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[dbfuru]

In the many forts I've had over my time playing this game, I've never found any magma. This is most likely because I've never really dug deep enough.

Now, I really want to utilize magma and have used the site finder to recommend a place with a Magma pool or pipe, and have just embarked. What is the general magma locating technique?

Thanks a lot

[quinnr]

Look for a big obsidian cap on the surface if it's a vent...I haven't actually used magma, so that's all I know.

[Retro]

The wiki says it all, really.

edit to elaborate slightly: If you have magma visible from the embark screen, as set in the init, you should have a general idea of where on the embark your magma is. Sometimes it's open to the surface, sometimes it's just below and produces an obsidian cap on the surface, and sometimes it's farther down and invisible to you. If you don't have a guess as to where it is and it's somewhere underground, you're going to have to use exploratory methods to dig around. Try going to the center of a 48x48 square of land and having your miner dig straight down - with magma, you're likely to find it sooner or later.

[Osmosis Jones]

Aside from obsidian (which can be hard to find on snowy maps, and often invisible on others), look for changes in elevation without ramps.
The image below is 1 z-level above the opening for my magma pipe, and aside from the 3 pieces of gold I dug out and the 1 tile I channeled to find the vent (look straight above the designated tree), it has been left completely untouched.

Spoiler: Large Image (click to show/hide)

The height changes occur for pipes; they MAY occur for pools, but I do not usually embark on maps with pools, so I couldn't tell you. While in this case, the majority of ramps are removed, THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE. I've seen it with as few as 3 tiles rampless in a region square. Further, the rampless tiles will be in the same region square, but not necessarily directly above the pipe, and the pipe will often be several z-levels below the surface (the above example of only 1 floor is rare). Finally the height changes can often be as much as 4 or 5 z-levels of sheer drop.


Hope that helps

[dbfuru]

Thanks a lot! Once I've got my current fort stabilized I'll start exploratory mining. In the mean time I'll look for elevation. I haven't seen any obsidian caps so far.

[Osmosis Jones]

Yeah, you often won't. In the above pic, that rock is all basalt. The only surface level obsidian is a fair distance away, on a region tile that contains no magma whatsoever.

[goron72]

When you use the site finder set it for magma and in the init set it to always visible, that's what I use when I desire a tasty treat for my foes.