I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on how to generate a very special embark spot, i'm looking for a sheer stone cliff in a desert biome with gold and iron deposits as well as some coal. Oh and Clown Car, Is such a thing even possible?
sheer stone cliff will be where two rivers meet.
gold, iron, and coal, no problem. clown car is always present.
desert and rivers of appropriate size will be challenging, but not impossible.
Thanks, now the work begins
If you use the
Perfect World utility you can use the rainfall map and drainage map features to your advantage by raising the desert threshold. After that just add a lot of rivers and your desired location will surely be a reality after a couple of map gens. Deserts are (obviously) low rainfall, and low drainage. Also in the low rainfall categories are rocky wasteland, which is high drainage, and I think medium drainage is badlands.
The DFwiki has enough information on how biomes work that it can be pretty easy to get your desired gen. The only really unpredictable things appear to be good/evil biomes and temperature.
**Minor Update**I like using the world generator so I went ahead and tried to produce a region heavier in desert biomes. It
does have more deserts than I usually produce, but I still intended for there to be greater swaths of sandy desert than are presently available there. I think adding all those extra rivers confused it somehow because it was about then that I noticed an unusual border between zones (the flat one between a forest and then suddenly badlands). I'll try again with some smaller worlds after I plumb the riches of the present one. If I find an embark site relevant to your interests I'll let you know and post its worldgen.txt entry.
Also I deliberately bothered the large zone options and those have a way of turning the entire ocean into an evil biome, which I like because evil oceans are amusing for embark purposes. It is easily rectified by setting the good/evil large region settings to 0.
For now, here is a picture:
**Update Again**Found a promising site, which I embarked on and did some minor exploration.
There is a lot of slope, but a sizable plateau exists at the upper z-level. There are actually two different aquifers but both can be readily avoided, as there is a pretty large gap between both of them. The large amount of slope, especially that on the northern side of the map causes the red sand to be available a pretty long way down while also allowing you to have a lot of access to stone at the cliffs. Mind the aquifer, although it is largely out of the way it is pretty big.
The river coming from the south is significantly higher than the one moving along the east-west axis and once it thaws it will waterfall into the river below. My map is in a temperate zone so the rivers are presently frozen and there is snow all over the place.
Here is the relevant prospect info:
Sadly, no coal. I'll resume searching in other areas of desert, since, unless you want to embark half-desert half-place-with-trees you will probably actually need coal in order to protect your dwarves from being killed by sissy gas-butterfly FBs.
**Useless Update**I am still poking around, but I've found a few more places that are, from the embark screen, similar to what we are searching for. I had to make a copy of the map to continue searching, though, because I found an embark site that I really, really liked for myself and simply had to use it. There are at least three major regions where I found desert river cliffs, two of which have no troublesome aquifers.