Print

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

[Marshbaboon]

Anyone know of a reliable way to gen an embark location with a good variety of minerals/gems without there being excessive amounts? I can't seem to find a good balance with mineral frequency.

Basically what I want is to have lots of different types of gems and ore, without being flooded with it the second I hit a stone layer. I want to actually have to actually mine to find veins, but setting the frequency to sparse/rare/very rare just seems to leave me with either hardly any metals or gems at all, or tons of only one ore type.

If someone happens to have advanced worldgen parameters for such an embark location it'd be nifty!

[Girlinhat]

Try setting more depth, you get more layers of stone and thus more likely to have different types of generations.

May not work, but all I can think of.

[Marshbaboon]

I've played around with different layers & multiple biomes in one embark and I just can't find the right balance for myself. I'm also using the accelerated mod to stop duplicate/redundant ore types in one embark. I think the only thing I've really thought of is looking at changing the raws to reduce the amount of bars gained from smelting, but I'd rather find a way to keep things vanilla if I can.

I just like having to manage & use resources sparingly, rather than having practically infinite amounts of everything.

[Girlinhat]

I don't think that's a raw change.  It's a hardcode that "ore drops 1/4 of the time and bars smelt 1:4".

[Marshbaboon]

You can't change the ore drop rate, but you can change the smelting/crafting reaction. The masterwork mod has settings whereby you only get 2 bars from smelting 1 ore/ it takes more bars to smith items.

All I really want though is lots of small veins/clusters of various types of ore, without having 30k gold in a 3x3 square.

[Girlinhat]

I'm not familiar with Masterwork, but they may be using separate reactions, totally different from vanilla reactions, to achieve different results.

[Eric Blank]

Unfortunately I don't think it's going to be possible to get any large variety of ore types without having a metric arse-ton of each of those materials you do have. It's honestly a choice between copious amounts of everything and virtually nothing, and I know it's not ideal, but there's currently no setting that permits things to show up everywhere but only in small quantities.

The best you may be able to do is set every mineral type to only appear as small clusters or individual clusters. But then when you DO strike gold, you'd only get a teensy bit and be left guessing where next to look for more, rather than following a vein.

[Marshbaboon]

Guess I'll just have to crank up the frequency and then pretend most of it isn't there, like a sultry harlot or some sort of delicious forbidden pie. HURRY UP CARAVAN ARC.

[Bavette]

One thing I noticed is that you hardly need any ores at all if you aren't doing anything with them. I mostly get hundreds of steel bars just lying around waiting for one more military guy to get his full set of armor. If you really want some metals, you can always ask the montainhomes and smelt everything them and the humans bring you. I got by ok with that process.

You can't control the world, only how you react to it.
If you are annoyed with infinite random veins and clusters of ores you can just channel every single tile in a massive subterranean stone layer to build a dwarven underground city, with real underground towers, and use the rest of the map for mining and miscellanea. All the ores you get then you will use to build the city. Iron streets, bronze thrones on the parks, etc. It's a project that will even give you fair excuse to search for more minerals and do some more sensible mining.

[Sutremaine]

Another option is to set many minerals and gems to appear in all layers, but make them very rare. You won't come across these very often, but you will be able to get them in trade. Not quite what your OP asks for, but it will give you a lot of different materials without having to have a technicolour fortress.

There are limits to this, which I don't fully understand. Civs with access to kimberlite will be able to send you the faint yellow diamonds found in the kimberlite, but not the rare coloured diamonds found in the faint yellow diamonds.

[gchristopher]

I'm still in the early stages, but I've done something like what you want by editing world.dat after world generation.

Each geology entry is made up of layers, and each layer has a primary material and then a list of material types with corresponding vein shape, and frequency.

In my case, I put several layers of sandstone that contained no ores below the dirt layers so there'd be a 12-layer deep aquifer, with slightly tweaked layers below that to reduce the frequency of annoying ores.

This isn't terribly helpful, because I'm still a ways away from publishing anything useful, sorry. But it IS possible, with enough effort.

[vjek]

With 1000 mineral scarcity and a two-biome embark, I can find embarks with 8 types of ore and 50 types of gems, if I use 3 caverns and 100 Z levels between each in advanced worldgen.  Additionally, there are 13 layer materials and 9 other vein stone.

Are you looking for more than 8 types of ore and/or more than 50 types of gems in two biomes, Marshaboon?