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[Wirewraith]

Now, this may or may not be a bug. By all means, I am not a Dwarf Fortress master and I don't have a limitless knowledge of the game's mechanics.

That being said, is it just me, or do cliffs...not exist...at least in the latest version (39b). Now, by all means I'm getting elevation (after of course, checking sites on the cliff indicator, specifically picking sites with, for example, 9 or above tiles right next to, say, 0 tiles). However, I'm not getting steep drop offs.

At the most, I'm getting lots and lots of slopes, going all the way up to the max elevation level. Now, I'm pretty sure this isn't right, or at least, I'm looking for the wrong things. In 38c I constantly got real cliffs (ones without slopes that Dwarves can't run up and down).

Again, I may have just been looking at the wrong things, I just want my steep drop offs back, any ideas?

[Inquisitor Saturn]

They're still around, just not everywhere. How often do you see cliffs in real life?

[Wirewraith]

Fair point. What should I look out for then? It seems there are a whole lot less common in the new version then in the old.

[Corak]

As is said, they aren't all that common in real life, more gradual changes are more natural.

That being said, if you WANT cliffs (say for the front end of a fort), just strip mine the levels flat, one Z-level at a time

[RogerN]

There's a new worldgen parameter which is something like "Gradually erode extremely steep cliffs".  It's on by default.  Maybe if you turn it off then the cliffs will return?

[Christes]

03/14/2008: This will take a little while, but I'm trying to make the system support more than just roads so I can use it later. The first pass will include roads and bridges, and I'm considering world-level walls and tunnels if they won't burn a lot of time. I've (almost) got civs planning out the road/tunnel networks they want to try to build now, and I'll get into the world/local realizations early next week.

I've also smoothed out cliffs for the most part. There will doubtless be some bugs from this, and we'll definitely want to get occasional cliffs back in (once you can climb, anyway), but they were everywhere and made moving around almost impossible. Now it does some local smoothing first and you can pretty much walk anywhere you want, unless you hit a river or the ocean. The resulting lack of flat patches means that dwarves walking on a mountain side will switch z levels more frequently (rather than using long staircases in cliffsides to switch levels all at once), so I might allow pinning the camera to creatures to help keep tabs on them, but I don't know if I'll get there or exactly what form that will take.

[Wirewraith]

Ah right, well that makes sense. Cheers.

For the record, RogerN: Tried that, didn't work.

[Calenth]

I'm trying setting elevation x and Y variance to 1600 (max). Don't know if that'll help; I really enjoy cliffside forts.

[lastofthelight]

I have verified that turning off gradual erosion gives us cliffs again; however it just makes it absurdly steep erosion. I'm looking at a /massive massive/ sheet cliff mountainside that has....across its entire face...1-width ramps.

Ugh. Apparently toady has, as pointed out, major issues with cliffs....so no cliff-forts this version.

[Keizo]

Yep, several months ago I made a thread about this. This is definitely the one and only thing I don't like about the new version. I really hope Toady finds a way to work the roads around cliffs sometime soon. They really spiced up the landscape.

[Faces of Mu]

I've found the only real cliffs were when a river cut a deep gorge through higher ground (see this thread re: not finding cliffs with waterfalls but making my own).

I am sure that on previous versions I would find an area with, say, a 9 next to a 3 and I'd expect to find some nice sheer cliffs. NOW I see the wording of that embarking filter has changed so that the numbers appear to reflect the variability of slopes. I think now you need to use the blue squares filter for actual elevation (the one that grades elevation from light blue/grey for high and dark blue/black for low).
For example, if you want a sheer cliff, you'd need to find two zeros next to each other as, while they might be different elevations, they're both flat. So to find sheer cliffs you probably want a light grey square next to a dark blue square (one high, one low) and two very low numbered elevation variations (0-2) so that while the elevations are quite different, there's also few slopes (more sheer edges; high flat land drops straight to low flat land) between the two. A 9 and a 0 would just mean the higher elevation would slope steeply down to the lower one across the z levels.

At least, that's what I've figured! I'm probably talking out me bum and have tried to rationalise my random methods!