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[FantasticDorf]

Just a quick suggestion that I found regarding my modding experience and a few personal observations of how DF generates cavern systems that are already lined up to be worked upon.

Some of the lore i was tapping into while making the draft of my total/majority conversion mod defines many kinds of cave dwelling creature, but to have them all simultaneously inside the same super-network doesn't really work because they live in respective in the fantasy world setting in places like different continents entirely unless i purposefully evocate them entirely from the underground.

• Its all a bit mix and match in trying to divide them up mostly between layers, but the underground is the most contentious offender for this especially with such a lot of big, deadly & threatening apex predators often being relegated to the third, so its strange to see a giant underground dinosaur underneath a glacier.

• The other is that this is indeed possible to have biomes affect caverns, as already the sea-levels from frozen oceans can have large waxing effect unintentionally in killing cavern moss & mushroom trees when you embark into them. As above, as below.

Here's a few post-map rewrite examples i could pull up to try to get my point across of unique and mixed biome enviroments.

High Humidity Lush Jungle Limestone Caverns

A savage jungle underground might be quite similar to the novel cliche "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" with many great plant vines hanging from the ceiling, large insects comparable to variants of the generic GCS and the occasional large creature boding through.

• Creatures from typical DF mushroom caverns might congregate here despite being widespread all over with a generalist underground tag such as Drunians seeking out varieties of fruit to compliment a diet of mushrooms, avoiding cavern biomes where neither are present.

• The temperature is much hotter than the sublime subterrenean cold, with plants, grass and trees defined in the subterranean realm preferring this heat. Most aboveground jungle plants can have mixtures of above and below tokens and work fine here but not elsewhere underground.

• Some habitation preferences for lizard & snakemen layer linked civilizations to settle may be suitable for them.

• Alternative spheres to generic caverns similar to primordial titans, and forgotten beasts that are culminative of what those spheres represent in form.

No certainty that such a biome will exist except for the existance of a jungle or other suitable biome above it existing, and being the correct rock composition for a small way around the entire regional area distinct in the underground network. Being able to offload some varieties of creatures in these specialised biome climates would be a immense help to modding & indeed DF vanilla possibilities, which im sure advanced map conditions & third party applications can handle the rest for pre-configured arrangements.

[NW_Kohaku]

Underground sphere-related power is something I think is a good match for caverns.  One of the long-term goals was already to replace good/evil/savage with sphere-based biomes, and pulling that down underground makes even more sense, as spheres are the "magic climate", and caverns are clearly running more on magic than nature, especially relative to the surface.  Hence, you would expect a fire sphere dominant area to have firey features, possibly including perpetually-burning fungal "trees", while a love sphere dominant area might have underground fauna that form tight-knit packs and are quite vengeful of those who threaten their packs, but which are particularly loyal when tamed.

Creating a system where you can make creatures tied to spheres, and then have mechanics for how spheres propagate above and underground (which may have different spheres for different layers of each biome), and you'll be able to mix-and-match to create the kind of underground where players can't necessarily presume they'll know what they find when they start digging, the way that the caverns are pretty much all the same, now.

I also tried to make up a big system for how the player could interact with sphere underground a few years ago, in the Xeonsynthesis thread.