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[ManaUser]

Generally I try to pick a "perfect" site with a river, no aquifer, and all the resources. But in my last attempt to start a game I hit a weird problem. First thing I noticed was that there wasn't any clay near the surface, nor sand (DFHack claimed there was sand too at embark). Suspicious, I decided go go ahead and use reveal, nope, no sand or clay anywhere.

Lots of sandy clay loam though... I don't suppose either the game or DFHack is dumb enough to misreport this type of soil as both clay and sand... are they?

But anyway, it gets worse, no flux that I an see either, even looking all the way down to the semi-molten rock.

Could this have anything to do with reducing the number of cavern layers to 1? I don't usually mess with that, but I did this time. Does changing that bork map generation somehow?

[Fleeting Frames]

It is possible that your air biomes or SMR layers has sand, clay or flux as layer material. Sand and clay you can access (if you figure out the right area) by obsidian-casting a wall then digging it away. Flux, you're out of luck.

This is a known bug.

[ManaUser]

So nothing to do with changing the cavern settings then?

I was wondering if perhaps removing two of those had "squished" the map or something, making this kind of issue more likely.

[Fleeting Frames]

It may have had an effect, but not necessarily. Geobiomes place map layers until they reach the last layer they have, then continue that layer down furthermore. If SMR comes before that last layer, it is possible to have all your available flux overwritten like this. If you set the world to have 1 cavern, you automatically make it thinner - which you can compensate for with a different setting - resulting in SMR coming up sooner.

[PatrikLundell]

If the site-finder you refer to is the one in vanilla DF, it's known to have deficiencies. The sand indicator is a DFHack feature, though, and I've never seen that one fail.

The reason DF sometimes reports things that aren't there is because it looks only at the geo biome, the structure that specifies all the layers of the area influenced by the world tiles referencing it. However, DF performs processing after that: Erosion of the top happens if the elevation is high (an this can remove a top layer of clay, as well as reduce the soil depth to 1-2, which causes any aquifer reported to disappear as well). At the bottom end the SMR cuts off the geo biome at the level the SMR happens to be at, so any resources that would have appeared further down (such as e.g. flux) gets cut out. Removing caverns probably squishes the map so the SMR appears further up, and thus more of the geo biome gets cut out.

The sand indicator is more puzzling, though, as the logic knows sand from non sand, and also handles soil erosion. Are you sure you have checked the whole embark? You may have more than one biome on it, which typically (always?) means you have multiple geo biomes, so while the center might not have sand, tiles further out might. The Showbiomes DFHack script can show you where the biome boundaries in your embark are, and thus where to look for your missing sand: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=160856.msg7194572#msg7194572.

The DFHack embark-assistant plugin is an alternative to the vanilla search feature which does take soil erosion and SMR cutoff into consideration, as well as adding additional search criteria: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169634.msg7697068#msg7697068.