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[Ilmoran]

I've been working on a new fortress, just finished digging out a few dozen rooms, and set my stoneworker to start training on cups.

Then I looked at the stone he's been using...

Dolomite.

I look around at other things I've mined out.
Lignite...
Limonite...

I now realize that I've dug down into a damn steel mine.  lol

I'm still going to bring magma up to my main fort, because I like magma, and I probably won't start making steel until I do.  I just found it funny that the ONLY stone in my fort right now is flux, coal, and iron.

[Shadowfury333]

v0.31 makes you re-evaluate the reason why you got magma addicted in the first place. Do you simply not like having to setup a fuel production line (by trees or coal) and putting some dwarves on that work? Or is it because coal and metal used to be so scarce in the previous versions, that you needed the magma to save on all the resources you could and to make use of the 'renewable' source of iron (goblin equipment, metal items bought from traders)?

The abundance of ore and coal means you don't need to recycle metal so much until the endgame. Wood is also much more plentiful than before thanks to the caverns and since it's easy to get underground water with those caverns, growing your own wood (after you've got some metal-geared soldiers) is also a staple you can do on nearly every map (provided you didn't do something extreme in the worldgen). So for me, I don't need magma anymore to get started with my metal (and glass) industry - I'll eventually get down to the magma but it's not so urgent that I must rush for it.

Mind you, if you want magma for other purposes, like moats, obsidian production and mass-cleansing loose stones, you're still gonna need to build that pump tower. But if you wanted magma for all those reasons, chances are you'd have spent time getting to know how to move it around efficiently anyway.

I'm actually planning to build a Great Green Glass Skyfortress (that is, supported only by the access pillar) and a magma defense grid, allowing me to drop magma anywhere on the map. Basically a controlled Boatmurdered.

[Blah]

I set underground cavern layers to 1 or 0 in world generation. On 0, magma lakes begin about 8-10 levels below the surface.

[Shoku]

I have not had similar luck. With 2 layers on a pocket world I still get the magma 80 layers down. I've seen less in the usual settings I was using on a medium world.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Just as an update to my own fortress... In my most recent Embark I decided to Bore straight down immediately to magma, with the intention of making a small water supply, food store and open sleeping area for workers... By the end of the second year I had moved my whole fort down there and pretty much abandoned plans on building an above ground fort...

I am going to try another one and see how well I can do with OUT using magma!

[Paul]

If you build your fort near the center of the map you can have ramps leading to the edges going pretty darn deep without any extra walking distance for caravans and such to come down to you. Thats what I did, and the traders happily descend to the depths of the earth to my trade depot. The goblins do too, but I always have some military stationed where the ramps converge.

It's like having an underground fort with all the benefits of having a surface fort. The only annoyance is the fact that animals even wander down, but I had that happening even with just a shaft going down. Elephants would climb down the stairs to the caverns

[Greiger]

Dig stairs down as far as I can go.  If  hit cavern I look at the surroundings, find the nearest pillar capable of fitting the staiircase in, re-floor, grate or leverhatch(so I can drop exploration kittens into the cavern) the opening.  In 40d buildingdestroyers couldn't destroy stuff while flying, and I see no indication of it being any different now, so even a locked or levered hatch or grate should keep the opening secure if it's more than 1 level off the floor.

Then I find the magma and set up my workshops.  The "long" trip down the stairs doesn't hold a candle to the distance dwarves had to walk to magma works back in 2D most of the time. It was a far more dangerous trip back then too. And at any rate you could always give the smiths their own burrow and food supply.  If you need magma near the surface, dwarven science has turned pump stacking practically into an art form.  And dwarven perpetual motion machines are relatively easy to make and maintain.  Even if you don't have a river that can give you hundreds of thousands of power for free.

Of course there is now so much coal that you hardly need magma.  And so far every place I embarked had more than enough trees for anything I would want to do, not counting the underground supply.

[endimiao]

Actually im using more magma than ever. And no i dont mind having some dwarves haul stuff betwen all those z layers.

[Lord Shonus]

Ironically, magma smelting is slightly more of an improvement than it used to be, now that the fuel used no longer counts toward the coal requirement for steel making.