That was more a reply to NW_Kohaku.
I wasn't sure if the params he'd posted were like he'd posted. Since, well, his reasoning sounds pretty awesome. No giant mountain ranges, especially. That sounds awesome.
I find learning the tricky stuff so you can do it yourself is more fun, but I know some people just want to get their hands dirty in the stuff they enjoy most. To each their own.
If you want to learn, there's only one way to learn what they mean:
Open up DF, go to generate world with advance parameters, and start looking at all the dials you can fiddle with.
(Well, OK, two ways, here's the
wiki link.)
The first page of advanced worldgen stuff is mostly "Seeds" - you can export the seed of an already-generated world, and punch that in there in order to recreate the world with the same random numbers as the world you previously created. If you didn't change anything else, this will regenerate the exact same world. If you did change things, this will come out pretty differently once you hit the point where the things you changed matter. (You can also do things like generate a world, see some important event you want to be a part of happened at year 214, and then generate the exact same world seed and stop it at the year 214, for example.)
You might want to fiddle with the End Year (when worldgen stops) because the game will possibly have more werebeasts in later years, but cities are more likely to be abandoned in later years, and there will be greater diversity of megabeasts the earlier in worldgen you stop. Generally, it's best to give cities just enough time to rise, and not enough time to decline from too many generations dying out, so around 150 years of worldgen is enough.
Worldgen will also be stopped when the game detects "too many dead megabeasts", although you can change that (and I typically tell it never to check for megabeast worldgen stoppage by setting that value to -1).
After that, you get into a set of "variance" numbers.
They go in this order:
Elevation (elevations below 100 are oceans, elevations above 300 are mountains)
Temperature (obvious - whether it's freezing to scorching is determined by this. Odd things happen when you have high x-variance in temperature - it gets colder the further east you go until suddenly it gets hot again!)
Rainfall (determines if you get deserts/grasslands/badlands, or forests/swamps, depending on drainage.)(
See this page for details.)
Drainage (again, determines biomes)
Volcanism (not important to adventurers, but this makes more volcanos and igneous stone layers appear if it is high, and sedimentary layers if it is low)
Savagery (Makes savage areas appear. Towns do not appear in savage regions, but savage regions have more fun things to kill. Make this highly variable and you will find some savage regions nearby with fun things to kill even peaceful town regions.)
Variances are important in determining how "jumbled up" the worldmap looks. Low variances like 200 will result in a world map with only a single huge mountain range and single huge ocean, each taking up about a third of the world. Very high variances like 2000 or more will result in features and biomes so small that they practically fit in single region tiles, and "oceans" the size of lakes. Variances of around 800 or 1200 will give you much more variable terrain.
Then you get mesh sizes. You need to make the mesh size something other than ignore, or you don't get to play with weights. The smaller the mesh size, the more variability there is.
Weights - These are broken into five equal chunks, and you can "weight" them to be more or less common. So, for elevation, if you go 1:2:3:2:1, then what you will end up with is elevations between 0 and 20% of the maximum (which, if you leave the minimum elevation as 1 and maximum as 400, means elevations from 1 to 80, with 100 still being sea-level, so all of this elevation range will be underwater) only 1/9th of the time.
Each point of weight adds an equal chance to be selected, so if you have 1:1:1:1:4, then there's a 1/2 chance that the game will make terrain within the top 20% of the minimum/maximum range, and only a 1/8th chance of any other quintile inside that minimum/maximum range.
Or, to put it in simpler terms, if you want lots more volcanos, make vulcanism look like this:
Volcanism Mesh Size: 2x2
Volcanism Weighted Range (0-20): 1
Volcanism Weighted Range (20-40): 1
Volcanism Weighted Range (40-60): 1
Volcanism Weighted Range (60-80): 1
Volcanism Weighted Range (80-100): 10
Restraint should be advised, however, as volcanism prevents sedimentary layers from appearing, and you need those for your limestone layers filled with coal and hemitite. (More important if you are in Fortress Mode, obviously.) As such, I tend to make Volcanism ranges like 10:1:1:1:12, so that I have only extremes.
Other bits:
Megabeast caves determine how many megabeasts the game starts with - add more to get more dragons and stuff to kill, but be careful, as too many means everyone will get eaten by dragons before the game starts.
The whatever creature types or rain types or region syndromes all relate to how many procedurally generated creature types there will be. This only determines how many
kinds of these creatures there will be, not how common they are.
After that, you start getting into "minimum of this type of region" stuff. They exist to make sure there are "just the right amount" of forests and grasslands and other biomes. I like to remove these entirely by setting them down to ignore, so that I can sometimes get really weird places, like worlds with very few forests. It also reduces the amount of rejections your worlds will face, since it's not rejecting anything anymore.
Finally, there's amount of subregions - if you crank up your variances, this will cause tons of rejections, so set it as high as it will go.
Generally, I turn off rejections any time I don't really need them to be there. Minimum peaks? Nobody needs to know that there is an exactly 400 elevation peak in the world. Turn that to 0.
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Topic: What are good worldgen parameters for Adv Mode? (Read 6681 times)