I seem to gen a lot of worlds that have no lignite or bituminous coal for forging.
Current world gen has none on any squares. And that means 1 for 1 wood use for a forested area. There is a volcano but no wood.
The concern is that there are two civilizations showing but one has just 1 square and the other appears to be dead.
Is this just bad luck in genning a world?
Not really bad luck. As per the wiki, Lignite and Bituminous Coal are found in sedimentary layers. Volcanos require igneous extrusive layers. They are often mutually exclusive in DF, that is, it's rare/challenging/difficult to find them in the same embark tile.
The lack of wood is caused by low rain, low drain. Increase rain/drain, you'll have (yes, literally) thousands of logs available on the tiniest embark.
With multi-tile trees on even a shrubland embark, there's often so many logs, it's absurd/ridiculous/comical. To say nothing of a temperate coniferous forest or tropical moist broadleaf forest.
Finally, people often want a volcano so they can use magma forges. Ok, fair enough. You can also build magma forges on the magma sea. It is trivial to generate a world with magma within 20 Z of the embark level. It's often closer to dig straight down 20Z than it is to build a magma forge on a surface volcano, which are almost always more than 20 steps away, on the surface.
Point being? If the point of the volcano is to have a magma forge, you can achieve that goal faster & quicker with a shallow world. The best part is, without the need for a volcano, you can reduce volcanism to zero and generate 100% sedimentary worlds and get all those tasty things like iron bearing ore, 4/5 OTHER kinds of flux, and coal and lignite by the thousands.
Then you can focus on fun things like finding embarks with all of that PLUS adding large amounts of bauxite, kimberllite, and similar for rare & precious stone generation.