How do I get out of the cavern layer?
The way you got in.
That or find a tunnel and trace it to a fort. Seriously. If you are lost you could be stuck down there.
If you happen to get under a settlement you could try to retire 'in' it, and you would teleport to the surface, but that's a finicky bug and may not work. You'll know if you don't get the option to retire.
Any tips on finding caves from below?
Don't. I'm assuming that means you are in at least the second cavern layer, and the only way up that naturally exists down there is the downward passage.
I'm a vampire, thankfully: plenty of gorlaks and that around so I won't starve.
Should I head towards a Fortress (the dwarf kind)?
Yeah, if there is a big cluster of forts somewhere nearby (pretty sure you can still use shift+q underground to check the map, I did not know that last time I got trapped underground after having made the lamentable error of NOT slaughtering everything in sight, and thus producing a trail of
corpses and gibletsbread crumbs to follow back to the ramp.
If you can get yourself under the site directly you might be able to find the ramp, but it is still really iffy for the little one or two ramp paths leading up into a cave.
If you are on a version with dfhack you have more options:
1. You could get under the site and use advfort+a pick if you have one (createitem WEAPON:ITEM_WEAPON_PICK STEEL if not) to dig your own ramps or stairs back up to the surface. I did not yet know the capabilities of advfort myself when I got stuck.
2. You could use reveal while in the (l)ook interface and then move up a few z levels until you find the ramps. I did not know reveal worked as an adventurer (unreveal does not, but if you move around you should forget and re-reveal stuff again before long) so I didn't try this, though I have had to use it to confirm I was in a bugged vault where I could see the slab, had gotten all but one lever pulled, and had absolutely no route to any other... which was due to a tile at the bottom of a ramp funnel being a floor instead of a final ramp leading to a room with the last lever it seems.
3. If you have an idea of how tall the caverns are and how far underground you are, you could use gui/gm-editor to directly edit your pos until you end up above ground. I was content to just try to find the site manually until I got right underneath it according to the compass.
Then after being stuck down there for another night, my fps suffered an awful fright, the cavern populations began to rise, when suddenly before my eyes,
they did the mash, they did the monster mash.I could barely move or see due to the constant announcement spam and my fps was hovering around 10 to 15 when I tried to move around, so I finally said screw it and since I knew the caverns were at least 10 layers tall to my north I just gui/gm-editor > pos > z + 10, darkness, z + 5, darkness, z + 5, darkness, z + 5, *status changes to flying and Urist McLegendary drops 3 levels to the ground like a steel plated ninja*, hurray... *fps also drops to the ground, since the monster mash followed me upstairs, and remained that way until I left* but yeah, that is a good last resort.
If you don't have dfhack available, point yourself at the largest cluster of forts unless you know of one which connects to the highway system for sure.
As for the size info, I checked around in gm-editor, under body I think there are a couple of tags, I think they were actually called size info... yep, and they include size_cur, area_cur, and length_cur, as well as _base versions of those. Changing those around look to influence movement speed so I assume they are general body parameters. As an elf it gave me a base of 4560, 285, and 255 I think, and I started out with like 5800, 308, 280 or something like that. After playing with the values some I found if I reduce size_cur to below 3800 it gives a speed hit, dropping it to 3000 pushes speed down to less than normal walking speed with sprint selected, while raising it to 40000 only pushed speed down a couple of decimal points, and setting it to a range from 3850 to ~4050 gave the highest movement speeds I saw, gaining .26 over the previous top speed after letting it build up.
Under appearance there is a size modifier value which looks like a straight percentage of the racial average, putting it in the 75 to 100 range has me listed as average sized for an elf, 50 was very small, 200 was very large.
Under body directly I think there is a bit about weight fraction, fat fraction, muscle fraction, changing these didn't do much that I saw except when I tinkered with the total fraction value, raising it beyond 100000 gave a bit of a speed hit, but not much, while dropping it down close to the base value (think it was 62536) gave a bit of a speed gain, but again not much.
Tweaking those values and then going into gait_info (also under body) and setting the first sub-section under walk to a value of 100, and just to make sure I turned "layers_affect" off, which gave a peak value of 6.666 >.> which is ridiculous and fun zooming around and being all "rawr fear my numerological coincidences, oh ye of little reason" at the same time for the win!
...aaaaannnnyyyywwwwaaaayyyyssss, anyone got a good compromise setting for announcements.txt which cuts down on some of the "random creature a punches random creature b in the tooth, while random creature a through z comments on how horrifyingly inevitable it all was" spam
while being able to keep tabs on my own combat logs as needed?
I turned several things off but not being able to see when something is lodged in a wound, when a blow lands, when parts sail off in an arc, and so forth is all a bit underwhelming AND it makes it harder to work out what tactics I should use if I don't know certain details.
Edit: apparently I confused UCR and UCR_A at some point and had turned off several of the _A tags, which would explain a lot of the spam I was getting lately.