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[IDidItForScience]

For the long version, read the whole post. For the short version, skip to the last line.

So this is my first post as a long time player, and I desperately need some help with the total lack of metal variety in embark locations in 0.31.25. I've genned four different worlds of varying sizes, and embarked on an even dozen sites that say they have shallow metal as well as deep metal. At most this yields four kinds of metal not including the special one. Usually the metals are gold, tetrahydrite, or galena. Even when I set the world gen params to have the most mineral variety possible (100) I just end up with mountains made of gold, silver, and TOTAL BOREDOM.

My last fort I had to armor the military in bone and leather. Anywhere else, and that'd be kinda badass in a mildly freaky way. But this is DWARF FORTRESS. I need iron, bronze, steel, and any other kind of metal my dorfs can wade into battle wielding, and clad in. I've always loved this game for the epic variety of things I can find underground, but that variety has been replaced by agriculture. The only part of the recent agriculture business I cared about was the possibility of weaponizing bees, or at least finding ways to terrify traders with the giant swarms or bees coming over the walls of the fort. I'd have no problem with the new stuff, IF I STILL HAD METAL.

So, the long skinny of it is, how do I get the variety back in my metal diet? I tied upping the mineral variety in the world gen, I tried other embarks, other worlds even, and I've got nothing. Please help, the lack of metal variety has thoroughly curbstomped my interest in DF. And that scares me.

[FuzzyZergling]

Do you use normal or advanced world gen?
For advanced, try setthing minerel scarcity to a very low number. For normal, just set it to "everywhere" and hope for the best.

[IDidItForScience]

I usually just do the advanced world gen, and I was setting the scarcity as low as it'd go which wasn't working. Just tried using the normal world gen with the scarcity maxed, and it worked beautifully. My problem now is that with the normal world gen I can't set any of the specifics I usually do. Like having more than one, incredibly inaccessible volcano in the entire region. So one problem solved, and another found.

[JAFANZ]

Try exporting the params for the world from the "normal world gen", find the scarcity line, use that value in your "advanced world gen" set.

Logically it should help. (Of course "Logic is a way of going wrong with confidence.")

[IDidItForScience]

I will try this logical solution. If that fails I'll use Dwarven Logic. AKA Encrusting the problem with gems, beating an elf to death with it, and then throwing it into the volcano.

[Falknor]

If that fails I'll use Dwarven Logic. AKA Encrusting the problem with gems, beating an elf to death with it, and then throwing it into the volcano.

Congrats. Sig worthy. 

[IDidItForScience]

If that fails I'll use Dwarven Logic. AKA Encrusting the problem with gems, beating an elf to death with it, and then throwing it into the volcano.

Congrats. Sig worthy. 

And on my first post too.

[Nameless Archon]

So, the long skinny of it is, how do I get the variety back in my metal diet? I tied upping the mineral variety in the world gen, I tried other embarks, other worlds even, and I've got nothing. Please help, the lack of metal variety has thoroughly curbstomped my interest in DF. And that scares me.

Like you, I want dwarves with iron (at least) and steel (if at all possible) as a matter of course. Despairing of a solution in game (I can't even see layer types to specifically pick layers likely to have iron in 31.25) I just shrugged my shoulders and modded the game to have iron. You may not be willing to do this (it may offend you to mod the game), but it's very simple to do.

Here's how I got there:

1. Set mineral availability to 100 in worldgen parameters.

This alone will not fix the issue, but it will make finding metals easier. You note that you've already done that, but I mention it because it will make step 2 easier.

2. Add a line to permit iron smelting with Cobaltite and Cinnabar. (Dwarf Fortress 0.31.25\raw\objects\inorganic_stone_mineral.txt)

My modded RAW entries for these ores, changes bolded for ease of use:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

ore of mercury, powdered gives vermilion dye
[INORGANIC:CINNABAR]
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:STONE_TEMPLATE]
[METAL_ORE:IRON:100]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:cinnabar][DISPLAY_COLOR:4:7:1][TILE:158]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_EXTRUSIVE:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT_SPEC:SHALE:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT_SPEC:QUARTZITE:VEIN:100]
[IS_STONE]
[MELTING_POINT:11044]

[INORGANIC:COBALTITE]
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:STONE_TEMPLATE]
[METAL_ORE:IRON:100]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:cobaltite][DISPLAY_COLOR:1:7:1][TILE:158]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:METAMORPHIC:VEIN:100]
[SOLID_DENSITY:6295]
[IS_STONE]

These ores (cobalt and mercury) do not currently have a use in the game, but are treated as metals by world generation! Originally I just deleted them, but this didn't entirely solve my problem. So, I've since tested a few embarks with modified RAWs, and I was much happier just being able to treat Cobaltite like Blue Limonite, and Cinnabar like Hematite-Lite. This more or less solved my metal woes, as Cobaltite and Cinnabar are often found on those "mountains of gold and silver" maps like you're describing, in veins and small amounts - but enough to build plenty of traps and weapons/armor.

If you make this change, and set the site finder to look for flux stone, you're almost guaranteed to have the means to make steel, though you may be doing it from Cobaltite/Cinnabar and flux.

If that's not enough, you can further modify the game by allowing either layer stones (inorganic_stone_layer.txt) or modifying other "typical" stones (like Mica, Jet, and so forth, all found in inorganic_stone_mineral.txt) to allow a chance of iron production when smelted - this chance does not HAVE to be 100 (it is 100 in my examples above) but could be lower, if you want to have a chance of failure when attempting to smelt iron from these "backup" sources.

If you go the modding route, a list of stones found in veins and clusters may be of use. Here's a good one that explains how you'll find these stones to give you an idea of how to balance them to taste.

[Reelyanoob]

So, the long skinny of it is, how do I get the variety back in my metal diet? I tied upping the mineral variety in the world gen, I tried other embarks, other worlds even, and I've got nothing. Please help, the lack of metal variety has thoroughly curbstomped my interest in DF. And that scares me.

You can make the whole world metal if you like. I have done it before - everything was gold, adamantine, and marble . This was in 31.18 and I had all the other metals too about the place.

I added the [SEDIMENTARY] etc tags to the definition of the metals - presto entire layers of the stuff (with other stuff as deposits). This was overkill though, I'd prefer to make the large deposits Metal, not the whole layer if I do it again. I cut and pasted the defs to the stone_layer file, I don't know if this is strictly necessary though.

Eg hematite has the tag "VEIN:100" try upping the value or changing VEIN to CLUSTER

The basic idea is look at the tags for something like orthoclase or mircocline, which you get a lot of, and copy/paste relevant tags into the things you want more of.

EDIT : Using DFProsector, on normal, I got 100,000 Microcline ad no Hematite. Then I regenned after I changed Hematite to "[ENVIRONMENT:ALL_STONE:CLUSTER:100]" copied from Microcline. The next map had 60000 each of Microcline, Orthoclase and Hematite. Presumably this figure could be tweaked down a bit (not to CLUSTER_SMALL, that's for rare gems only).

Setting Hematite to [ENVIRONMENT:ALL_STONE:CLUSTER:20] plus [ENVIRONMENT:ALL_STONE:VEIN:100] gave about 30000 Hematite to 65000 Microcline.

Actually just increasing the environments they appear in to ALL_STONE should give you a broader mix of metals.

[Hyndis]

Adjust the advanced worldgen settings and make the mineral rarity be the lowest amount. IIRC the minimum is 100, maximum is 10,000.

If you set it to the minimum its identical to older versions of 31.XX.

[BishopX]

My experience has been almost the complete opposite, I've found iron in every world gen since .21, I typically use mineral scarcity parameter of 1000-1500.

The biggest trick that come to my mind if using the site finder. You need to specify multiple shallow metals and multiple deep metals. Also, site with more than one biome can increase your mineral diversity.

The other possible issue is your other world generation parameters. Have you made any other drastic changes?

[wuphonsreach]

I'm running at 800 in this set of 31.25 worlds, and starting to feel like that might be a bit too low.  That or it's because I always choose sites with "shallow metal and deep metal".

(Swimming in 2500 iron ore so far and nowhere near done digging out the main fortress.)

[Fredd]

For FUN, you could always use adventurer mode to send out scouts to find ore veins in the side of cliffs

[AdeleneDawner]

An answer in a completely different direction:

I'm currently working on a mod to replace dwarves' use of 'human-themed' animals with creatures that are more cave-themed and dwarfy. One of those creatures is a 'cave coral' (actually, several species of cave coral, each with slightly different stats) that gives stone, including ores, once a season. I think this will be an interesting way of re-balancing the game to avoid these issues - you can embark anywhere, and so long as the traders can get to you and you can support a breeding population of coral, you'll *eventually* be able to have flux, coal, magnetite, whatever you like. (Well, not cotton candy, unless you mod my mod.)

I'm actually working on figuring out the details of how the cave corals should be set up right now (the basic mechanic is done), and I have a poll on the mod's thread about it, so if you're interested, go have a look and let me know how you think this should work.

[Nameless Archon]

Adjust the advanced worldgen settings and make the mineral rarity be the lowest amount. IIRC the minimum is 100, maximum is 10,000. If you set it to the minimum its identical to older versions of 31.XX.

This is true, but one of the things we lost (after 31.18 sometime) was the ability to see which layer stones you had. Depending on your layer-makeup, you may or may not have iron, even at high availability values for mineral occurrence.  (Gold+Silver+Tetrahedrite+Cobaltite+Cinnabar = 5 ores, that can occur both shallow and deep to appear as "shallow and deep metals" in the site finder, IIRC. None of them are iron ores, and if you don't have Cassiterite to go with them, you don't have bronze either.)

If you want a site-produced, metal-equipped military not equipped solely in copper, gold and silver (and useless ores of cobalt and mercury), then you need iron (or at least cassiterite) and you're not guaranteed to find them in 31.25 just by setting the availability to 100 and using the site finder. In older versions, one could simply look for appropriate iron-containing rock level types and be almost certain to find iron. This is not possible in 31.25 (no layer display) so we've created a problem (limited iron with layer obscurity) without a solution (caravans to bring ores and metal bars in bulk) that can be addressed through modding (metal/ore alterations to make iron available more frequently).

Those of us looking for high iron availability sites (and who couldn't care less about precious metals on site) want high iron and low gold/silver, but are typically finding high gold/silver and low (or no) iron. Different strokes, etc. Modding fixes the problem, and since I've started modding RAWs for this, I'll probably never stop modding again, because I Must Have Everything Just Right.