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[Passive Fist]

I'm trying to expand my experience and stop playing so much in temperate woodlands.  I've only got a little bit of desert in my current region and it's unsuitable.

I sort of know how to use PerfectWorld but even still I'm having a hard time making a world with lots of arid grassland/desert type areas. Think American southwest, or sub-Saharan Africa in the dry season.  What can I do to get these kinds of areas in my world more frequently?

[UmbrageOfSnow]

You don't need Perfect World, just Generate New World With Parameters.  Then go into advanced parameters and reduce things like the maximum rainfall and increase things like the minimum drainage.  (Rainfall == Bad, Drainage == Good for deserts).  If you want specifically hot deserts, you could also up the temperature. 

Also, depending on how harshly you adjust these things, go down to the minimum number of BIOME options, lower to 0 any of the ones you don't want (I find when messing with these things, if I don't do that, I end up having my desert world get rejected for not enough swamps or something )

You could also put the minimum deserts up a bit.
Just be careful to still allow enough non-desert terrain that the game can place civilizations.

Parameter World Generation is your best friend for things like this.

[Epacsten]

If you want a complete world with all civs, as well as a huge desert, use perfectworld to make a long vertical mountain range along the west side of your map, with enough room to the west of the mountains for forests and such, and on the rainfall map, make the wind direction 90 degrees, then generate the rainfall mask.

What this does is make a huge desert to the east of your mountains while leaving forests and such to the west.

[Passive Fist]

I've played around a bit with perfectworld and generated a world with a small ocean inlet in one corner and some nice mountain ranges. Most of the world is in the rain shadow of the mountains so it generated a lot of good desert locations. Only problem now is that they're full of aquifers! I haven't learned how to deal with aquifers yet so this is a problem.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

Or an opportunity to learn how to deal with aquifers!

[Passive Fist]

I hate to sound all obtuse but how is an aquifer best dealt with? I was thinking of ways to get down past it but there was still the problem of what to do with all the water leaking into the constructions below it. Bilge pumps?

[UmbrageOfSnow]

Well what you'd like to find is a one-layer aquifer.  On the map, more than two aquifer layers can be tougher.

There are several fun tricks with cave-ins or magma or ice, but using pumps is fairly easy once you figure it out.

It is exactly 1 layer of stones that produce water on all squares adjacent to them.  So the ideal way to get through it is to have a stairway going through the layer, with constructed walls surrounding the stairway to keep it dry.  If you extend the stairway one more level down beyond this, and avoid building back up into the aquifer, no water will ever get into the fort.

The other secret is that aquifer tiles also absorb water.  If you set up a pump to take water and push it into an aquifer, it will suck up the water.  So on the layer above the aquifer, you dig down your stairways based on speed faster than the water fills up.  After that, you channel out an area around the stairs, where you intend to build your wall.  Don't worry when it fills up with water. 

Build pumps to pump the water from the places where the walls will go, you can power them by dwarf power, no need for windmills.  Then channel out the output square for the pumps.  As I said before, this will mean the water spits out above the aquifer, falls down, and is reabsorbed, so you can get rid of infinite water.

Having a few pumps active around the squares you want to build the walls on will drain the water, this is the Moses Effect.  (And yes, I suppose bilge pumps would work, but it is more dangerous).  You have your dwarves build the wall around the stairs, one square at a time, starting with the corners (so they don't get trapped out).  The job will sometimes get cancelled, but that just means suspended, so hit q and hover over the wall and hit s to unsuspend whenever they do.

You can use just a few dwarves on the pumps, shifting them around to man the pumps most needed after each new segment of wall.  When a wall is built, no more water will be able to occupy the square the wall is in.

For an example, I did it in this thread and posted a picture of the end state.

For any questions on how pumps work, and which direction the dark end should point, see the wiki.  I honestly look at that first colorful picture every time I'm building a pump just to make sure.

[Passive Fist]

That was an excellent howto. It worked great. Unfortunately I found out that my aquifer on this map is more than 1 zlevel tall, despite only showing one on the embark screen. I'll have to abandon this fort and start over cause my dry area isn't big enough to put another level of pumps in.  Anyway thanks for the instructions.

[Mini]

The embark screen only shows which soil layers have aquifers, not how many z-levels have aquifers.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

Haha, no problem.

Two possible fixes for that:

First, I don't know where you embarked, but a lot of times you embark on more than one biome.  (One map square in one, one in another).  The state of aquifers can change with this biome line.  So it is always good when embarking to use the F1 F2 etc keys to check your other biomes.  You can have a map with an aquifer in half of it and not in the other, and regardless, if the aquifers are in different biomes, they can be of different depths in other parts.

But yes, one squigly on the map can be more than one layer sometimes.

Also, although it is a pain at first, you can expand this technique to do an infinitely big area.  Rather than hollow out the entire area, you can make bigger dry spots (For many layers thick aquifers) by channeling out just the wall space and a set of stairs just next to the wall, with rock left in the middle.  Build the wall around the entire area, and then channel out the middle rocks, and just put one more pump inside the perimeter to drain the last of the water.

And a third thing, don't worry if there is some water left on the stairs at the end.  The first time I did this, I got freaked out, because I thought I was golden, then I put another stair going down and there was 3/7 water on it!  Turned out it was just the water leftover from the walled off layer.

[Passive Fist]

My stairs down were full to 7/7 when I got to the next floor down, when there was only 2/2 on the level I had pumped and sealed.

And yeah if I had done a bigger space and started some farms I probably would have been fine, but dwarfs don't stay alive long when there's no food left.  Doing a sort of inverted step-pyramid design is how I imagine the method for pumping out multiple levels works.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

Exactly right on the inverted pyramid.

Yeah, by all means re-embark, just didn't want to miss anything.
Breaching a 1 layer aquifer is decently fast (esp if you embark with some of the pump parts or extra material to build them from).  But for a multi-layer breach, you might as well set up an above-ground farm and a brewery.  The crop variety never hurts anyway.