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[dralloss]

Okay, so I used the sight finder to pick my embark spot because I wanted a magma pipe. It found one, I settled, and am now in my third year. I still haven't managed to find the pipe. After digging a few different exploratory tunnels I got frustrated with all of the spammed alunite messages so now I'm looking for a better way to find my pipe. I'm currently digging under the few blocks of obsidian I could find on the surface. Any advice for a beginner?

[MoonLightBird]

be careful, it sounds like you have an obsidian cap. Keep digging around the obsidian, but stop if you get the warm rock warning. You might have to go down a few levels.
Read the "Finding magma" part here : http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Magma

[NecroRebel]

Go to every corner of the map and count 24 squares in, both horizontally and vertically. Dig a staircase straight down from those points. Also, count 48 tiles directly horizontally, directly vertically, and directly diagonally from those 4 points and dig stairs straight down from those points, too. Then, repeat those 48-tile counts to find all of the places you should dig. This method finds magma pipes, magma pools, underground pools, and bottomless pits without fail.

This method works because each map feature is alone in a local tile on the local map in the embark screen, and each local map tile corresponds to a 48x48-square block ingame. These features also invariably occupy the center of their local tile, and you're finding the center of the local tiles.

If you know which particular local tile the pipe is under, you can skip all the "exploratory" staircases and just dig through the center of the pipe's tile directly to find it more quickly and easily. Regardless, it takes relatively little effort compared to true exploratory mining for such things.

[dralloss]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

[MacaqueAttack]

I hate alunite. It's worse than microcline in terms of announcement spam.