Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Noin]

Hail, fellow dwarf-herders!

I've got a question about caverns, as you might understand from the topic subject )

It's my first successful fortress (in first two I had problems with food and water, especially at winter, which eventually led to starvation and dying of dehidration dwarves). I have a strong argiculture, steel and glass-making industries and three squads of dwarves equpped with masterwork steel weapons and silver hammers. My overall population is 141 dwarf, including children, and my wealth is something like 400k. My expidition leader sits on the throne, made of pure gold even
First of all, I still have no nobles (it's year 4 already)
Secondly, I am complitely unable to find first caverns. I've dug about 30 levels below ground, and still nothing at all! It's getting boring No sieges, no nobles, no underground... Even no dungerous beasts, even though the biome is wilderness.

[i2amroy]

A couple different ways to find it:
1)How tall is your embark overall? (So how far down can you go?) It's possible that you just haven't dug deep enough yet.
2)It's possible that you just missed it by digging through a column or something similar. Try digging out a few tiles every couple of z-levels down and see if you find it.
3)If you aren't averse to a little bit of exploitation you bring up the designation for a farm plot. Expand it's size to 10x10, move it over the black area and then start moving downwards. When there is just solid wall there it will look something like this:

But when you hit the cavern floor it will start to look similar to this:

4)If you really are fine with cheating you could always just use the 'reveal' command on DFHack to find it, then unreveal it afterwards.

[FuzzyZergling]

Keep digging down. It's completely possible that your first cavern doesn't start till deeper than 30 Z's.
Not sure what the soluting to your noble problem is, unfortunately.

[TKGP]

I believe nobles and sieges are also tied to exported wealth, so if you haven't traded too much that may be the issue.
About caverns, one of the first things I do is just dig straight down to the bottom of the earth. The magma sea is excellent for a thriving metal industry and you should uncover most of the caves on your way. If you happen to miss them though, I just dig some nice big grids every 10 layers or so.
On the off chance that you still can't find them, there's always the "reveal" command in DFHack (which I would recommend installing anyways).

Fake edit: oh you, ninjas.

[AutomataKittay]

It's possible you don't have goblin, unless you've been getting snatchers. In which case, you're not making enough wealth for them to lust over.

No idea about nobility, have you been getting liasions and caravans in regularly?

Caverns can be very deep. Or just completely missed. You can tell roughly by what tree grows in them ( if they're not a dry cavern! ).

[Sutremaine]

Dig a bunch of 1x1 staircases in the corners of the map. Not as close to the corner as you can get, because you're more likely to keep hitting the rock that's always found at the corners of the map (and presumably the corners of every 48x48 area that comprises an embark tile), but about half a dozen tiles in. Odds are you'll hit something if you have three layers of caverns.

For the most part, caverns will take up about half a dozen layers each. Sometimes you get long hollow faults that start at the level they should do, but the bottom of the spire and the rest of the cavern may be many, many levels down. If you don't hit the small area that the fault is in, you'll have a long way to go until you find the more horizontal cavern space.