The people who want info on where they embark shouldn't play this really. I like it better this way, and if you dont then here's an option for you. Play this one, or play another.
Just because you guys want something doesn't mean others do, and no, OPTIONALITY is not an option.
This isn't a very helpful attitude, as you're basically implying, whether you mean to or not, "play the way I play, or don't play at all" or "stop having fun any way I don't condone you having fun".
Rather, G-Flex is going about this a little bit better:
Things that drastically and fundamentally change the game are often least suitable for options, because it's that much more difficult for the game to support all options involved if they change the game that much.
Having a "make this just like 31.18" init option is a bad idea because it means that you break a fundamental system of the game. Either one option is "playing with half the game", or Toady has to develop two entirely different game types for both options.
What would really be nice is if Toady actually made those raws where you can set the rarity or availability of some of the metals
actually work, so that we could just adjust that part of the raws, and make platinum veins only appear in small clusters in 1% of the world's surface, while iron deposits occupy 60% or the like.
That way, you don't have to use some sort of "break the world" init option, it's just a natural continuation of the raw settings and a dynamic geology simulation.
Basically, Toady probably is already planning on this, since you'll notice the whole "3d veins" thing is his third release package, and he has that whole dummied-out place in the raws for determining rarity, and that much of what both sides want are probably going to become available a half dozen versions down the road.
You can't assume the game will always stay as it is, or that the way it is now represents what it is trying to be. Just saying.
The game needs to be refined, and I think what we're seeing is an incomplete, rough change in how the game is designed that will be refined back towards being more realistic, but which just breaks some things for right now.
All that I've already said aside, it's still worth lobbying Toady to at least get an indicator of what the top couple layers are, and what maybe at least one shallow metal, since those should be pretty obvious. Right now, the only way to tell whether I'll be digging into igneous stone or not before I embark is to go to legends mode and make it spit out the detailed vulcanism map.
"It's typically worth checking before you irrevocably commit yourself to spending the rest of your life mining that worthless ore vein." This reminds me of my visit to a 16 th century Hematite mining site last year. The foreman was showing us the tools of the trade and some exploration shatfs. He said that this one shaft was started by one bloke, he was working on it for 20 years, died and his son picked up the chisel and hammer and continued on the shaft. After ten more years they did eventually find a vein, but they had no way to tell if there ever will be anything there.
That was a guy who was a prospector... There certainly were prospectors, but that's not really what dwarves necessarily have to be. They could be a team sent to set up a mining outpost after someone found some iron ore or gold nuggets panning the river.
The ore system is indeed poorly implemented.
I believe it was to make one place abundant and suited for being a mine, while other having worthless rocks and occasional gems, scaring the civilization away.
Sadly, .19 have the system so implemented that not only every place sucks as a potential 'mine' site, but also the worthless vein minerals (cinnabar, cobaltite) count as vein metals, or I at least think so, with what I have experienced on embark.
Fortunately, I'm the person that rarely works with metal until I have large, established dwarven fort 
This is a huge one, here - cobaltite was an
extremely valuable trade resource in the real world throughout much of history, giving places like Afghanistan their wealth and their heightened trade status.
We need to be able to specifically set out to find Lapis Lazuli (for making Ultramarine pigment, a pigment so rare and valuable only royalty could afford it), or cobaltite, or sand or kaolinite, or some of the other valuable rare items on the planet.
Yes, I know it's not all that realistic that we could have "prospectors" already out there for us every single time in every single place, but we shouldn't be forced to just put our hand over our eyes, point to a random spot on the map, and hope we got a good spot. If we're going to be setting up a trading fort, we need to be able to know there's something there worth trading before we dedicate our games to them, otherwise we're forced to just embark and quit until we manage to find a spot with the resources we wanted.
"Realistically", we would be able to visit or leave a place after finding or not finding things we want, and "realistically", we would have access to rumors of ore veins, and be able to see that one city is obviously mining something, and that maybe we could move a little further along the cliff face and set up a mine where we are likely to find similar minerals. "Realistically", many of the gold mining operations in the American Gold Rush started because a few lone explorers happened to find gold literally just sitting as a nugget out on a creek bed. If nobody picks it up, the materials are just lying out there, and the eroded mountain faces give a good clue as to what's inside those mountains.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress 0.31.19 Released (Read 171511 times)