Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Pukako]

So, I embarked on what appeared to be a volcanic glacier, with no vegetation around.

Actually, there's precious little ice, but no trees.

Finally, when the population has used up my precious cargo of imported logs, I've tunnelled down to the caverns, to find them muddy but with nothing growing - no fungi, no trees, no shrubs...

Aside from having to rely on caravans to bring wood, and not being able to support grazing animals, it's not that bad, but does this sort of thing happen often, and, if so, why?

[NecroRebel]

It happens rarely.

All of the underground plants except for blood thorns occur only in wet biomes. Although they're not usually apparent, there are biomes underground (they aren't in the same places surface biomes are, either). If there is no water anywhere in a particular underground biome, that biome is dry, so no plants except for blood thorns will grow in them, and since blood thorns occur only on the third layer, that means that a dry biome for the first 2 layers will be completely barren. I don't recall whether there's different biomes for each layer or not, so digging to the other 2 caverns may bear fruit.

If you change the world gen settings so that the minimum water is higher than 0, such things will be even less common than usual and perhaps impossible.

[i2amroy]

It's a side effect of not having water in your caverns. Try digging down to the deeper ones, since the levels are generated separately there is only an extremely small chance that all three lack water. You can prevent this in the future by changing the "Layer Water Minimum:X" (Or maybe it was "Cavern Layer Water Minimum", something like that) to a number that is higher then zero. Personally I prefer having the minimum set to something like 10, and the maximum to something like 90. This ensures that I'll always be guaranteed to have some water in my caverns, but it also guarantees that I'm not going to end up with a cavern layer that is 100% water without any land in it.

Edit: Dang Ninja!

[Pukako]

Thanks guys - but there's mud - doesn't that mean there was water, once, or does it need to be real, wet water?

[Garath]

needs real water

[i2amroy]

It needs to be real water. If you penetrate a lower level with water (or reach a level that has blood thorn trees, those can grow even in waterless caverns) then those plants should start to grow on the empty level above, but until that point your cavern will remain empty.