Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kaiser Reinhard]

Usually worldgen slows down to a crawl for me after 300 years or so, and after 40d I've never seen a single world get past the age of myth. I can't imagine how long the default worldgen params would take to get to 1050 years, especially since I love big maps.

Other than that, usually I increase minerals a little, max out embark points and increase number of good squares, megabeasts, titans and volcanoes.

[Shonai_Dweller]

In 40.24 I'd choose max everything, so 1050 years. That was usually pretty good. Large worlds give plenty of room for stuff to happen without everyone becoming extinct or all the beasts dying.

Since 42.x worldgen seems a lot slower on my pc so I dropped to 550.

[Bumber]

Usually about 300 years, and I never play anything larger than a Small world. I'm pretty sure world size affects in-game FPS, ever since the active world.

[Greiger]

300-400 years usually.   
* I also usually like to generate a tall map (whatever the large size is for height, and then the medium size for width.)
* Poles north and south
* 1 complete edge ocean (preferably the east or west side)
* large evil and good biomes to 0 (otherwise it almost always makes that ocean evil or good.) unless I'm looking for an evil ocean.
* 2x default volcanoes and mountain peaks
* mineral scarcity to 1000
* Werebeasts to 0 (Currently I feel they come way too early to mount an effective defense without sealing up or spamming traps, two things I vowed never to do. And death by RNG grinds my gears)

[Shonai_Dweller]

Usually about 300 years, and I never play anything larger than a Small world. I'm pretty sure world size affects in-game FPS, ever since the active world.

Just been testing stuff on a small world and it seems to be no different on my PC. Calendar and general save/load times are much slower in large worlds but  fortress lasts pretty much the same before it begins to slowdown.

[Baffler]

I usually let it run for about 500 years. My go-to setup is a small world, with fewer civilizations, caves visible, and a higher site cap, but otherwise default.

[Johuotar]

In the older versions, 1050 years. These days I usually go for 150-250.

[Untrustedlife]

250 years, usually.

[exdeath]

I usually start my advanced worldgen parameters, that is the average (rounded to nearest and rounding up if .5) of all current advanced world gen parameters.
I made some edits to this averaged parameter thing.
The size is 513 x 257

[Salmeuk]

300-400 years usually.   
* I also usually like to generate a tall map (whatever the large size is for height, and then the medium size for width.)
* Poles north and south
* 1 complete edge ocean (preferably the east or west side)
* large evil and good biomes to 0 (otherwise it almost always makes that ocean evil or good.) unless I'm looking for an evil ocean.
* 2x default volcanoes and mountain peaks
* mineral scarcity to 1000
* Werebeasts to 0 (Currently I feel they come way too early to mount an effective defense without sealing up or spamming traps, two things I vowed never to do. And death by RNG grinds my gears)

I like the idea of a tall map with 1 complete edge ocean. I imagine it would feel sort of like the coast of a continent?

Werebeasts can be defeated if you bring a couple sharp weapons and two skilled fighters at the start of your fortress. Or even just one, but it's less of a guarantee.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Not in my experience. Werebeast's all like  and my people are all like  and then X( and I go   

[Bumber]

Not in my experience. Werebeast's all like  and my people are all like  and then X( and I go   

Dodge harder.

[NW_Kohaku]

Generally 300 to 500 years.  Enough for history, not enough that it causes worldgen to hit 2 gigs and explode. I tend to use medium worlds.

The most interesting embarks are always in places that are on "corners", so I actually like to massively (by about an order of magnitude) increase the world's x and y variance, which requires a corresponding decrease in target biome "size" figures.  I up the chance of chaos, because giant and critter-peoples are interesting. 

I also don't care about having a tropic and a polar region in every world, so I massively drop the Y temperature variance and mellow out its temperature tolerances so it's a randomized surprise.

I also tend to lower titan and other procedural creature variations, since having large numbers of unique creatures isn't as interesting to me as seeing a few species of werecritter get well-developed.

[Zuglarkun]

I always use custom parameters, and have quite a few templates saved that I tweaked over and over again to avoid tons of rejections.

Smaller maps because of FPS considerations, because pocket worlds don't end up as diverse as smaller worlds for the parameters I run. 250 years so that there is enough time for towers to form and for some interesting history. Longer histories tend to end up with one or two dominant races (usually goblins). Mostly high savagery with some variance so that civlizations have places to spawn. Plenty of titans and megabeasts (around 50 for chance of dragons and roc breeding), and to compensate for it, more civilizations (3-4 of each) so at least some will survive the megabeast rampage in the first few decades. Also, lots of caves of all kinds everywhere to spread the love.

I put in some evil and good squares for variance. Frequent mineral occurence (for easy access to iron). I prefer embarking on natural defensible locations (a lone hill, a narrow stretch of land surrounded by water on 3 sides) so I tweak my parameters for lots of X and Y variance and elevation variance. I also prefer lakes over oceans, so I set minimum river locations to max and minimum elevations of 100 to eliminate oceans from spawning. I also set z-level settings to ensure I always get around 20-25 layers to build between the surface and the first caverns. I also prefer fairly shallow maps for easier to build magma pump stacks.

[cottontailcake]

Wow, really depends on my mood, and what computer I'm running it on. I'll use a pocket world if I'm impatient and the computer's small/really old, but like Zuglarkun says above it cuts down the diversity. You get less embark options and if there's something specific you're after, there's less chance in getting it. I haven't managed to tame the custom worldgen settings tho. I like volcanoes, so I usually go and find settings that someone's already worked out for them if I'm in a volcano mood. If I want a specific majority race, I'll pick a map size that's small enough that it won't bore me to tears to repeat it X amount of times until I get what I want.

In terms of how long to let worldgen go for... I hear that really long worldgens can be frustrating in adventure mode because you get more uninhabited/abandoned towns, but I haven't used it much. After that, it's just interesting for me to see the 'Age of...' thing change, and for the sake of that I like to keep it running as long as I can stand. That's a lot longer on a small world than a medium world. I've been trying to get a human-majority world a few times this past week, but it hasn't happened yet.  I don't make maps larger than medium, for the sake of how time consuimg it is.