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[MDFification]

At some point in the future, I'm going to try embarking in a world that never genned any dwarven civilizations. The goal is to build a dwarven society from the ground up; no skilled migrants, no dwarven caravan, only fortress-born dwarves and a rigid clan-based hierarchy.

I know that this is possible to generate, at least, but can't seem to find anywhere whether I can actually embark in it. Does anyone know if this is possible? If not, I'll just have to try to generate 1 dwarven civ and hope it dies - in previous versions this worked, but in the current version this seems to lead to 'ghost populations' not associated with any site that make the no-migrants (beyond the first year, which is hardcoded) thing impossible.

If I have to go back to .34 to make this work, I will, since the end goal is a fort I can tell stories about here, not to just revel in the new version. But I'd also like to do an above-ground fort, and the new version makes that significantly more challenging due to climbing enemies. IDK.

[NullForceOmega]

Maybe with embark anywhere, but other than that slim possibility, no, this cannot be done, in order to embark there must have been dwarves in your world at some point.

[MDFification]

Did some testing and it seems that you're right.

I wonder how to guarantee that 0 dwarves survive worldgen then? You can't just go and kill them all yourself as an adventurer anymore - there's a bug that everyone you interact with gets duplicated, so you can end up with 7 cloned followers (or cloned corpses) because it'll just spawn a new guy with the exact same profile every time he dies or leaves the site. And seemingly, even with 0 sites remaining, you frequently get dwarves who have survived the utter destruction of their civilization and spent the past few years doing... well not much of anything.

Just mod it out I guess? I could make dwarves not reproduce, wait for them to die of old age, then change the raws back to default and embark...

[NullForceOmega]

Yes, you could accomplish this with modding, the only requirement to embark is for the dwarves to have existed, so by doing as you suggested (and possibly lower maxage to something silly, like 2) you should be able to ensure that you have a dead civ to start from.  (Don't forget to revert all changes you make before embark tho'.)

[wierd]

You can reliably ensure that dwarves are extinct just by disallowing cavern water layers, which prevents the caverns from growing food plants, which prevents early settlements having food values, and ensures starvation.

It DOES however, effectively prevent you from ever having cavern flora to work with, unless you use DFHack to spawn the items afterwards, and prevents you from ever having cavern fungus unless you initiate it with DFHack.

At least, this has always worked for me in the past.

[Space Wizard]

I'm very interested in producing a 0 dwarf world with minimal modding, I will be monitoring this thread. I have had similar ambitions recently as far as building dwarven civilizations from the ground up.

So basically, if I can generate one dwarven civilization and it dies, there won't be a dwarven caravan? I don't mind preventing migrants through implementing a population cap that still allows birth, as I already to that for FPS reasons, if ghost-civ migration is a problem, I'm just wondering if ghost-civ caravans are also a problem.

[NullForceOmega]

Shouldn't be, if the civ has no pop and no sites, I don't think it can send a caravan.

[Max™]

We did a little of this work in the megabeast thread.

Reducing the number of sites so they can't spread helps a lot.

[Amperzand]

I've got a worldgen setup that seems to guarantee dwarven extinction fairly quickly, at least the twice I've tried it. It'd take some time for me to find the exact settings I used, but hey. It also extinguishes most other things, so be warned.

[escondida]

Shouldn't be, if the civ has no pop and no sites, I don't think it can send a caravan.

Can't it? Last time I tried to rebuild an extinct civilization, merchants and migrants (and no, not just the first two waves) were freshly generated at the moment they were due to enter the map. Granted, that was a few point releases back. If this bug has been fixed, I'd love to know.

[escondida]

More germane to the actual topic, I've found that increasing the amount of savagery by tweaking the proportion of savage vs. non-savage areas and adding a lot of megabeasts and titans will often end with at least one extinct dwarven civ.

[Space Wizard]

I've got a worldgen setup that seems to guarantee dwarven extinction fairly quickly, at least the twice I've tried it. It'd take some time for me to find the exact settings I used, but hey. It also extinguishes most other things, so be warned.

The amount of beasts and titans is very relevant to the survival of civilizations, it seems. I've found a good way to create a map with extinct dwarven civilizations but surviving other civilizations is to tweak these numbers, along with the number of civs and number of sites, until you produce a map in which dwarven civilization dies out around 5-10% of the time that you generate the world. This gives you a good enough chance to get a decently generated world with no dwarves and other civilizations thriving.

[Amperzand]

Sounds about right.

[Space Wizard]

So I've been experimenting with this for a few hours now, man is it difficult to get a good solid world for this project. I succeeded early on, had I known how challenging it was I would've made duplications of the world, haven't been able to recreate it properly with it's seeds. I already ruined it's integrity by putting 7 dwarves in it in a situation that I had to abandon instantly for FPS reasons(I go for a 5x5 embark every now and then when I forget my machine can't really handle it).

Going for a world with 0 dwarves and at least three digits of other races(5 digits of goblins seems entirely consistent). When dwarf civs are reduced to ruins, it seems that there are usually a few stragglers, and most worlds with only dwarf ruins tend to have <20 dwarves, but very rarely 0. I've seen some pretty funny population combinations though in all of this. Two dwarves, no humans, one elf, four kobolds and 23k goblins. The worst was hundreds+ of everything else and a single surviving dwarf, probably either an axelord or a child somewhere deep in some dwarven ruins, definitely completely insane. I'll get my good gen sometime.

As for an unrelated question, what is going on exactly when world gen produces tiles of white forests on the map now and then? It's visually unappealing.

[Master Catfish]

I'm also quite interested in playing a game where my fort comprises all of the surviving civilization.

You can reliably ensure that dwarves are extinct just by disallowing cavern water layers, which prevents the caverns from growing food plants, which prevents early settlements having food values, and ensures starvation.

The only way I could find to disallow water in caverns was to set "Cavern Layer Water Max" to 0, which seems to prevent dwarves from ever existing.  I tried this on a few world gens and found when I tried to play that my only options were 'Legends' or 'Adventurer' (the latter having no option for playing a dwarf).

Yes, you could accomplish this with modding, the only requirement to embark is for the dwarves to have existed, so by doing as you suggested (and possibly lower maxage to something silly, like 2) you should be able to ensure that you have a dead civ to start from.  (Don't forget to revert all changes you make before embark tho'.)

I tried setting the max age for dwarfs to 2 seemed not to have an effect on world gen.  I was hoping they'd all die out by year 3, but to no avail.

Personally, I'm hesitant to use a method that kills off 10% of civilizations, since I'm pretty picky about what worlds to play in.

Might editing an existing civilization and detaching their brains work?  I seem to recall doing that to fix an issue I had a long time ago with a swarm of hundreds of lag-inducing giant mosquitos, which killed them all instantly.

[Edit: Found the thread <http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100907.msg2990614#msg2990614> but now I wonder if this fix might only be relevant to loaded creatures?]