a download for a quick hack I made to do so. Just type heavy-aquifers-only into the DFhack terminal while you're in the menu that lets you choose your fort location, and it'll transform all the world's aquifers into heavy aquifers. Kudos to whoever made the light-aquifers-only script for most of the code. Whatever the help regarding it says, though, don't try to use it post-embark. It'll either crash the game (unlikely), turn the entire embark into heavy aquifer all the way down (most likely), or just remove all aquifers. It was a quick hack, okay?

Delving deeper, there's a few changes you can make to the raws.

Aquifers are the toughest thing to control with advanced world gen, so even with DFhack helping, there's still more you can do. You can go into inorganic_stone_layer and give the [AQUIFER] tag to as many types of stone as you please, which will drastically help your chances of getting more aquifers.

Most importantly, you can follow these instructions to let goblins create necromancer towers. It will have little impact on gameplay (other than the necromancers, of course), unless you decide goblin mortality should be a reasonable lifespan and not 99999999 years or something.

Setting the dwarves' [MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER] to 1 in entity_default may also marginally help get more necromancers, and will make dwarves dying out a bit more reliable as well.

The last group of changes is customization to the param set itself. There's a few things you might wish to tweak to your liking
Caverns and layer spacing is entirely personal preference: currently I have one cavern layer with high openness and a small yet reliable amount of water. This makes the embarks slightly more possible, as there is good woodcutting and, if you're doing a bare-minimum embark, a 0% chance of the caverns being dead, which would result in your highly probable death. Layers are cut down quite significantly from an ordinary world, but the world isn't super shallow; I find the depth I've set it at to be a reasonable balance between having layers to dig in while not having to trek down a 100 flight staircase to go to the magma forges.

Megabeasts are only mildly personal preference, but bear notice. Megabeasts and titans destroy civs too readily in world gen (which would prevent the !!FUN!! necromancer sieges) and are also easily captured and exploited (well, megabeasts), so I've removed them from the world. Semimegabeasts are far less destructive in world gen (also they can't be exploited very effectively), and can thus be had in reasonable amounts. I currently have 20, but I have reason to believe that the world can hold up to 200 before thing start noticeably getting destroyed.

Generating your world longer is another thing that you should consider. I have it set to generate for 1000 years, which may actually be too much, but the balance you want to achieve depends on your computer's power. Older worlds will have more necromancer towers, while younger worlds will run better. My rule of thumb is to stop world gen once it takes more than 1 second per year, otherwise your in-game FPS will suffer. Of course, that might not be too big an issue, since your forts may likely be quite small due to the lack of sources for migrants. My typical worlds are about 300 years old and have anywhere from 3-6 towers, even without making goblins capable of building them.

This is the current world I'll be embarking on:

It's a fairly solid example world, but it does notably lack reanimating/thralling areas with aquifers. I chose it for the reanimating/thralling vault with 3 towers nearby, which should be good for a hearty dose of !!FUN!! Getting back on track, however, this is what your worlds will generally look like. Rarely you may get an accepted world that lacks non-evil plains, but I suggest just rejecting those manually and trying again.

Spoiler: Params (click to show/hide)

Fleeting Frames · « **Reply #1 on:** May 17, 2020, 06:53:33 am »

Regarding heavy aquier drainage: Have you considered using PSV maps for 67 and 87 drainage; ensuring all the aquifers in the world are heavy?
It wouldn't interfere with mountains, oceans or plains though would predetermine the broad blacement of glaciers and tundras.

(I assume setting drainage all to 87 and instead randomizing temperature rather than drainage for making glaciers was considered and dismissed due humans having larger numbers - though having some evil plains for goblins would be nice for ogres.)

You can get thralling clouds alongside evil rain by embarking across two different evil regions. If you want those to both be evil glaciers, they must only touch diagonally, as otherwise they'll be merged into one.

(Instead of using dfhack to find the embarks, I also imagine you could instead use your own raws for thralling clouds, if going through raw solutions for other stuff already.)

Note that megabeasts cannot traverse oceans in worldgen. Therefore, you can multiply the number of megabeasts by adding multiple equally-sized uninhabitated islands. (Again, would require PSV or at least utilizing mesh sizes to ensure low savagery and "high" temp lands in same place.)

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Author Topic: Permafrost v6.2: A parameter set for hard embarks! (Read 1364 times)

NordicNooob

Permafrost v6.2: A parameter set for hard embarks!

Fleeting Frames

Re: Permafrost v6.2: A parameter set for hard embarks!