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[Halfling]

Spoiler: "Speculation about worldgen methods 1" (click to show/hide)

I was trying to help out, but it didn't work. However, the following was reaffirmed:

• If there's no layer stone on the map, the surface will flash in gorgeous eyesight-ruining colors and you get the pebbles and boulders made of everything at once
• This seems to be specifically related to that there has to be a stone with the tag [IS_STONE] and the layer tag you are embarking on, such as [METAMORPHIC]. The fact that the stone exists on the map does not help - you can make all layer stones [DEEP_SPECIAL] so they should be on the map but not near the surface and the surface will still flash
• Having non-layer stones such as olivine does not seem to help either

Removing layer stone altogether furthermore causes DF to crash when entering fortress mode, without leaving anything in errorlog.txt (assuming you removed all references to stone - it does note those referring to something missing if they are left in), which irritates me to no end as I would like to understand what is going on.

There's two alternative solutions. One, manually change every flashing tile on the surface into something else with dfhack. It may seem like a lot of work but you only have to do it once, and pebbles aren't that frequent. Then I would assume you can with correct modding have the earth itself consist of ONLY clays and sands with mineral veins in them. Or two, make a tileset that makes pebbles and boulders invisible. I would assume this is as simple as changing init to simple ground and replacing the period character as well as the infinity symbol with transparency. This will also change the way the fortress interior looks; you could compensate by adding background color(?).

Either way, vaporstone is an easier fix, but it's not as atmospheric.

Added: if dfhack is easily run from command line, could probably relatively easily write a script to do this for you

[falafelsandwich]

Thank you Talanic for the very informative responses.

So... is the dream of the entire fort being a treefarm out?

Use a modded race (Kobolds, Humans) that is mostly identical to dwarves
Remove MINING as a possible labour
Build tree farms

[falafelsandwich]

After all these alarming facts, I am quickly giving up the dreams of tower-caps in bedrooms, and will gladly accept our new vaporstone overlords.

If you're in, sign ups begin now!

[Halfling]

Not going to take a turn, but I finally managed to create entire mountains made out of only clay that do not flash (I briefly had flashing mountains made of EVERYTHING in the process, it was stunning). Everything that is normally stone is made out of clay, all the way down, including the caverns. The clay leaves clay boulders when mined, similar to ones that you would get with the collect clay job, that can be used for everything that clay can be used for but cannot be used to make stone items. I have no idea how this affects civilizations. Interested, or will you go with vaporstone?

[laularukyrumo]

For clarification: A few people seemed to think we meant "no digging". This is not true. We were merely proposing a fort where nothing was built from stone.

Also sure, sign me in :>
Dorfname: Laularu
Profession: Chef/brewer/farmer/something along those lines. Food is important!

Looking forward to where this inevitable trainwreck goes.

NINJA-EDIT: Ooh. This is something I hadn't thought about. Did you do it via DFhack, or through raw-edits? I'm also tempted to run SCIENCE on just what happens with the flashing omnistone... like, what happens when you dig it out or whatever. Definitely a curiosity.

[Halfling]

Spoiler: "Speculation about worldgen methods 2" (click to show/hide)

I at first removed all normal layer stones* and gave clay the IS_STONE, METAMORPHIC, IGNEOUS_INTRUSIVE, IGNEOUS_EXTRUSIVE and SEDIMENTARY tags for worldgen. After worldgen I embarked on a mountain to save the clay mountain. Then I removed the IS_STONE tag so that clay can't be used to make rock mugs and so on and loaded the save; this caused the entire mountain to turn into flashing everything. It's very psychedelic when a square is electrum for one millisecond and cobaltite the next, and I wonder myself how that would work out when digging. Anyway, since it started to look like the SOIL tag is the problem and not the IS_STONE tag, after that I removed the SOIL tag too, and all this lead to a clay mountain, clay on the embark screen too, with "clay boulders" on the surface that do not flash. Other soil types like sand are present, but stone types are not. I tested it to make sure; the clay cannot be used in stone reactions, can be used in clay reactions and is... well, clay, not some magic material that you might expect.

Further investigation should test if it is necessary for clay to have the SOIL and IS_STONE tags during worldgen for this to work, so you don't have to edit them manually.

Edit: To clarify, this variant of clay also does grow plants despite not having the soil tag. It started growing underground flora immediately after breaching the caverns and the entire "mountain" is covered in trees. There are also mineral veins running in it (native gold at least). Possibly the SOIL tag being present at embark caused the entire clay layer to be marked with a hidden "plants can grow here" attribute and this did not change upon removing the tag later, since it's not possible for the removal of the IS_STONE to have done that as the mountain was already covered in trees at embark.

* Rather than just deleting them, it is much smarter to delete their layering tags and giving them DEEP_SURFACE. My civilization had normal access to metals this way.

[falafelsandwich]

So what you're saying is... you have a map ready to go for us? 

[Halfling]

Edit to above, repeated here for safety: Do not delete layer stone, make it DEEP_SURFACE instead to avoid creating patches of *EVERYTHING* "rock" when magma cools.

So what you're saying is... you have a map ready to go for us? 

Essentially. What I'm saying is I can have any kind of map that you want ready to go for you today. Tell me what biome(s) you want and what minerals you want a chance to have in the clay (this will not guarantee you will have them, but makes it a possibility), and I'll do it. It'll only cost you... a planter or a brewer.

[Njals]

I'm in.

Njals, male, diagnostician/surgeon/suturer/bone setter (maybe 5/2/1/2 or 3/3/2/2, I dunno). He can be one of the starting miners.

[CognitiveDissonance]

Oh hell, I'm in.

I also vote for Halfling's map

[joeclark77]

The idea here was to make a fort out of wood, metal ore, metals, ceramics, and glass.  All of those materials are limited, but you always have an infinite supply of stone, which can make things too easy.  By removing that resource, the subsequent shortages and closer focus on the economy will make things more Fun!

You've got it backwards:  wood, ceramics, and glass are infinitely renewable.  Stone, ore, and metals are finite (although certainly they'll last longer than any succession fort is likely to survive).

[Halfling]

Well, either way, I started working on a way to make the ores follow normal distributions while all stone is different types of clay. Currently testing, attempt 1 lead to there being no usable stone in the entire world which might be a bit too extreme.

[Halfling]

Spoiler: "Speculation about worldgen methods 3" (click to show/hide)

K. I've been testing this method on and off much of the day, and unfortunately I have to say I am unable to get it to work reliably. Best case scenario, it generates something that is exactly as if the stone had been replaced by clay. Furthermore I've also been able to generate working maps made out of sand. However, the problem is, I am unable to get it to work reliably. About half of the time it either does not generate surface minerals or does not generate deep minerals, which means ores will be 30+ z-levels deep or in the most superficial layers only. It can create massive veins of everything or almost no minerals at all. It occasionally generates bugged, weird soil types that turn into each other when you touch them, such as sand that becomes clay when dug. This may also be due to inconsistency on my part; I just started trying different things out randomly and didn't keep notes, and it is possible what I did initially is not what is below. The below does work for some definition of "work", though.

While I really enjoy the challenge, I'm out of time and my day off is almost gone. I won't work on this anymore. So here's my suggestions:
a) I can generate a fort for you that works, your choice of name, on a biome of your choice, and post a save with an active embark
b) You can try your luck on a few embarks and see what happens
c) Somebody who knows better can maybe make this work every time
d) Back to the vaporstone or some other idea

My notes:
To mimic gem, ore and stone distribution with distribution of different types of usable clay, in inorganic_stone_gem and inorganic_stone_mineral:
1. Replace all "ENVIRONMENT_SPEC:" with "ENVIRONMENT:"
2. Replace all ENVIRONMENT_SPEC arguments with corresponding LAYER (e.g. GRANITE -> IGNEOUS_INTRUSIVE), except when ENVIRONMENT_SPEC argument was a metallic ore, then revert to ENVIRONMENT_SPEC:ORE. Remove doubled tags.

To remove layer and non-ore stones, in inorganic_stone_mineral:
3. Set all not usable ore minerals to DEEP_SURFACE only
In inorganic_stone_layer:
4. Remove all layer tags, set all layer stones to DEEP_SURFACE only

To create a world made only out of clay containing the above defined distribution of ore, in inorganic_stone_soil:
5. Give all clays IS_STONE
6. Fire clay is now IGNEOUS_INTRUSIVE and IGNEOUS_EXTRUSIVE
7. Clay and sandy clay are now SEDIMENTARY
8. Clay loam and silty clay are now METAMORPHIC

In material_tempelate_default
9. Gaseous soil is now "dust clouds" and not "boiling magma"

The only stone available on the embark site is in the form of (usable) metallic ore. Ores follow approximately the same rules of distribution as in vanilla DF: alluvial ores are still found exactly where they were before, and others will be found roughly where they were before, i.e. sedimentary layers have lots of iron, etc. Obsidian still lines magma pipes and can still be made by casting. Cave vegetation should grow everywhere once caverns are breached. So does surface vegetation - clay mountains (mounds?) are not bare, they are covered in trees.
1. Find site and embark. The first thing you'll probably notice is lot of things flash in a psychedelia of colors and they actually are every material in the universe at once. Don't be hypnotized by them, and for the love of Armok don't touch anything, just save and exit immediately.
2. Go to data > save > region folder > raw > objects > inorganic_stone_soil.txt and manually remove both IS_STONE and SOIL tokens (sic!) from the following: fire clay, silty clay, sandy clay, clay loam and clay. Save file. You only need to do this once per embark.*
3. Resume from save and play normally. The world sure looks boring now. If you want to start a new fort, reverse step 2, then go to step 1. If you want to gen a new world, reverse step 2 but only add IS_STONE, copy these raws over your defaults, gen (ignoring the occasional crash), add SOIL tokens to fully reverse step 2, and go to step 1.

Plz advise.

[Halfling]

El oh el, as soon as I type out something dramatic like that, I figure out exactly what is going on without even thinking. My misguided attempts at replacing stone with clay were failing, because, even though if you do the operations in specific order you can OCCASIONALLY (and I don't care to investigate this further, managed to make it happen randomly via multiple saves between operations) preserve the type of layer "stone", typically first generating something with [IS_STONE] and [SOIL] tags and then removing both tags completely eradicates that material and replaces it with a random soil. That's why it was generating random results. The mineral randomness was probably due to DF wanting to have lots of minerals to play with for generating veins.

So having discovered that, it's freaking obvious. Here's how you can completely destroy all stone that you don't want and replace it with a random soil, and that is the actual soil, not some bastardized version of it:
1. Add the [SOIL] tag to the layer stone you want to destroy before worldgen, gen and embark. Easiest done with automatic find & replace.
2. After embark, save, remove both [IS_STONE] and [SOIL] tags and reload save. Ta-da! It's gone, replaced with a random soil.

Since it turns out that does not actually nuke cluster stone and this is all getting a little bit out of hand already, I'm going to just generate a world for you where cluster stone is modded into something else, and upload it, and another file you can use to patch it to destroy stone. Uploading in a bit.

I'll just cull my previous lengthy posts so they don't ruin this thread.

[falafelsandwich]

You've got it backwards:  wood, ceramics, and glass are infinitely renewable.  Stone, ore, and metals are finite (although certainly they'll last longer than any succession fort is likely to survive).

Well, ceramics and glass take time and fuel to make, so they're not as trivial as stone, especially if there's a wood limit.

Thanks for the offer Halfling, would love to have you set up an embark site.  Could you find and convert a Joyous Wilds for us?  As long as there's sand I'll be happy.