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[AdirianSoan]

I thought I'd start a thread with (hopefully new and interesting) Worldgen tricks, but whatever you regularly change/use:

To improve FPS without sacrificing features, reduce your cavern number to 1.  To avoid losing those features, modify the RAWS so that all underground creatures and objects are spawnable in the first cavern.  [underground_depth:1:3] means a creature/plant spawns anywhere from the 1st to the 3rd cavern, setting everything to a minimum of 1 ensures access.

[Lamphare]

i meddle with txt file all the time.
normally i ajust with river start position, erosion cycle and sometimes with peak/volcano numbers.
or volcanism variances to get varied enough geological distributions.

elevation variance and range(with proper mesh size) is another fun thing to do with.
so you get many big enough moutain ranges, scattered neatly across the world, with apposite river start locations and erosion cycles. also it gives possiblity of waterfall, high cliff, shallow or deep soil in general etc.
combining with volcano and peak number tweaks and quite varied drainage/rainfall/savagery values, i could ensure a medium or small world has most features i could think of/dream about, that are normally occuring in larger ones.
too large rivers everywhere could potentially be a bane to FPS, but not too much unless you embark, like i did, on a convergence of three major rivers, with two waterfall, one 30 levels+, the other 10+ in a temperate forest that thaw half of the year. i abandoned it for every in-game year i had to wait four, five minutes, twice, for the water to freeze and thaw. horrible experience.

you could still get all three caverns and good amount of cotton candy whilst having a shallow world, that is to set [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_1:#][LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_2:#][LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_3:#][LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_4:#] relatively low, [LEVELS_ABOVE_LAYER_5:#][LEVELS_AT_BOTTOM:#]with sorta arbitrary values.
and set[LEVELS_ABOVE_GROUND:50] like this would allow you to make a high tower basically 50 levels above ground. tried 120, not yet higher, but that was quite enough. actually i could not need more.

[Untelligent]

To get insanely tall mountains, use a small or smaller world size, set the elevation x- and y-variances as high as they go (you can set them even higher if you edit the worldgen text file directly, but if they go too high you start getting weird errors), turn off all the parameters that cause rejects, and increase the number of peaks. By a big number. As much as you can without getting infinite rejects.

Now when you go to the embark screen look for large white triangle mountains (the icon for the highest icon) next to not-mountains. If the Cliff Indicator has a bunch of extreme cliffs around that spot and the Relative Elevation shows a highest white tile next to a lowest blue tile, there's a good chance of getting a 70-100 z-level distance between the lowest and highest ground points.

Alas, in my experience normal mountains seem to have a cap of a 100-level difference; they just seem to form plateaus at that point. Unless it's on a peak, in which it seems to force the mountain to ignore the cap and be pointy. I think one guy got a peak that was over 200 levels tall back in 40d, most I've ever seen was like 110 or so.


Combine this method with that one parameter that lets you increase the level of sky to 100 above the highest ground point and you have a really huge amount of space to build in.

[Rez]

I'm not sure it really qualifies as a trick, but if you're looking for waterfalls, try lowering the erosion count a lot.  You'll get wonky looking land, since it hasn't undergone realistic amounts of erosion, but there will be a plethora of high waterfalls.  Seems to work with a high volcanism rate to produce relatively short waterside volcanoes.

I've been looking for cliffs or headlands on an ocean or, much preferred, a freshwater lake.  Anyone have a decent way to get them.

[Haekel]

I've been looking for cliffs or headlands on an ocean or, much preferred, a freshwater lake.

Same here, nothing yet. :-/

[MarcAFK]

You can hack your worldgen file to get around the limit of volcanos,
re:
 but sadly i can't do anything more useful with it like more z levels etc.

[Johnny Madhouse]

An easy way to get cliffs on a freshwater lake is to crank elevation variance up to a ridiculous degree, like by a factor of twenty. Then do the same for all the other variances, and increase the max subregion count to something like 5,000,000 to avoid errors. You will probably only get 40,000 actual subregions on a medium sized map, but there will often be mountains right next to lakes. Sometimes, you can even embark on areas that span lakes so you can start on a savanna and build a bridge to the sheer cliffs on the other side.

A more generalized tip that I always do no matter what is to replace the min and max region counts and elevation etc. counts with 0:0:0 to avoid rejects. This is particularly useful when making the patchwork worlds described above.

[Vorthon]

I've been looking for cliffs or headlands on an ocean or, much preferred, a freshwater lake.

Same here, nothing yet. :-/

I get them all the time. Usually. Perfectworld DF is good for these kind of things.

[Haekel]

I get them all the time. Usually. Perfectworld DF is good for these kind of things.

Good for you, but I can't be bothered with learning how to use yet another third party tool.

[Cotes]

I get them all the time. Usually. Perfectworld DF is good for these kind of things.

Good for you, but I can't be bothered with learning how to use yet another third party tool.

Much less trouble than figuring out how to get the advanced parameters cooperate with you.

[Vorthon]

I get them all the time. Usually. Perfectworld DF is good for these kind of things.

Good for you, but I can't be bothered with learning how to use yet another third party tool.

Much less trouble than figuring out how to get the advanced parameters cooperate with you.

Yeah, and the fact you can paint evelation and rainfall and drainage and stuff is great. Sure, you can do that in DF, but the interface for that is frankly a pain in the ass for anything larger than a pocket world.

[Haekel]

I don't even know what rainfall/drainage DOES, so those two features are wasted on me

[Vorthon]

I don't even know what rainfall/drainage DOES, so those two features are wasted on me

Rainfall and drainage, along with temperature, determine biomes.

[Cotes]

I don't even know what rainfall/drainage DOES, so those two features are wasted on me

Rainfall sets how much it rains in different areas. It also affects the amount of vegetation in a pretty straightforward way.
 I never really figured out drainage either, so I just use the defaults. All you need to do yourself is click the button that creates a random drainage map based on the (unaltered) parameters.

[INSANEcyborg]

Depth seems to be what separates lakes from oceans, so if you don't want salt water, up the minimum elevation.   150 to 200 seems to work for me.

I've done the 1 cavern thing, but you don't need to mod anything else.  Everything can potentially spawn in that cavern.