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[ehertlein]

I have read that you need an underground river for these to spontaneously spawn, will a river that starts above ground and then ends up inside a mountain and underground count?

[Keolah]

No. More accurately, you need to breach an underground river or pool for tower caps to start spawning. Even just having one on the map but not discovered won't count, either.

[ehertlein]

Good to know... thanks for the quick reply.

[vagel7]

what? you mean my next project was a failure all the time?(the project was to make a underground forest to get safely some wood)theres gotta be some other way to get trees underground.

[Konis]

You need to get the "You have discovered <somethingsomething>!" window to pop up.  That's the thing that enables Tower Caps to spontaneously spawn (does that seem redundant?  Can we just shorten that to spawntaneously?).  I once had the "You've discovered a magma pipe!" when I really hadn't.  Still couldn't find the dang thing, but it did enable magma buildings.

I believe you can mod in somehow that you've already found the river, but I dunno the specifics on that.

[Christes]

In a few versions, we will undoubtedly be able to buy/start with towercap spores.

That will make things endlessly simpler...

[Captain Xenon]

if you hit 'u' and see the cave river species live (olman, snakeman, cave crocadile, ect), then its probably a visible river/pool. if you see em just show up as dead, then you have a river(not pool) hidden underground somewhere, and you can find it by watching for their corpses via Z and zooming to them... which will show you the general area to dig into. cave pools tend not to have the quick death by sudden drop that a river does.

[ehertlein]

if you hit 'u' and see the cave river species live (olman, snakeman, cave crocadile, ect), then its probably a visible river/pool. if you see em just show up as dead, then you have a river(not pool) hidden underground somewhere, and you can find it by watching for their corpses via Z and zooming to them... which will show you the general area to dig into. cave pools tend not to have the quick death by sudden drop that a river does.

After reading this I opened up my unit list and sure enough:

Snakeman    Deceased
Snakeman    Deceased
Snakeman    Deceased
Lizardman    Deceased
Lizardman    Deceased
Lizardman    Deceased
Frogman    Deceased
Frogman    Deceased
Frogman    Deceased
Frogman    Deceased
Frogman    Deceased

I was pretty sure I asked for an underground river from the site finder. Now I just need to locate it. Any hints? I also seem to have a chasm on this map.

[Proteus]

It can be anywhere and the search can be quite long.

I also knew that there was a cave river on my map (after all I used the sitefinder for a location with one.
The search however took an extremly long time, as it was rather tiny, covering just a tiny spot in the north western corner of the map, over an area of less than 1/12 of map size.

There might however also be rather large river systems that you can uncover in relatively short time (in another version I one stumbled upon a long cave river with many waterfalls while digging the main stairways. It was a rather bad thing as afterwards my dwarves would be too afraid of the creatures in the river to use the stairway anymore

[CptFastbreak]

If you're on a fertile biome, you can also grow trees in a greenhouse. If you excavate an area and cover the ceiling with any artificial floor, it will be inside, light, above ground. If it's in a tree-rich environment, saplings of overground trees will eventually grow. I discovered this when I suddenly found an oak sapling inside my fortress.

[JoRo]

Can regular trees grow on rock covered in mud?  So, could you expand on the greenhouse by having several levels of constructed floors that you cover in mud?

[Tcei]

Doing some exploratory mining will help to find things like hidden rivers/pools. If you have these kinds of things enabled on your embark map you can see ruffly were they are. It took quite a bit of digging in my current fort to find the river. Turns out its about 8 z-levels down and a good distance away from where the fortress proper is.  Seems I'll be building my underground forest with the much closer pool.

[Paul]

Trees or plants won't grow on constructed floors, even if muddy. So that kills the dream of a tree tower I guess

You can still get them to grow below ground if you expose it to the surface, but only if they would grow above there in the first place. I guess it's a way to migrate a forest below ground to make it safer, but you can't just spawn trees from nowhere.

In a few versions, we will undoubtedly be able to buy/start with towercap spores.

That will make things endlessly simpler...

You can now, at least in a semi-hacky way, if you mod it into the game
I released a mod the other day that lets you get any type of tree seed and grow it into a plant at a farm. They take 2 years to mature and are then harvested as a plant called "x timber" (x being name of tree) with no natural plant uses. You can then process the timber in a smelter and get 1 log and 2 seeds. You can also eat the seeds, but since each stack only gives 2 and it takes 2 years to grow a stack, I doubt you'll have a big surplus.

Since dwarves only get underground plants you can only take the tower cap ones with you, but you can trade to the humans or elves for most of the rest. I wasn't sure about how to incorporate gathering seeds once a fort is started, since gathering timber from little plants seemed silly.

[krumlink]

I have experimented with underground tree growing. I would channel a big square room out and build a wall around it on the surface (so things cant wander in on it). The ground will have to be soil for the trees to grow. Wait a few seasons and grass will start growing. Then little saplings will start popping up.

[WCG]

I have experimented with underground tree growing. I would channel a big square room out and build a wall around it on the surface (so things cant wander in on it). The ground will have to be soil for the trees to grow. Wait a few seasons and grass will start growing. Then little saplings will start popping up.

Of course, if you're going to build a wall around it, you don't need to channel out the area at all, do you?

Note, too, that it's easy to see where a hidden chasm is (though this is probably a game exploit that needs to be fixed). Or it was on my map, anyway, but this is the first chasm I've seen.

I'd post the method here if I had the slightest idea of how to do that and hide it under a 'Spoiler' tag,... but I don't. And I don't suppose it's any big secret, since it was pretty obvious. But I haven't been able to find my underground river. I've got lots of dead creatures, but can't zoom to any of them, and I couldn't even right at the start.

Oh, well, it took lots of searching to find the magma pipe, so I've got a bunch of legendary miners. I'll find the river eventually.

Bill

PS. OK, maybe I see how this is done. Here's how I found my chasm. As I say, it's probably no secret, but don't look if you don't want to know.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the Stocks screen, cave spider webs show up under 'thread.' Even if you can't see them, and haven't found the chasm, you can still zoom to them, so that tells you where to dig.