Or a reverse.
Having a pure industrial fort and rely mostly on trade for food.
Or an even greater challenge: Embark on a complete wasteland, depending primarily on manufacturing (import raw material, export finished goods for food and more raw materials).
That's purely a self-imposed challenge, however. You can grow food anywhere right now. So long as muddy floors and caverns provide limitless food no matter where you go in the world, you have access to food.
Don't you people enjoy the difficulty of this game? I only see you complaining about not having much metal. I expected you to enjoy this...
On my .18 noob embark location, I dont have flux nor sand. So what? I do not really need that. You still can buy it from the caravans to make your shiny things.
The problem with that is that some materials are so rare, your home civilization wont' have it, either, and you can have worlds where the only ore your home civilization has access to is galena or something similar.
That said, it's certainly not impossible to play without metal, so long as you use other exploits and largely wall yourself off from threats.
However, this rarity of resources is part of a move to make fortresses trade for their materials, but right now, the rarity of materials has come before the ability to trade for the materials that you lack. It means that Toady has created the problem before he's allowed us access to the solution, so it's going to be a wierd handful of releases with many incomplete features until the caravan arc is complete.
Ultimately, though, it's questionable how "difficult" it really makes the game. Like I said in one of the other threads, it's perfectly reasonable to have a "survival challenge" in a glacier. Now, you can have a survival challenge in a glacier with no metal or coal at that, so go nuts if that's what you're into. Still, it's a little disconcerting when you are only told you have "shallow metal", and no idea if you have hematite or cinnibar. When you walk onto an evil glacier, you know what you are walking into. When you embark on one of the new sites, you have no idea if it's going to be easy mode with coal and iron simply sitting exposed to the air or high difficulty (relatively) where you have nothing but a useless material like cinnibar, or even a completely barren map.
The mineral distribution idea is just fine, but players need to know what to expect of a map before they commit, or else everyone will just be "prospecting" by save-scumming an embark or running Reveal before abandoning if they don't find what they were expecting.
That said, Toady has already reacted to this:
Regarding the fighting that has taken place upthread, people should relax and not fight with each other when we are the source of your grievances. As I acknowledged in the release notes, this is a problem. The release was split because it was delayed and needed to be aired out. I cleaned up a lot of the loose (split?) ends, but I only thought of this one at the last moment, so I mentioned it in the notes and plan to sort it out during this bugfix period. Once we have trade, some assurance that a reasonable amount of ore is being brought to the surface in world gen and better local mineral veins, I imagine it'll be less of a problem, but we don't have any of those things yet. Even after that, I think we should end up with some world gen options for different play styles for next time. As people have mentioned, an over-abundance of metals will essentially remove that element of the economy (and warfare etc etc), but not everybody is going to be playing for those reasons and it is very easy for me to fix. Worlds with some variation in metal distribution will be the ones that receive the most attention over the long term, though.
I'm not sure I really like this solution, honestly, since I think the game is better served by just making the regular game capable of supporting multiple playstyles rather than just making init options for every single feature.
I really think that if people just sit tight for a few versions, everything will get sorted out a month or two down the road. People just react to unexpected news like this more emotionally than they otherwise would.