Im done with zombie hair and that idiotic crap, but normal embarks are just boring me to hell.
Is there an evil embark that doesnt zombify every turd you drop but still is somewhat challenging?
At the moment i see either mind-numbingly lame or "fucked-by-mechanics"-unfun.
Looking for a solid middle ground...
I tend to stay away from evil embarks. They're good for the occasional challenge, but for sustained play i find them too annoying to deal with.
Evilness can be fiddled around in worldgen, but i don't know if it's possible to make e.g. raising of the dead less frequent specifically without defanging all evil areas completely: a region with high "desired evil squares" counts but all specific evilness options set to zero (regional interactions, disturbances (? i've no idea what this actually does, might be totally unrelated?), evil rains, evil clouds) produced a world mostly covered in evil biomes, but a quick check suggested i was getting completely ordinary wilderness with no effects.
You can pick challenging embark locations without resorting to evil embarks - extremely cold, extremely hot, little usable water, massive aquifers, nearby towers, start close to a goblin civ you're already at WAR with or get "lucky" and find a dwarf civ that starts out at war with the elves...
Deadly evil embark locations are only a serious gameplay challenge for the first month of a fortress - either you get yourself dug in, or you don't. After that i find it turns into drudgery, staying alive, snatching the occasional item or migrant from the surface when the coast's clear, but when you have husking clouds or similar nonsense to deal with, you practically play fully turtled forever, which i find supremely boring.