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[Duul]

My current adventurer is looking to become a thrall/husk and has been wandering around the entire world looking for evil mist, but I can't find any! I created an entire world filled with evil, so there's plenty of evil biomes, but I have no idea which one has evil weather or more specifically: thrall inducing evil weather. I've tried using everything from dfhack to world viewer to looking into the raws, but all that's been telling me is that there is thrall inducing weather, but not where it is.

For that matter, evil weather seems to be completely random, even if I somehow ended up in a biome with thrall inducing weather, I have no idea where the cloud will come from or when it will come!

Is this just a lost cause or am I missing some easy way to find them?

[gchristopher]

It's pretty easy to find the region interaction entries in an uncompressed save file (they're plain text) and to see which ones are thralling/husking.

However, nobody knows how a particular biome is associated with a particular regional interaction index. DFHack does not have the memory mapping. I managed to get the 34.11 save game file format about 70% mapped and didn't find it. In particular, the part of the file defining the biomes and map REALLY doesn't have any good candidates, so I started to strongly suspect there's a crosswalk table between evil biomes and regional interactions somewhere in unmapped data. (Which is a nearly totally useless observation.)

There are only a few useful ways to find thralling biomes:

1. Walk around and wait for clouds, which you've been doing. (Or embark on various biomes, which is a little faster, but still very time-consuming.)

2. Figure out which regional interaction applies to a particular evil biome by observing it. i.e. this biome rains goblin blood and reanimates. Frequently there will be only one or two regional interactions in the save game file that have that distinct weather. Then copy-paste (using a hex editor) the text for a regional interaction that has thralling/husking weather.

Since method 2 involves editing a save game file by hand, that's pretty horrible.

It's also probably possible to do method 2 using dfhack, but I haven't figured out the specifics there.

So, to answer your question, there's no known easy way, and people much better/more obsessed than me (like Quietust) haven't found one. (And I routinely move biomes and rivers around to make niftier embarks with 3-4 different evil weathers and waterfalls/cliffs, which is also pretty obsessive.)

[BadLeo]

which is also pretty obsessive

Yup. But don't worry too much about it. Every single DF player is a bit of an obsessive-compulsive person.

Anyway, pretty interesting issue, I'll follow the discussion.

[Duul]

It's pretty easy to find the region interaction entries in an uncompressed save file (they're plain text) and to see which ones are thralling/husking.

However, nobody knows how a particular biome is associated with a particular regional interaction index. DFHack does not have the memory mapping. I managed to get the 34.11 save game file format about 70% mapped and didn't find it. In particular, the part of the file defining the biomes and map REALLY doesn't have any good candidates, so I started to strongly suspect there's a crosswalk table between evil biomes and regional interactions somewhere in unmapped data. (Which is a nearly totally useless observation.)

There are only a few useful ways to find thralling biomes:

1. Walk around and wait for clouds, which you've been doing. (Or embark on various biomes, which is a little faster, but still very time-consuming.)

2. Figure out which regional interaction applies to a particular evil biome by observing it. i.e. this biome rains goblin blood and reanimates. Frequently there will be only one or two regional interactions in the save game file that have that distinct weather. Then copy-paste (using a hex editor) the text for a regional interaction that has thralling/husking weather.

Since method 2 involves editing a save game file by hand, that's pretty horrible.

It's also probably possible to do method 2 using dfhack, but I haven't figured out the specifics there.

So, to answer your question, there's no known easy way, and people much better/more obsessed than me (like Quietust) haven't found one. (And I routinely move biomes and rivers around to make niftier embarks with 3-4 different evil weathers and waterfalls/cliffs, which is also pretty obsessive.)

Well it looks like I'm doomed to an eternity of wandering evil biomes, good thing I'm a vampire so I won't die of old age standing around.

In all seriousness thanks for answering the question, maybe in the magic update Toady's been talking about there will be better ways to become an all-powerful badass.

[Chaosegg]

Are you sure vampires can become husk/thralls?