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[byrnsey]

Does this seem... crazy high to anyone else?  I thought the game might have been bugging when it wouldn't let me designate stairways any further down.

Says I have 101 Z-levels beneath the SMR layer.  I thought SMR was the last layer between the normal world and the HFS.

[Drako365]

-40 is actually rather low in my experience, unless you're talking 40 below "surface"
I'm more interested in the hundreds of z levels below SMR, what's your lowest level?

[Fleeting Frames]

It's possible to set SML to be 100z thick in advanced worldgen, but if you had not done so it is unusual. Sometimes there's elevation offsets near the boundaries of low and high regions, so maybe that's the case.

[byrnsey]

40 below the surface.

SMR is 100 Z levels thick, apparently.  I'm on a flat embark, good temperate shrubland and neutral conifer forest with a brook.  The entire surface occupies 2 Z-levels. (3 if you count pool bottoms.)

Only edits I made to world gen are increasing the amount of good and evil, giving gobbos religion to juice the number of necro towers, and increasing the number of megabeasts, titans and forgotten beasts.  Be surprised if any of them affect something like the floor of the caverns.

Digging up to get a sense of what's what, I found the 3rd Cavern.  So there are definitely two above.  Not a whole lot of free layers, I'm guessing.  I had to tunnel through a 4-Z thick aquifer to find this.  Took me two years.  So that leaves 36 layers for 3 caverns.

Settings as far as caverns go:

Magma Layer: yes
Bottom Layer: yes
Z levels above ground: 15
Z levels above Layer 1: 5
Z levels above Layer 2: 1
Z levels above Layer 3: 1
Z levels above Layer 4: 2
Z levels above Layer 5: 1
Z levels at bottom: 1

[Quietust]

When you generate "Region" worlds (rather than "Island" ones, which is what you always get from "Create New World!") and embark away from the ocean, you'll tend to have a relatively small number of Z-levels, often with the magma sea being only 30-40 levels beneath the surface.

Do you actually have 100 Z-levels of semi-molten rock, or does it simply start at "Z:100"? There is absolutely no guarantee that the Z-level indicator on the right side of the screen will ever reach zero - for a shallow world, it might stop at 80 or so, while for a typical Island embark it can often go negative (i.e. having over 200 Z-levels within your embark, which dramatically hastens the onset of FPS death).

[edit] To clarify, the Z indicator you see in Fortress mode is showing your elevation within the world, where Z=100 is sea level.

[byrnsey]

Interesting...

Started playing again for the first time in a couple years, so my knowledge is fuzzy.  Didn't know that about the region worlds.  That is what I'm running.  Kind of a bummer, although I never really built out too many layers.  I guess it's just the potentially lower rock/ore/gem variety.

That's, I guess a missstatement about the thickness of the SMR.  There's 101 layers below the SMR layer I found.  know that for a dact.  I've only just breached the aquifer, so I'm not about to go poking around for candy to see what's beneath.  Maybe once my dwarfs have actual weapons, although with no iron (my sedimentary layer is just 4 layers of aquifer conglomerate) and no (discovered) flux, it could take some time to get them ready.

[EPM]

Does that mean you have a hundred layers of candy, potentially?

[Thisfox]

I'm envious. Whenever I try to generate a small z-depth magma sea, it never seems to work...

[Quietust]

I'm envious. Whenever I try to generate a small z-depth magma sea, it never seems to work...

It would help to know exactly what steps you are following in order to accomplish that goal - it's likely you're missing a very important step.

For reference, here are the steps I use:

• Design New World with Advanced Parameters
• Select "MEDIUM REGION" (or "SMALL REGION", or anything that's a REGION)
• Press "e" to edit advanced parameters, and set the End Year to something smaller than 1050 (so worldgen doesn't take 3 hours), and adjust other things like mineral density and civilization counts/populations
• Press ESC, Enter, and "y" to start generating the world (without saving changes to the template you were using)
• Let the world generate, then press Enter at the end to save it
• Start a new game in that world, then select an Embark region that isn't near the ocean

My first attempt using the above steps got me a Wasteland embark with the surface at Z=115, the Magma Sea occupying Z=81 thru Z=74, semi-molten rock filling Z=73 thru Z=46, and the Underworld occupying Z=45 thru 36 (except for one corner of the map where the semi-molten rock extended for another 9 Z-levels, for some reason). Several other embarks were even more shallow, but an Ocean embark was over 100 Z-levels deep.