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[Luraien]

I'm back, after a month of post-dump depression and a non-stop alcohol binge. I plan on playing a lot of DF again, as I've not played for about a month now and I'm craving seeing my little Dwarves burn horrific magma deaths once more.

Getting to the point, how would I generate a map full of sand? It's a total turn on seeing your Dwarves effortlessly slash their way through a mountainside which is basically just sand. If I'm asking too much by wanting the WHOLE map being sand, how would I atleast have a nice big area of sand to play with?

[smjjames]

One word... Desert.

Just find a desert with some variation in elevation if you're looking for a hill of sand to dig through. Although there are hilly non-desert places where most or all of the soil layers are sand. Most desert biomes are flat, but it's still possible to get a river canyon or something in the desert.

[Luraien]

I usually just generate random worlds hoping for a nice big sandy desert with the odd hill or two, but I never get one big enough and there's usually stone there to spoil it :<

[Stargrasper]

Set world parameters.  I believe poor rainfall and drainage should create deserts.  Deserts in the real world are dry areas normally beyond mountains.  They aren't necessarily HOT, many deserts are actually quite cold...but I'm betting DF doesn't know about that distinction, so setting a high temperature while you're at it should help too.

[Albedo]

Low rainfall and high drainage, I believe.  And some DF deserts are not hot - but I've yet to find a truly cold one.

[Malicus]

I don't think I've never seen an area that does NOT have stone, though.

[AtomicPaperclip]

I think if you dig down a few layers on any map you should strike stone

What happens if you remove all the stone from the raws though?

[HammerHand]

I don't know much about world parameters, but my few experiments may actually  help you in this regard.

I recently tried to gen a world where I played with weighting.  I think I weighted Volcanism.  I took the second range and bumped it up to 2, and left the others at 1.
What I got was a world that was absolutely nothing - NOTHING - but Hills, continually rejected by the system.  There were no rivers.  There were no mountains.  Do not strike earth.  Do not collect riches.

Still, I think there's a way to weight the amount of desert you want in a given world generation, but since that experiment didn't go very well for me (and, for that matter, neither did any of my further attempts to get more areas with lower drainage, or more hills, or fewer mountains...) I can't be very helpful with the specifics.

For now... I'd just start in a desert.  I have yet to gen a world that doesn't have at least one.  They're really easy to spot on the map, too.  Just big swatches of yellow, red, or white.

[Masennus]

I imagine you could mod all the stone to be sand, or have sand-like properties. I don't know a great deal about modding so you'd have to ask around about how to do it.