Print

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

[Crab]

The thread title is fairly self-explanatory, but:

Choosing to settle in an Evil Biome is effectively the closest thing the game has to a difficulty setting. Yes, you can set the difficulty higher on Embark, but in my view this doesn't affect the level of difficulty itself, just the speed at which you hit the level of difficulty - sieges are equally tough regardless of this setting, they just come sooner. The only way to actively increase difficulty beyond the normal is to try finding something like: a reanimating biome, a biome which rains dangerous syndromes, a biome with husking/thralling weather, a biome with dangerous undead creatures skulking around.

Unfortunately, most Evil biomes do not do this. Despite genning a very considerable number of worlds looking for an appropriately scary starting biome, I found... basically nothing. The vast majority are not reanimating. They do not have undead wildlife. They usually do have some kind of evil weather, but it is usually just raining blood or something dwarves find disgusting without actually being dangerous.

Nor are Evil biomes visually that interesting. They have specific grasses - Wormy Tendrils and Staring Eyeballs; Glumprongs - but from my experience these are also quite rare. Normally you just get dead vegetation, which isn't particularly interesting and looks basically the same as ordinary vegetation (dead grass is somehow still green, which I can assure you is not how dead grass looks).

Once in a million, you find an actually Evil biome with appropriate eyeballs, death zombies, creeping mist, and so on - but it's really just too rare. Most Evil biomes are not Evil, they are, as the title puts it, mildly vexatious.

I would go so far as to say that, because of the new Agitation mechanic, Savage biomes are actually presently much more difficult than Evil ones on average.

I feel that Evil biomes ought to be nearly guaranteed to be reanimating or have some really horrible syndrome weather, and glumprongs, wormy tendrils, and staring eyeballs ought to be more of a staple. If I choose an Evil biome to settle, I'd like an Evil biome and not a mildly vexatious one!

[Bumber]

I ended up embarking on an evil volcano with husking clouds for my first fort of v50.

No evil vegetation or animals, however. It had longland grass, echidnas, keas, and ravens, so it must've been a temperate shrubland. I got undead sieges, so I was probably near a tower.

[Alastar]

Just shows that you can't please everyone.
In past versions, I disliked Evil stuff for being too intrusive, encouraging me to wall up and practice strict access control.

I love subtle evil and would like to see it expanded... weirding dwarves out is a good start, but a corrupting influence would be better. Hunger for dwarven flesh, tendency towards violence or betrayal, nightmares that show up in art, brainwashing into cult membership, perhaps a physical process: first mental changes, then weird physical symptoms, eventually transformation into something creepy.
A terrifying biome that deserves its name is fun once in a while, but imo understated creepiness makes for more interesting games than splatterpunk.

[anewaname]

As a side-note, in 47.05, a goblin fortress would create a biome around it that is displayed as haunted/terrifying but will not have the weather or other interactions normally associated with evil biomes.

[satan]

Try finding a spot that is both evil and has high savagery. Getting never ending hordes of giant undead birds is very fun.

[Alyfox]

I embarked on several Haunted-rated areas in a row, and the worst I got was some slimey rain, and that one had regular animals and regular vegetation. All the others were just dead grass. I was rather disappointed. I've also not found high-savagery embarks to be excessively tough either - I *have* modded out animal-people, giant insects and giant birds, but that still leaves a lot of giant land animals available and I dont really seem to see many. I think I've had more issues with regular sized kea spooking merchants than anything else

[Redman9012]

Evil biomes in general are more RNG-dependent than other biomes if you are looking for something specific.

The first thing to check an evil biome for is death, "dead" evil biomes have no living flora, and won't regrow flora with time, meaning wood becomes a finite resource here, and you'll require to harvest the seeds of any wild plant you can for farming in order to maintain a supply of sliver barbs for example.

Then there's reanimation, this is very simply if the biome has undead or not, if you can find native undeads on your embarking biome, it's reanimating, and therefore the !!FUN!! kind, else it simply has the evil-aligned fauna according to the dryness/wetness, temperature and shrubbery of the biome, it's usually on the non-reanimating ones that you can find creatures such as harpies, beak dogs, foul blendecs, etc...

Finally there's density, this means how dense is the "evil" in the region, like say, how dense are the growths of wormy tendrils and/or staring eyeballs, or if it has them at all. This means that sometimes an evil biome can have giant undead creatures roaming around daily, yet regular grasses and flowers grow on the dirt of the region, with no tendrils or eyeballs visible at all on the ground.

With only these 3 variables at play, the variety of evil biomes really becomes prevalent on every world generated, especially since traditionally, "natural" evil regions are quite rare on the first place, thus any specific flora, fauna or features that you're looking for may be hard to come by when you actually find them in the first place.

If you're looking to generate a world with a lot more good/evil regions, on the advanced generation parameters, go to the "evil/good square count" settings, and simply increase those, they tend to create more "spots" of evil/good where you may be able to find what you're looking for.

[Salmeuk]

yeah, the game is simulationist that way - no guarantees beyond the fucking keas. often digging a bit deeper into the world history will lead you to more interesting embarks.

goblin pits spread malign influence but the resulting biomes remain fairly plain. look for haunted regions that exist from the start of history, and with high savagery.

I am ALL for more difficult challenges but I like the variability of the current worldgen - sometimes a false sense of security might lull you into complacency

[Crab]

Just shows that you can't please everyone.
In past versions, I disliked Evil stuff for being too intrusive, encouraging me to wall up and practice strict access control.

I love subtle evil and would like to see it expanded... weirding dwarves out is a good start, but a corrupting influence would be better. Hunger for dwarven flesh, tendency towards violence or betrayal, nightmares that show up in art, brainwashing into cult membership, perhaps a physical process: first mental changes, then weird physical symptoms, eventually transformation into something creepy.
A terrifying biome that deserves its name is fun once in a while, but imo understated creepiness makes for more interesting games than splatterpunk.

I mean, I also wouldn't mind this if it was in the game, but the game doesn't do this either. Seems to me it's a false dichotomy to say "Evil biomes are too heavy metal evil and not enough creeping cult evil" - they're neither. Right now, most of them are basically pretty safe and unobstrusive.

Try finding a spot that is both evil and has high savagery. Getting never ending hordes of giant undead birds is very fun.

Most of the time the birds will not be undead. It would be much more interesting otherwise.

If you're looking to generate a world with a lot more good/evil regions, on the advanced generation parameters, go to the "evil/good square count" settings, and simply increase those, they tend to create more "spots" of evil/good where you may be able to find what you're looking for.

This has other consequences though. If you spam Evil count during worldgen, most civilisations find it very difficult to spread and get off the ground and you end up with goblin-dominated worlds with scant human and elven presence. I like being able to interact with other civs and so only want small patches of Evil gen'd. I just want those patches to actually be Evil and not "eh, the trees are dead I guess?" again.

[ArmokGoB]

Just shows that you can't please everyone.
In past versions, I disliked Evil stuff for being too intrusive, encouraging me to wall up and practice strict access control.

I love subtle evil and would like to see it expanded... weirding dwarves out is a good start, but a corrupting influence would be better. Hunger for dwarven flesh, tendency towards violence or betrayal, nightmares that show up in art, brainwashing into cult membership, perhaps a physical process: first mental changes, then weird physical symptoms, eventually transformation into something creepy.
A terrifying biome that deserves its name is fun once in a while, but imo understated creepiness makes for more interesting games than splatterpunk.

I embarked on a terrifying ocean, and the most terrifying thing about it was the reanimation down to the cavern levels and undead sea otters thirsting for blood. The elf blood rain was captivating, though.

[Salmeuk]

This has other consequences though. If you spam Evil count during worldgen, most civilisations find it very difficult to spread and get off the ground and you end up with goblin-dominated worlds with scant human and elven presence. I like being able to interact with other civs and so only want small patches of Evil gen'd. I just want those patches to actually be Evil and not "eh, the trees are dead I guess?" again.

I'm fairly certain you can get this kind of effect with custom world painter tool, if you are truly desperate..

[Mohreb el Yasim]

you can chose if you prefere more "interactions", clouds or rains when you create the world.
I think it is those tags in world gen :
   REGIONAL_INTERACTION_NUMBER
   EVIL_CLOUD_NUMBER
   EVIL_RAIN_NUMBER

there is also
   DISTURBANCE_INTERACTION_NUMBER
but that is more mumies i think

[FantasticDorf]

Nor are Evil biomes visually that interesting. They have specific grasses - Wormy Tendrils and Staring Eyeballs; Glumprongs - but from my experience these are also quite rare. Normally you just get dead vegetation, which isn't particularly interesting and looks basically the same as ordinary vegetation (dead grass is somehow still green, which I can assure you is not how dead grass looks).

Generic evil woodland probably is like that because (living) glumprong can't reproduce, as its not been given a means to drop any sort of seed that would let it establish new saplings (unlike feather trees) so living trees overlap them a lot more dominantly. A similar story occurs for silver barbs, which goblins could use just for the dye but requires a plant or seed edible component & farmers/gatherers for goblins in order to get them in the production chain.

Once you fix this (workshop mod or just own edit), a couple more things can happen. Goblins will arrive with glumprong wood decoration embellishments and wield glumprong wood shields, if you mod in to play as them, their wagon will be either cavern wood or glumprong too.

When im feeling in the mood, i just drop them a knuckle nut for the knuckle worms to eat in a quick world modification (a evil vermin, but i have noticed no demon rats/knuckleworms as of late) and let the glumprongs saplings spread well and away.


My only regret is that I think most evil biomes in 50.05 have been streamlined for better access to re-animating zombies for streamer-content as there was never this many reanimating biomes before. When on 47. they were more varied between the split spheres. Perhaps this is just a time constraint in that Toady wanted more surprises ready when the rest of the evil biomes are added back in, like bogeyman attacks or something.

[rhavviepoodle]

I will have to give an evil biome a shot at some point. While I love glumprongs (yay purple!) and sliver barb (yay hot topic black clothes!), it felt like every single evil embark had husking clouds or was reanimating. Ultimately it just wasn't worth it. Honestly, this sounds like something I would enjoy, shrug.