You don't seem to understand the purpose of a purge. When Toady wipes out a section of derail, you're not supposed to bring it back up again, that's the whole point 
IF PTs were mentioned, never saw it. I was
trying to apologise for whatever part I may have played in the drama, although I suspect that what became manifest was my curiosity as to where the cut-off had occurred. Which is something I had meant to keep to myself, but the fingers they may have kept on typing, undirected. Mostly, though, I thought I could put my off-topic apology for off-topicality, in there, because the majority of my post was most definitely on-topic. To make it totally obvious,
this I'm quarantining as a bit of 'FYI only' off-topicality which would be best to take replies to PM for.
I'm not sure how you're generating worlds, but you can select ore scarcity now and that can reflect the amount of iron ores available.
When I've generated worlds (in .34 and in the later stages of .31) using that "tabular" form start with the "age of world" choice and end with the "mineral scarcity" one, since my first couple of no-iron worlds I've
always set the scarcity to maximum (erm, maximum
non-scarcity, that is... so that I always got loads of other ores, it was just iron that's notably missing).
And it's only in the latest (.34.06) worldgens, as mentioned, that I've actually found iron ore at all. Which I've been taking as signs that something's been fixed regarding undue scarcity.
I've not been using anything like Prospector, to check this, but in previous fortresses I've been pretty thorough in my digging. Not for ore discovery, but because I've been digging into large volumes in the first place (see
this map upload as an immature example of the kind of thorough digging-through that I have been doing). And no iron is found.
Plus my civilisation obviously has no iron because of what's available (and not) in the trading menus. i.e. only
steel anvils, and never any ferrous ore stone-types, but flux ones whenever I've thought to check.
Yet with my most recent fort I dug straight into magnetite. And that's with the same sort of "choice of embark area", so I'm fairly sure I've not got an inadvertent predilection for low-iron geologies.
Still, there's a possibility that I've just been unlucky. Or that I've been lucky in the more recent examples (after habitually aiming for iron-poor strata systems). Still doesn't really explain the home-civ scarcities. I've even been tempted to save-scum the embarks and try each and every home civilisation on the max-scale worlds to compare availabilities of iron (and other things) between the various possible home-civs. Maybe another time. I probably still have some pre-embark copies of worldgens hanging around for the prior versions. Sometimes I've used these to have a separate Adventure Mode around the exact same source world as I'm putting a fortress in (just for fun), without abandoning said fort or otherwise DFHacking things to let me do so.
(In most of my earlier .31 (and previous) worldgens, I was of course using the fully customizable worldgen (choosing Pocket/whatever-sized worlds, on upwards, island or non-island versions) and if I ever
did customise the worlds at all, it'd be only increasing the interstitial distances between cavern/cavern-like layers, and then not always. I'm starting to wonder now if the transition between iron-normal and iron-scarce embarks actually transitioned at the time as I changed the worldgen creation method to this other.)
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Topic: This new metal system makes me rage. (Read 16233 times)