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[shadowclasper]

Not sure if this was pointed out, but there ARE birds in game. They flit about around multiple z-levels though, so it's sometimes hard to spot them. That is, unless they were just added in with Mayday >.>

[Granite26]

Not sure if this was pointed out, but there ARE birds in game. They flit about around multiple z-levels though, so it's sometimes hard to spot them. That is, unless they were just added in with Mayday >.>

Cardinals scare the crap out of me in vanilla all the dern time

[Heron TSG]

okay, so we have birds.

Anything else?

[Silverionmox]

Tepuis are small plateaus separated from the mainland by steep rock precipices. They often have a very specific flora and fauna.

I think those would be great to contain the occasional megabeast that would be too powerful to let loose on the countryside, as an advanced challenge for adventurers. It would also assure that the extinction of megabeasts happens gradually, and you would never know whether there was another one that could show up on the most inopportune time, if their island happened to be connected.

[atomfullerene]

More generally, small areas (circa 1 embark square) which are different from the surrounding biome in certain typical ways.  Most especially, I am thinking of oases.  A small depression with a pond or some such, perhaps tapping an aquifer so it doesn't evaporate, surrounded by a higher concentration of plants than found in the surrounding biome

[CaptainNitpick]

Inselbergs/monadnocks. All those great big rocks that just seem to be sitting somewhere for no apparent reason. Tell me you wouldn't want to build a fortress inside Rio de Janeiro's Sugarloaf Mountain or Australia's Uluru.

[Euld]

Hm... it couldn't hurt to ask, could it? 

How about plate tectonics, which subsequently lead to various kinds of volcanos, areas prone to earthquakes, eruptions, and areas whose shape changes a little bit after some time due to how the two tectonic plates in question are interacting? (Those tend to be very small changes though?) Here's the wiki on tectonic plates interacting.  Now for volcano types.  Current volcanoes seem like mere magma pipes that just happen to be in tall mountains.  With eruptions that behave based on the type of volcano in question, building a fortress in a volcano could be a challenging but Fun experience   Having different shaped volcanoes would add some more variety and even affect which volcanic rocks will be nearby.  I especially want to have a Mt. St. Helens type of eruption available, maybe no more than once or twice every say, a hundred years, depending on the volcano?  There would be plenty of warning, like earthquakes, a bulging cryptodome filled with magma, that sort of thing.  A St. Helens eruption would rain rocks, smoke, bits of magma, and even lava creatures down across the area in addition to an earthquake.  As for super volcanoes... no idea.  Earthquakes could throw objects and dwarves around, possibly damage constructions or cause cave-ins.

[Drutin]

What about deep snow? Kind of like soil layers on top of soil layers in freezing biomes. You could make snow caves! and dwarf children wouldn't just hang out at the well, they would go skiing or ice skating. hmm...

[Darkond2100]

Around my house, trees explode. It happens in thew Winter, because the trees get REALLY cold. The sap freezes and expands with a large amount of pressure until the bark splits. One of the smaller trees made a crash, and I saw that it had broken in half! Here's an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_tree . Oh, and it's not just cold, the article says that fire and lightning do it too (make wild forest fires AWESOME!).

[SirHoneyBadger]

How about a bottomless, critter-spawning lake?

One that may or may not be sacred, and may or may not lead to the Underworld?


From Wiki: "In classical Greece, Lerna[1] (Greek: Λέρνη) was a region of springs and a former lake near the east coast of the Peloponnesus, south of Argos. Its site near the village Mili at the Argolic Gulf is most famous as the lair of the Lernaean Hydra, the chthonic many-headed water snake, a creature of great antiquity when Heracles killed it, as the second of his labors. The strong Karstic springs remained; the lake, diuminished to a silt lagoon by the nineteenth century, has vanished.

Lerna was one of the entrances to the Underworld, and the ancient Lernaean Mysteries, sacred to Demeter, were celebrated there. Pausanias (2.37.1) says that the mysteries were initiated by Philammon, the twin "other" of Autolycus. At the Alcyonian Lake, entry to the netherworld could be achieved by a hero who dared, such as Dionysus, who, guided by Prosymnus, went that way in search of his mother Semele. For mortals the lake was perilous:

"There is no limit to the depth of the Alcyonian Lake, and I know of nobody who by any contrivance has been able to reach the bottom of it since not even Nero, who had ropes made several stades long and fastened them together, tying lead to them, and omitting nothing that might help his experiment, was able to discover any limit to its depth. This, too, I heard. The water of the lake is, to all appearance, calm and quiet but, although it is such to look at, every swimmer who ventures to cross it is dragged down, sucked into the depths, and swept away."
—Pausanias, 2.37.4.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lerna

[de5me7]

have steam and gas vents been suggested, sometimes found round volcanic areas. The gas could be toxic.

or shifting quick sand - ill give an example to explain what i mean by this; there is quick sand at a place in the UK called morecomb bay. There is a path across it, but it changes each season. theres some old guy with a  stick that remaps the path every few months.

i think a shifting path of safty through an area could create some interesting exploration in @mode if there was a technique for finding the path beyond trial and error.

pagan sites (may have already been ,mentioned) it would be cool to see stone circles and ancient sites kicking about the landscape even if they dont do anything (although it would be cooler if they had some occult power). Of course these sites would need a reason for being there.

more interesting coastlines - mudflats, slat marshes, lagoons, cliffs

Tsunamis?

[Heron TSG]

Oh, wow, I completely forgot about this topic! I need to re-read the first post of this and underwater diversity, and then look some other stuff up.

This topic is back on track!

[SirHoneyBadger]

Certain geography, whether or not it's supernatural in nature, should definitely have an impact on the spirituality of the intelligent beings that encounter it.

It happens constantly here on Earth. Convincing the game to recognize such features may be a problem, however, but I suspect there could atleast exist ways around that.

[Vester]

Isolated civilizations could eventually become extremely xenophobic!

Civs in a proverbial land of milk and honey could be all love and kindness and sharing wealth!

Something like that maybe?

[Heron TSG]

Added bottomless lakes to Watery Diversity.

Added exploding trees and Inselbergs.

@Vester: I have no idea where I'd put civilization features in this topic. Sounds like a good idea for a new topic, though.

@de5me7: Please explain how quicksand would effect things on top of it.

@Drutin: Explain how deep snow would react to movement across it and digging through it.