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[Mythos]

Is there any way to cycle through all the fitting locations? I'm still a noob at the game so I'm trying to find a pleasant map, with some basic parameters: medium temperature, a river, no aquifer, and either a magma pipe or a magma pool (preferably a pipe). I'd also like a good amount of trees, but you can't actually tell it to look for that. Because of that, a lot of the time the first place it finds almost always has some flaw like no trees or no possibility of iron ore. I can't see any way to show the other locations that fit the conditions I specified, I'm just stuck with looking at the first one that it finds.

[SkyRender]

Unfortunately, the site finder is very primitive.  You're often better off searching manually for the site you want.

[Mythos]

Well, searching for a site manually is problematic in that I have no idea magma is there, unless it's a volcano which in my experience are almost always in scorching climates with no trees whatsoever.

[Akura]

Open /data/init/init.txt in Notepad or something. About halfaway down you'll see options related to seeing stuff on the embark map. Set(depending on which you want or both) either one of the following to ALWAYS:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[SHOW_EMBARK_M_PIPE:FINDER]
[SHOW_EMBARK_M_POOL:FINDER]

Should then show:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[SHOW_EMBARK_M_PIPE:ALWAYS]
[SHOW_EMBARK_M_POOL:ALWAYS]

[Mythos]

Ah, great! Thanks, that'll make things much easier.

[SinisterMinisterX]

Set the temperature option to medium. That cuts out deserts and glaciers, leaving you with biomes more likely to contain trees.

[smjjames]

Set the temperature option to medium. That cuts out deserts and glaciers, leaving you with biomes more likely to contain trees.

Not always, it depends on what kind of site you want to find. Setting the temp to medium just includes all but the most extreme ends of the scale, you can still get a cold/freezing site even with that setting.

Its the rainfall setting that determines how many trees you are likely to have. Even then, with the ultrafinder I've had hits using the high rainfall setting which grabbed a desert and a mountain biome. Chances are it was the mountains that had the high rainfall due to it bieng a rainshadow desert.

[SinisterMinisterX]

Set the temperature option to medium. That cuts out deserts and glaciers, leaving you with biomes more likely to contain trees.

Not always, it depends on what kind of site you want to find. Setting the temp to medium just includes all but the most extreme ends of the scale, you can still get a cold/freezing site even with that setting.

Its the rainfall setting that determines how many trees you are likely to have. Even then, with the ultrafinder I've had hits using the high rainfall setting which grabbed a desert and a mountain biome. Chances are it was the mountains that had the high rainfall due to it bieng a rainshadow desert.

I almost never get a cold or hot climate with that setting, and I've generated hundreds of worlds with it. Maybe it's affected by the other things I search for (flux, river, no aquifer, magma, HFS ... much like what the OP wants). Maybe changing the rainfall setting would indeed work as well. But in my experience: "not always" is only technically correct. Changing temperature to medium gives me trees at least 99% of the time.

[smjjames]

Set the temperature option to medium. That cuts out deserts and glaciers, leaving you with biomes more likely to contain trees.

Not always, it depends on what kind of site you want to find. Setting the temp to medium just includes all but the most extreme ends of the scale, you can still get a cold/freezing site even with that setting.

Its the rainfall setting that determines how many trees you are likely to have. Even then, with the ultrafinder I've had hits using the high rainfall setting which grabbed a desert and a mountain biome. Chances are it was the mountains that had the high rainfall due to it bieng a rainshadow desert.

I almost never get a cold or hot climate with that setting, and I've generated hundreds of worlds with it. Maybe it's affected by the other things I search for (flux, river, no aquifer, magma, HFS ... much like what the OP wants). Maybe changing the rainfall setting would indeed work as well. But in my experience: "not always" is only technically correct. Changing temperature to medium gives me trees at least 99% of the time.

How about low rainfall? Since I prefer desert sites, that could cause tundra and glacier to come up.

I've tried doing the high and low temperature settings and they are just about always red, which leaves me to believe that those two settings are for more extreme temps.

The worldgen settings will also affect it in various ways.

[SkyRender]

I discovered an interesting bug with the site finder: the more variables you input for it to look for, the less accurate it is.  When trying to re-locate where Griffonseals was, I searched for all of the features it has and it couldn't find it.  Confused, I dropped a feature, but it still couldn't find it.  I had to leave out the bottomless pit and the underground river before it located it again, even though the bottomless pit and underground river are clearly part of the site.  So yeah, even more reason not to rely on the site finder: it'll often skip over suitable sites entirely.

[SinisterMinisterX]

Here's the dilemma: on my computer at least, the finder is reasonably fast. From the time I start DF, I can gen a world and do a finder search in about 90 seconds. But it only rarely turns up good sites.

On the other hand: searching by hand finds better sites, but takes much more time (at least for me). The biggest problem is locating areas with desirable goodies like flux and magma together. I can't search like that very fast, but the finder can.

So my solution has become: do a finder search with only a few features. Flux, river, no aquifer, magma pipe: that's my bare minimum, and that search almost always gets a hit. It may not give you a good site, but it puts you in the right area. Often, looking around that area will find a good site even if the finder didn't.

This is why I don't understand why so many people say "don't bother with the finder". The finder is a tool, and using it can be helpful. I think the better statement is "don't rely exclusively on the finder".

[Elijah]

Anyway the finder really needs a button to cycle through all the sites with the requirements we put into it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, forests only occur in very wet climates, so you can use "rain: high" as a search parameter, and everything you come up with should have a forest or swamp (or at least, a shrubland or marsh).

In fact, it can be easier to just set really restrictive search parameters, and just keep genning worlds until something manages to fit one of them...  You might want to mess around with the x and y size, though, to see what you can manage to squeeze in.

I managed to get a low-evil (I.E. mirthful), flux, no-aquifer, underground river, with magma pipe to come up in about a dozen tries. It also had a bottomless pit, chasm, sand, excellent layers, and HFS, for bonus points.

Practically like winning the lottery.

[Fictionpuss]

What I ended up doing was searching for 4x4 sites with the features I want, expanding that to 6x6 for embark, and then abandoning the fortress if I didn't like the landscape.  Then when I started a new game in that same world, site-finder would then skip over that unsuitable area.  Took about 5 tries to find a perfect site.

[NW_Kohaku]

Oh, and next time I try making a world, I'll definitely tru using batch processing.

Why sit through worldgens?  Just tell the computer to make 20 large worlds in a row, then go make yourself lunch or watch a television show you recorded or go read a book.