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[shifty]

I'm new to DF and the forums, I've been delving into several tutorials and I've made a lot of progress.

However, I've since started several fortresses since I started learning to play (a little less than 10 maybe?), and I've NEVER seen any lignite or b. coal. I've never even seen a merchant sell the stuff. I saw somewhere in the bugs wiki that it may be a bug, but I'm not sure. Am I just having insanely bad luck?

This has been across several new world generations also. I haven't tried it with minerals set to anything higher than the default though.

[Garath]

I've set my mineral scarcity a bit extreme, but even so, I've found coal in all embarks so far. I did change the volcanism range a bit, emphasizing on lower level volcanism (3,3,3,2,1), which usualy results in more iron bearing layers but may also help with coal and lignite.

[GoldenShadow]

If  you have coal, it will usually be visible in surface hills, but sometimes will be a few layers down. Its never very deep.

[Bilanthri]

Alternatively, you can burn trees for charcoal which is functionally equivalent to coke.

[expwnent]

I always just burn trees. If you don't have them on the surface, you'll still have them in the cavern layers. Once you hit your first cavern layer, you can make underground forests by flooding. I like to flood an entire z-level or two once I have the resources.

[robertheinrich]

As a beginner you might want to set minerals to "everywhere". It does what it says, you will get tons of economic stones at every embark. It still needs quite some luck to find a perfect spot where you will have metal + coal + flux at your disposal. From my point of view flux is the most important because you canīt make steel without it. Coal can be substituted by charcoal from trees and iron can be harvested from goblins. Or order it from the caravans.

Sometimes it even makes more sense to ask directly for steel or even weapons / armor from the caravans and trade it for crafted stuff. In the long run you wonīt need anything else from the outside once you have some industry running.

[Garath]

you can actually order quite a bit of iron/steel from a caravan if you ask the right questions. Normally they bring only a few of each item, never 10 or 20.

so, ask for hematite, magnetite and limonite, iron bars, pig iron bars and steel bars. You can proceed to buy items just to melt them too, though that is not as cost effective.

[Bytyan]

Flux can be ordered from the caravan, but it hasn't been practical until the wagons came back. Now you just need to remember which stones are flux, and not to order blocks instead of rocks. Marble works.

[shifty]

Thanks for the replies. I've been deforesting the area and buying all the lumber from every merchant, and I've been able to forge weapons for my military at least. The elves won't be happy, but you know, screw the elves. I've got flux stone and iron ore at least.

I guess it won't matter so much once I get magma forges up and running. It's just weird to me how rare lignite/coal is. I wouldn't expect it at every embark spot, but I expected you'd be able to find it if you looked for it hard enough.