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Author Topic: How to Archipelago?  (Read 3508 times)

bg

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How to Archipelago?
« on: March 24, 2012, 09:28:39 pm »

so i would like to worldgen a bunch of islands on a pocket-sized world for adventuring.
because if i can, i could jack up titan and megabeast numbers without screwing my chance for a town or two.
i've tried playing with elevation variance, but it's mostly one or two islands.
Should i be doing something with meshes instead? somebody explain to me how the heck they work, anyways.
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Loud Whispers

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #1 on: March 24, 2012, 09:47:39 pm »

I'm not sure you can really, without a tool like perfect... Crap, forgot the name of it D:

Flying Dice

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #2 on: March 24, 2012, 10:12:54 pm »

Actually, I've been genning worlds like that today. Push maximum elevation down to 200 or so, turn elevation variance to 3200. Set the elevation range weight to something like 100:1:1:1:100. Make sure you're doing an island world (4x complete edge oceans). As a warning, you will almost certainly get no rivers and likely no civs, so turn civ number to 0 and playable civ to no.
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bg

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #3 on: March 24, 2012, 10:32:03 pm »

erk. i do need civs for towns to appear.
i wanted islands because then i can have towns AND megabeasts
without the civs getting pinned down(no towns) OR most of the megabeasts getting killed
in other words, have my cake and eat it too.
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Flying Dice

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #4 on: March 24, 2012, 11:27:21 pm »

Yeah, you aren't going to get a real archipelago map with rivers, and with no rivers, you aren't going to get civilizations. Not to mention that the structure of an archipelago ingame pretty much prevents mountains AFAIK, so no Dwarf Mode at all. I just play an outsider with the Wanderer mod; you can make pretty much everything you need, but have to accept the lack of metal armor. The best you could hope for would be a sort of global swamp, like a reverse archipelago, with a bunch of small oceans scattered around a landmass, as that would still allow mountain and river formation, and thus civilizations.
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Tarran

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #5 on: March 24, 2012, 11:33:15 pm »

I'm not sure you can really, without a tool like perfect... Crap, forgot the name of it D:
"Perfect World DF"?
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Flying Dice

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #6 on: March 24, 2012, 11:35:03 pm »

I'm not sure you can really, without a tool like perfect... Crap, forgot the name of it D:
"Perfect World DF"?
That'd be it. And that's your best bet, if you don't mind stepping away from normal worldgen.
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bg

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #7 on: March 24, 2012, 11:50:14 pm »

unfortunately i'm on a mac, and getting things like that to work involves too much time spent on wine. erk.
why do dwarf civs need rivers anyways?
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Flying Dice

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #8 on: March 25, 2012, 12:05:40 am »

Well, for dwarves it is more mountains, and the parameters that create archipelagos don't encourage mountain formation. Humans and Elves are the ones that (IIRC) want/need to start on or next to a river.
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CursedBurger

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #9 on: March 25, 2012, 12:08:36 am »

If you did the same without it being an island, you should still be able to have an archipelago (I think) and just have civs on the mainland.
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CursedBurger

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #10 on: March 25, 2012, 02:45:09 am »

Okay, using Flying Dice's parameters with a bit of tweaking, I've got a pretty nice compromise going on (archipelagos with playable civs and a few rivers) - mostly, you *need* mountains (elevation > 300?) for dwarves to live AND rivers to form, but as long as the elevation range weight is weighted towards lowlands, it'll still be mostly islands. Also, make sure you remove all 'minimum (biome type) squares', except for minimum low-elevation squares (which should be decently large), and tweak the minimum rivers and mountains required.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now to figure out y and x variance to make a proper string of islands...
(Will include world gen parameters thing when I figure out how to do so; above is a medium sized world)
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bg

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Re: How to Archipelago?
« Reply #11 on: March 25, 2012, 02:53:10 pm »

i played around with mesh too, but most of the time civs end up on mainland,
thus there is much slaughtering of rocs. ended up turning megabeasts up to 64,
to get some breeding pairs. :<

incidentally, how do you get those big screenshots? export map image seems to give the tiny map view only.

EDIT: somewhat disappointed by finding this bug report:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/print_bug_page.php?bug_id=5327
« Last Edit: March 25, 2012, 03:52:56 pm by bg »
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