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[Astrid]

You know, i find it fascinating when the wiki sais you can find the topmost caverns ceiling usually at around 10 lvl below surface,
yet here i am in my glacier embark and had to dig 100 level down from the surface to find the top layer of cavern 1 at around that height, its bottom roughly at -4. And -29 is the maximum depth.
At least i think this is cavern layer 1 given local fauna and flora.

Did i seriously manage to miss the other 2 caverns by going straight down and leaving large cross shaped 1 tile tunnels every 10+ levels?
Do you know how marginally that chance is?

Which made me curious, did anyone ever delve into those cavern mechanics?

[Bumber]

Caverns don't follow surface terrain. You'll have to dig down through any mountains first to get to them.               

[PatrikLundell]

And you can cheat with DFHack's "reveal" command to see if it really is the first cavern, but 25 levels for from the top of the first cavern to the lowest reaches of the embark is fairly reasonable. I'm also assuming you haven't used advanced world gen to specify you want 100 levels between the surface and the first cavern (I typically set that to 15 to allow me to fit main parts my fortress in between the aquifer and the first cavern).

[Astrid]

Actually i dont even have DF hack, using the vanilla game(i know i am a monster), with the inclusion of Dwarf Therapist that is.
And the world in quesiton, vanilla world.
Might just as well experiment a bit with the advanced worldgen generator and see how that differs.

[Fleeting Frames]

Cavern 1 top seems to be placed around <levels between surface and cavern> under the lowest point of the terrain in the area the cavern region covers.

Cavern bottom seems to use bit different rules. This can result in 100z tall caverns when you have elevation 1 ocean-elevation 100 shrubland - elevation 400 mountain all adjacent. Of course, when you embark on the shrubland, the cavern has to be under the ocean, so there's over 100z of digging to reach it too.

[andrei901]

I've seen some odd ones. I've had worlds where all three caves were within 50 levels of the surface, and magma sea was -200. I've had games where all of the above and magma sea was -75 (small world, I think? Haven't made a pocket since 40d), and the world I'm playing on right now has cave 1 at 20, cave 2 at ~60, cave 3 at ~160, and magma at 168, with the absolute bottom of the map at -173.

In regards to your OP, I actually don't think that missing cave 1 and cave 2 is unreasonable while digging crosses every ten z levels. I often see caves that are only 3-5z levels top to bottom, and I've also seen caves that get really windy in the middle. I think your choice of embark also matters here, because I'm fairly certain that if you have an even-x-even embark rectangle, you're more likely to miss the caves (assuming digging straight down the middle) than if you have an odd-x-odd embark. I have a distinct feeling that caves get more "open" in the middle of individual chunks.

[Paralyzoid]

Better than the 3 layers I got in my new world at least