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[vanatteveldt]

When I think about dwarven fortresses, I think about steep cliffs and gorges; helms deep like valleys with a single access side to defend; towering mountains with small paths and passes; huge cliff faces in which the entrance is dug; soaring rivers in spring that carry everyhing in their course, etc etc

In DF, you have gentle slopes, little hillocks, and gentle streams, sometimes smaller, sometimes larger, but never threatening. Every hillside can be walked on and there are no natural defenses save what you hack away yourself. In a sense, we should call it hobbit village rather than dwarf fortress.

As far as I know, the only impressive terrain features in DF come from streams meeting, and very seldom a lone stream in a canyon.

IMHO, dwarf fortress terrain needs to be made less gentle, especially the more mountainous parts:

1) a lot less slopes should have ramps, and there should be more sheer drops. If you look at a real mountain, you will see that most mountains are accessible along some sides, but have cliffs on other sides. An example is Scotland's Ben Nevis, which as a mountain is nowhere near to being extreme; it has a relatively gentle south and east face but in the north has mainly cliffs that are inaccessible except to dedicated mountaineers, and certainly not to an army wearing full plate armour. On a smaller scale, even the accessible sides have a lot of parts that are unpathable and you need to walk in between the steep parts.

2) terrain should have consequences, both for hauling and for military. Moving heavy stuff should cost much more time/energy along slopes, both upwards and to a lesser extent downwards. Armour should have greater impact on movement along slopes and staircases. Fighting from higher ground should give advantages. Presumably, dwarfs should be hindered less by the terrain penalties than elves/humans/goblins, as they are supposed to be mountain creatures, after all.

3) climate should be more altitude dependent. A mountain should be snow capped in many climates, and winters in the mountains should feature a lot of snow and even passes that become inaccessible. Dwarfs out in the cold on a mountain top in mid-winter should become unhappy if not frost-bitten. Streams already freeze in winter in some climates, but they should flood over in spring, and in some climates there should be seasonal streams. There should also be more variation in streams, not just either flat or huge waterfall, but also streams that run down a mountain side or in between mountains, losing altitude as they go.

Anyway, I know the list of desiderata for DF is large, but this is something that has been annoying me....

[Ravendarksky]

Use PerfectWorldDF to generate the type of world you want.
Use IsoWorld to find the embark spot you want
Use embark anywhere if it won't let you embark there.

I suggest using a powerful computer and LARGE embark areas.

My most recent embark has  34z level sheer cliff face drop into a lake.

[mirrizin]

I like these thoughts.

[PDF urist master]

should probably go in the suggestions section.

[TheOnlySolitaire]

To some extent you are right, but there is already controls to change that in the vanilla game:

Changing the elevation mesh sizes makes a huge difference (I think its off by default), but by simply increasing the weight ration on the lowest and highest ratios (20-40 and 80-100 iirc) and/or decreasing those in between will increase the number of extreme cliffs and gorges. Adding more layers above ground and layer 1 seems to increase high cliffs too, and dont forget to turn off erosion completely. And that is just with standard vanilla df worldgen parameters.

With Worldpainter, I often paint large swathes of flat land, say using a variable of 300/400. Then set the variable to 1.000 and blob extreme mountains in, which results in flat cliffs and gorges. To make it look really really good you need to spend time 'painting the world' of course, but just simply blobbing adds in extreme variations in terrain, it stands to reason that using a more reasonable value of say 600-700 (big hills) would net you some Ben Nevis size ''mountains'', and the elevation meshes mentioned above would get rid of the soft slopes and proliferation of ramps.

On your second point: Material weight already matters, the addition of upward and downward variation would be interesting, but wouldnt add much to the game really, but it probably would get added eventually. But the 'highground' advantage isn't so much of an advantage in real life anyway, and as for moving upwards in armour - from a lot of experience I can say that in reality most armour is heavy sure, but the weight is spread over your whole body, and the exertion you need to move upwards isn't that big of a difference to warrant being a part of the game to be honest, that's not even mentioning how easy it would be to exploit by players. Just off the top of my head i can imagine entrances to the fortress being long ramps/stairways made excessively long just to make the opponents fall unconscious from exertion. It's a nice idea though.

The sloping rivers idea is something I'd like to see too, but because of the way DF handles Z-levels and liquids I'm not sure that it could be done.

Anyway, give those parameters for worldgen a test and tweak it how you like, but what you seem to be after in terms of terrain is possible, as I have it on most of my worlds.

[Larix]

Yes, playing with elevation grid allows for some pretty wild layouts. You can pull numbers out of a hat for the weighting, the world creator allegedly (and empirically) just uses the sum total of the weight numbers as total - i.e. you can scale the weightings (assuming five values, can't remember if that's right):
15-20-30-20-15 or 3-4-6-4-3 and get the same results.

For more extreme terrain, increase the weightings of the very low and very high elevations, and of course check cliff indicators on the embark screen to actually have the Cliffs of Insanity you created on your maps.

The craziest i've got so far was a 120z-cliff. Lots of fun. Incidentally, elevation _does_ influence weather; a bit; you need to go up about a 100z to get a notably longer freezing period.

[Thormgrim]

this
I used to build fortresses at the top of long, dramatic staircases before I came to realize that the invading goblins can run up the side of a mountain fully armed and armored without stopping for a breath.
I used to hike around in my area (Camelback, Squaw Peak, etc.) and look around and think "This would be cool, but impossible in DF"

[WanderingKid]

this
I used to build fortresses at the top of long, dramatic staircases before I came to realize that the invading goblins can run up the side of a mountain fully armed and armored without stopping for a breath.
I used to hike around in my area (Camelback, Squaw Peak, etc.) and look around and think "This would be cool, but impossible in DF"

Awesome!  Another Phoenician!  Howdy Thorm.

[Button]

What TheOnlySolitaire said, but you can also turn off 'periodically erode cliffs' in advance world gen.

[Ravendarksky]

To some extent you are right, but there is already controls to change that in the vanilla game:

Changing the elevation mesh sizes makes a huge difference (I think its off by default), but by simply increasing the weight ration on the lowest and highest ratios (20-40 and 80-100 iirc) and/or decreasing those in between will increase the number of extreme cliffs and gorges. Adding more layers above ground and layer 1 seems to increase high cliffs too, and dont forget to turn off erosion completely. And that is just with standard vanilla df worldgen parameters.

With Worldpainter, I often paint large swathes of flat land, say using a variable of 300/400. Then set the variable to 1.000 and blob extreme mountains in, which results in flat cliffs and gorges. To make it look really really good you need to spend time 'painting the world' of course, but just simply blobbing adds in extreme variations in terrain, it stands to reason that using a more reasonable value of say 600-700 (big hills) would net you some Ben Nevis size ''mountains'', and the elevation meshes mentioned above would get rid of the soft slopes and proliferation of ramps.

On your second point: Material weight already matters, the addition of upward and downward variation would be interesting, but wouldnt add much to the game really, but it probably would get added eventually. But the 'highground' advantage isn't so much of an advantage in real life anyway, and as for moving upwards in armour - from a lot of experience I can say that in reality most armour is heavy sure, but the weight is spread over your whole body, and the exertion you need to move upwards isn't that big of a difference to warrant being a part of the game to be honest, that's not even mentioning how easy it would be to exploit by players. Just off the top of my head i can imagine entrances to the fortress being long ramps/stairways made excessively long just to make the opponents fall unconscious from exertion. It's a nice idea though.

The sloping rivers idea is something I'd like to see too, but because of the way DF handles Z-levels and liquids I'm not sure that it could be done.

Anyway, give those parameters for worldgen a test and tweak it how you like, but what you seem to be after in terms of terrain is possible, as I have it on most of my worlds.

You sound like someone who really knows how to gen worlds! Do you think you could make me a lonely mountain type embark? I'm looking for a fairly large (5x5, 5x6, 6x6, 5x7) embark with a flat plain all around (360 degrees) with a mountain in the middle, Ideally the mountain would be 100 tiles or less and rise up to a small peak over at least 10 z levels. I've tried the worldgen cookbook thread but not had any luck there, not much luck getting one myself!

[itg]

this
I used to build fortresses at the top of long, dramatic staircases before I came to realize that the invading goblins can run up the side of a mountain fully armed and armored without stopping for a breath.
I used to hike around in my area (Camelback, Squaw Peak, etc.) and look around and think "This would be cool, but impossible in DF"

Awesome!  Another Phoenician!  Howdy Thorm.

Make that three of us!

[Thormgrim]

howdy!
maybe we need a Camelback challenge... load up with copper helm, breastplate, sword and GCS silk socks, shoes and thong and run up to the top of Camelback.  When you get there, see if you're ready to fight even a Dwarf child...

[Button]

You sound like someone who really knows how to gen worlds! Do you think you could make me a lonely mountain type embark? I'm looking for a fairly large (5x5, 5x6, 6x6, 5x7) embark with a flat plain all around (360 degrees) with a mountain in the middle, Ideally the mountain would be 100 tiles or less and rise up to a small peak over at least 10 z levels. I've tried the worldgen cookbook thread but not had any luck there, not much luck getting one myself!

I'm not who you were talking to, but is there a particular raw set you use? I like to play on embarks similar to what you're looking for, and have been meaning to experiment with the world gen parameters some more to generate them. If I can gen you something in my experiments, I'd prefer to use raws you wouldn't hate to use .

PS are volcanos OK?

[Russell.s]

You sound like someone who really knows how to gen worlds! Do you think you could make me a lonely mountain type embark? I'm looking for a fairly large (5x5, 5x6, 6x6, 5x7) embark with a flat plain all around (360 degrees) with a mountain in the middle, Ideally the mountain would be 100 tiles or less and rise up to a small peak over at least 10 z levels. I've tried the worldgen cookbook thread but not had any luck there, not much luck getting one myself!

I'm not who you were talking to, but is there a particular raw set you use? I like to play on embarks similar to what you're looking for, and have been meaning to experiment with the world gen parameters some more to generate them. If I can gen you something in my experiments, I'd prefer to use raws you wouldn't hate to use .

PS are volcanos OK?

I'd like something like this too . I know you weren't directly the question to me, but I prefer a world with moderate evil (not absolutely covered), and 2 relatively open cavern layers. I find the third layer doesn't add much for me.
Just my preferences .

[TheDarkStar]

From what I've seen, massive cliff faces are easy to find. Just look for a place with extreme cliffs (press tab when you are looking at the embark area a few times), and you should have a decent place. Deserts tend to be very flat, and volcanoes also make nice places. If you are lucky (or scouted around with adventure mode), you can also find caves and lairs. Finally, there are "mysterious underground structures" in the lower caves in some embark spots.