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[Spong]

Hi all,

I was really looking forward to this release mainly because of Caverns, I had imagined all the fun of being able to make a fort like Moria - many of my previous projects had involved mining out massive caverns and I liked the idea that this new feature would save a ton of work.

However, the reality is not as peachy as I had hoped, and I'm not talking about all the horrors of the deep, thats all perfectly reasonable. No, my problem is that the caverns are actually nothing like what I expected - every one I've encountered so far is a knotted, spaghetti like network of very thin passageways, open areas are very small, steeply sloping and are tangled with rocky clusters - there is often so much water as to make most of them unusable without extensive pumping.

What I expected to find was single, very large (in all dimensions) open caves connected by smaller passageways with perhaps a few small pools or streams here and there.

Am I just being unlucky so far?

Does anyone have any tips on Caverns? I don't mean like from the wiki which is regarding how to deal with the monsters but more how do you approach building into them? The idea of excavating them in such a way to make them as I want seems like almost as mammoth a task as simply mining a cavern from scratch in the previous version (as with Undergrotto).

[Zavior]

I believe you can tweak how the caverns turn out in world gen settings. Take a look!

[darius]

Yeah cavern passages are too twisty by default (especially if you're adventuring) but tweeking the settings made beautiful caves. 

[thvaz]

There are parameters you can define in world gen - like cavern openness and cavern layer water. I found that changing the openness can give the results you want.

[Goran]

Do what I do, set cavern openness to 100 to 100 and cavern passages to 0 to 0. That way you get neat spaceous caves without the 'stalagmite' debris. Good ides is also to narrow down cavern water like 15-45 instead of 0 to 100. Maybe even less, I mostly use 10 to 10 to have a little water, but no major lakes or seas underground. But to each his own.

[Skie]

Caverns bewilder me. I think they're very cool, but in DF mode I don't know what to do with them. They are full of monsies and I think they just drop my FPS and are quite annoying because of that. Always have to wall them shut.

[rdwulfe]

This is how they look for me, usually:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've not done a lot of building on them, yet, I'm still getting used to the whole idea of.. well, my fortress having all this crap beneath it, and trying to get my military to work together well enough to begin killing things down there.

[tombthedwarf]

Hi all,

I was really looking forward to this release mainly because of Caverns, I had imagined all the fun of being able to make a fort like Moria - many of my previous projects had involved mining out massive caverns and I liked the idea that this new feature would save a ton of work.

However, the reality is not as peachy as I had hoped, and I'm not talking about all the horrors of the deep, thats all perfectly reasonable. No, my problem is that the caverns are actually nothing like what I expected - every one I've encountered so far is a knotted, spaghetti like network of very thin passageways, open areas are very small, steeply sloping and are tangled with rocky clusters - there is often so much water as to make most of them unusable without extensive pumping.

What I expected to find was single, very large (in all dimensions) open caves connected by smaller passageways with perhaps a few small pools or streams here and there.

Am I just being unlucky so far?

Does anyone have any tips on Caverns? I don't mean like from the wiki which is regarding how to deal with the monsters but more how do you approach building into them? The idea of excavating them in such a way to make them as I want seems like almost as mammoth a task as simply mining a cavern from scratch in the previous version (as with Undergrotto).

so: they're like real caves instead of nice cozy pockets in the earth.

[Asmodeous]

Not exactly. Caves aren't usually just a twisty spiderweb of tunnels. They often break open into large vaulted rooms where the water that carved them out pooled periodically. (rdwulfe's screenshot is pretty realistic)

However you can make that happen by adjusting the settings and adding more "openness" to the minimum.

[Bryan Derksen]

All the caves I've encountered so far have been a nice mixture of both - a few big open areas connected by a few regions of "twisty little passages, all alike." I like that because the twisty passages form natural bottlenecks, I can send my masons out to throw some quick walls up to plug them when I claim one of the open spaces for civilian usage.

[SanDiego]

Not exactly. Caves aren't usually just a twisty spiderweb of tunnels. They often break open into large vaulted rooms where the water that carved them out pooled periodically. (rdwulfe's screenshot is pretty realistic)

Well, there are many types of caves, in DF there are three types IIRC, one of them being a massive underground lake, one maze of dry corridors and one transition between those two.

[JimiD]

Are the types dependant on the rock structure they are formed in?

Do we have enough info to assess this?  I have a site filled with many twisty passages, with the only open space above water, but it is in granite (I think), so it sort of made sense to me.  In limestone I would expect larger simpilar caves.

[Draco18s]

Caverns bewilder me. I think they're very cool, but in DF mode I don't know what to do with them. They are full of monsies and I think they just drop my FPS and are quite annoying because of that. Always have to wall them shut.

The caverns are the 3D version of the 2D Chasm: more trouble than its usually worth.  I'm glad something like that is back.

[Warlord255]

If the current default cavernousness settings are unsatisfactory, perhaps the defaults should be tweaked a tad?

[Footkerchief]

Yeah, I too can't stand the twistiness of the default caverns.  It's just visual noise to me.  The params work great though.