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[Ninjamestari]

I have a sedimentary (limestone) layer in my fortress and I've dug tunnels every 5 tiles on every level of the sedimentary layer but haven't found any bituminous coal or lignite. Isn't sedimentary layer supposed to always contain coal or lignite? And sorry if this is a nooby question, I'm pretty new DF player and the wiki didn't say anything about missing coal. Currently I'm chopping a lot of trees to make some steel, so elves will be angry at me soon xD How should i defend against elven sieges when they begin?

Some questions about magma: I've never used magma for anything before. How deep is the magma sea usually? What's the easiest way to get magma-powered furnaces? My fortress doesn't have a volcano, so do i have to make a ton of pumps to get magma from the magma sea?

[Dragonchampion]

Masgma is usually 100 layers down or so, with some exceptions. As for defense... weapon traps with 10 menacing wood spikes each is a decent defense.

[Anathema]

I don't think tree chopping actually makes the elves angry anymore; that used to be linked to the elven diplomat, he'd request you limit tree chopping and get unhappy if you didn't.. but with no more elven diplomats I guess there's no penalty?

Depth of the magma sea will vary greatly depending on your world gen settings and embark location. Really just send a shaft down to find out. The easiest way to access it, by far, is just channel a few holes in the floor above and stick your magma furnaces directly above the sea itself. This may put your magma furnaces some distance from the rest of your fort, but it's not as bad as it seems - keep in mind that dwarves travel up and down as easily as right and left, to them going 40 z-levels down is just like walking 40 tiles across the screen. Still you'll probably want to dig out some convenient storage nearby for ores/finished products.

The other option is a pump stack, which is much more difficult to set up and murders your fps; really only worthwhile if you want to pump magma to the surface to greet invaders with. Which is certainly a worthy goal! But if all you want are magma forges, then don't bring the magma to your forge, bring your forge to the magma.

[Ninjamestari]

Thanks for the helpful answers!
I'm currently digging a long stairwell to the magma sea so i can build my furnaces there.

So sedimentary layer is not guaranteed to have any bituminous coal/lignite?

[randyshipp]

I'm with the OP.  I feel somewhat fortunate that I think I have a pretty well defensible embark with trees inside my defensive perimeter, but it SURE would go faster if I could find a vein of coal or two amongst all this dolomite and magnetite.

[boyhowdy]

So sedimentary layer is not guaranteed to have any bituminous coal/lignite?

I'm pretty sure there are no guarantees in DF when it comes to geology (at least until you get to a certain... depth).  Sedimentary layers may have a higher probability of containing coal (or be the only kind that can have it), but that's about as far as it goes.  I haven't had a single embark in 31.25 that had any coal in it, but that's probably to do with the fact that I usually embark at the edge of a mountain biome and have limited sedimentary layers.

The other option is a pump stack, which is much more difficult to set up and murders your fps; really only worthwhile if you want to pump magma to the surface to greet invaders with. Which is certainly a worthy goal! But if all you want are magma forges, then don't bring the magma to your forge, bring your forge to the magma.

Don't let the haters scare you off ().  A pump stack is an excellent way to cut your teeth on larger scale engineering operations, and with the newer designs they're a lot friendlier to your FPS.

[Nilik]

Could be worse. My last embark had plenty of coal... but no proper metal ore. A few tiles of tetrahedrite was all I managed to find after an entire year of digging. Heaps of garnierite though. Because nickel is just so damn useful.

Abandoned that one. Kind of missing the old site finder at this point.

[synkell]

You tell me.... The map said i have metal ... Only found casserite at z-level -50 , below all 3 caverns. My militia is full goblinite now.