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[Airgeoff]

I apologize if this has been brought up already.  I did a search but couldn't find anything like this.

During the embark preparations, when choosing a site, we're restricted to only seeing the fact that metal ores / flux stone / soil / clay exist in the area.  Which seems rather odd to me if we're talking about being close to settlements, especially ones that mine and produce metal-works. 

What would people say to these tweaks?

1) Anywhere within a short distance around a settlement that would realistically mine (excludes elves and maybe small agrarian towns) you can directly see what ores / gems / stone layers / clay and sand deposits have been found there.  My thought is that if they can mine they would probably send out expeditions to search for metals and gems and would know what's in the area.  A bigger settlement will have done this for a larger area and delved more deeply.  Restrict knowledge down to only a certain number of levels that would correspond to how deeply they've dug.  I guess you could argue that they might be greedy and want to keep this info to themselves, but you would definitely be able to see what types of metal-works and gems they produce and I doubt that they would find information about certain things like what types of soil / stone there are in the area valuable enough to try to hide.

2) Have the area further out than above display what the game does now, with the proviso that the exact soil type(s), stone layer(s), gem type(s), etc that compose the surface layer(s) be known, as someone scouting the area (Lewis & Clark style) would be able to see and record this information. 

3) Islands or land that has no civilizations would display nothing, as if they have not been scouted at all.  We have the general lay of the land say from ships that have made maps, but nothing more.

[Necrisha]

But then there'd be a larger no-embark zone or angry resident raids. I think what you suggested might be a feature in the future, but until toady re-vamps the embark end of the game what you see is what you get.

[SixOfSpades]

Well, with savescumming, the game kind of already supports this. Send a team of "explorers / geological surveyors" to a site first, and have them write down what they find there, as much as you think is proper. Maybe they only take a day or two to pass through the area, as they make notes of what ores, gems, and common stone types are already exposed to the air, as well as what plants & animals are present. OR, maybe they make an in-depth study (literally), taking multiple core samples to try to determine factors like exact soil depth, the locations of the caverns, and the position of the nearest magma source. Roleplay it; do whatever prep-work you think your dwarves, and their home civilization, would do to support your future settlement. Then savescum, and embark for real.

But, as far as tweaks to the game are concerned, yes, you have a very real point. I consider the embark screen "broken" in that it knows whether or not there are no, one, or multiple metal ores buried deep underground (How would explorers magically know this, for sure, without actually going to see?), but yet it cannot tell us which metal ores are already sticking out, right on the surface. ("Shallow metals! Awright!" . . . . "Oh. Nickel and zinc. Whoopee.")

What I would like to see is a setting in worldgen that determines the "prospecting" skill of the embark screen. All the way down at Elf, all it knows is the plant & animal populations of the area, the approximate ratio of stone vs. soil at the surface, soil depth, and whether or not there are already-exposed metal ores. Crank it up to Human, and you'll be able to see which ores are present, and a guess at just how plentiful each of those ores is likely to be. You'll also get a rough idea of what's probably underground. ("Dude. This place is right between a lake and a swamp. Of COURSE there's going to be an aquifer here.") And up in the Dwarf range, you'll get predictions of how much of each type of ore is likely to be present in each of the Shallow / Deep / Abyssal ranges, as well as predictions about things like the depth of any aquifer(s), the number of uninterrupted layers before the first cavern, the known populations in each cavern, and the location of the most convenient source of magma. And the higher you set the "prospecting" skill, the more accurate those predictions will tend to be. In worlds generated with lower prospecting skill, you can still access that more precise information, but you have to spend a good chunk of your embark points to do it.

[TruePikachu]

Alternatively, if you are OK with DFHack, `prospect` or `prospect all` (the former does one embark tile, the latter does the whole embark) will check what is expected to be present in the embark; it is frequently wrong with the actual amounts and ratios, but it is useful for getting an estimate before embarking.

If it isn't clear, these get invoked before you even embark; they are much more accurate after embarking (counting revealed tiles and all non-circus-related tiles respectivly in that case)