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[waerth]

The question is in the topic. I genned many new worlds and many many embarks. I always prospect with dfprospect and I usually have loads of gold and silver (9 out of 10 times) but I have never ever found vutiminous coal. Even when digging down.

Now coal should be a lot more readily available than gold? Or is it not? I have never met with it!

(yes I do know about the tree to charcoal and magma forges)

W

[Mister Always]

It's a mineral, and minerals are randomly picked for the map. If it's not there, well, tough. I do have some of it on my current map (well, had...woooooh, 152 bars of coke!), so it does occur.

Start chopping down trees, mate.

[Strife26]

I'm not sure if raising the mineral params during world gen will do anything, but Coal is tough to come by in the current versions. Annoyingly enough.

[Naryar]

If you have assloads of silver and gold and no coal you might be embarking on igneous (aka made by cooling lava) stone layers.

You'll never find coal in here.

[Dutchling]

I always mod in Anthracite (4 coke) and Impure Coal (1 coke) in (both in Metaporphic Layer) and also remove the [FUEL] tag from coal reactions to ensure I have enough coal...

[Psieye]

Mineral scarcity affects everything that can be of use to you when dug up: gems, metal ores, the less common (but still mundane) stones and coal.

[Flare]

As luck would have it, I struck bands of limonite encrusting the entire map, with vast pockets of lignite and bituminous coal dotted around it. What version are you using? Surely not that infernal .21 or .20 version with a lack of iron and dooms day pillars reaching out from all over the place.

In any case, If you don't have any coal in the ground, why not just trade for the coal you need from the dwarven caravans? Up the maximum load the beasts of burden can carry if need be. But be sure to request coal in block form due to the weight problem. As for ordering coal right from the get go, I'm not to sure about the weight to fuel ratio ordering it straight instead of prefired coal blocks, but I'm pretty sure at 4 to one, that coal blocks win out overall.

[JmzLost]

You can't use coal blocks for fuel or to make coke, so don't order those.  Order bit. coal and lignite on the stone menu, charcoal and coke on the misc. menu.  And wood.  Use your wood to make beds, bins, and charcoal.  Make rock pots with a stonecrafter and rock furniture with a mason.  Dig deep for magma, and start making gold & silver bins.

Or gen a new world with scarcity set to "everywhere".

JMZ

[nenjin]

With the new scarcity, when it says "Deep Metal" "Shallow Metal", it literally means one metal type per strata. So the same applies to the other resources. Up the scarcity on the next world gen, and as someone said, look for sedimentary strata.

[GC1CEO]

Oh yea my current and last current of embark sites had zero coal and zero lignite, so my options are limited to smeltering right now. I can't get down to magma, keep running into caverns. Eventually I am gonna try the walled up shaft but trying to get me my big fortress finished first.

[Khift]

If you don't alter the mineral scarcity setting coal will be extremely rare. Even if you do, it'll still be fairly uncommon because it only appears in sedimentary layers and sedimentary layers aren't terribly common; the only appear on about half of the total biomes in a map and even then only as the topmost layer. And with the latest change where you can't even tell what TYPE of stone you're embarking on, yeah, it's a complete crapshoot.

Sedimentary stone should be more common, sedimentary stone should be able to make up more than just the topmost layer (potentially going as far down as 4 layers deep, if you ask me), coal should be far more common within sedimentary stone (as well as occasionally showing up in metamorphic stone), and we should be able to tell at least what the topmost layer stone is when embarking. At least. Being able to tell what is all the way down at the magma sea is understandably unrealistic, but when all it takes is digging 10 feet down to see what kind of bedrock you're standing on I should expect this is standard procedure for a race that lives entirely underground.

[Immacolata]

I always mod in Anthracite (4 coke) and Impure Coal (1 coke) in (both in Metaporphic Layer) and also remove the [FUEL] tag from coal reactions to ensure I have enough coal...

How do you do this? Is it on a pre-gen basis or embark basis?

[JmzLost]

I always mod in Anthracite (4 coke) and Impure Coal (1 coke) in (both in Metaporphic Layer) and also remove the [FUEL] tag from coal reactions to ensure I have enough coal...

How do you do this? Is it on a pre-gen basis or embark basis?

I'd assume it's done pre-gen.  You can also change the reaction for bituminous coal to use some other stone.
[REAGENT:A:1:BOULDER:NO_SUBTYPE:INORGANIC:GRANITE], for example.

JMZ

[Flare]

You can't use coal blocks for fuel or to make coke, so don't order those.

Drats.

[Lord Darkstar]

In the worlds I've genned with mineral scarcity set to the right of "scarce", I find a LOT of coal. And it is in the same layer as lignite. In fact, I find multiple metals where it just says "shallow metal" and "deep metal". So it is possible to have mutliple metals at more common metal scarities and still only have it report "1" being present.