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[runlvlzero]

Not going crazily over board genning worlds that are basically pimpled with volcanoes etc... what are some of the strangest embarks/forts?

Deserts of just sand with no flux?

Rocky wastes with no metals?

Sandy beaches were you had to trade barrels of fish  for any kind of building materials?

I see allot of people just generate the perfect volcano-chasm with mineral scarcity 500... that seems kinda un-fun.

Just curious to see what peoples take is on the less then perfect embark and playability... seems like the game is allot about creative solutions to these kinds of problems and less about having everything handed to you on a silver platter.

How many people just randomly look around for an embark because its in a "cool" area and don't even care whats in the ground?

[Nasikabatrachus]

How many people just randomly look around for an embark because its in a "cool" area and don't even care whats in the ground?

That's what I usually do. Usually I try to find a place that would be interesting for an adventurer to visit, then build with an interesting adventurer experience in mind. Some of my longest running forts don't even have iron.

[Neoskel]

When i play dwarf mode i usually embark on the flattest glacier i can find. Especially with 4+ layers of ice. At some point i'm gonna batten down and actually put some effort into working on one of those long enough to do some ice casting experiments/megaprojects.

[Biopass]

My favorite and longest-running fortress was a 40d fortress in the middle of a desert next to the sea with a volcano in it. I was just looking for a decent desert embark. As it turned out later, the rock layers consisted of chalk, chalk, and granite. Glass and iron fort, anyone?

(the legendary weaponsmith I got from a mood just made things better... 40d masterpiece steel bolts were essentially 40mm armor piercing rounds, even in the hands of a novice marksdwarf)

[zephyr_hound]

I'm doing a story fort right now with a focus on soapmaking. The embark is the stuff of nightmares: no metal AT ALL, civ has no iron, eleven layer aquifer (!), terrifying jungle, nearby goblin tower, etc. It's the most enjoyable fort I've had for a long time.

[Kogan Loloklam]

My first few forts it was all about unique terrain. A strait pillar next to a river next to a cliff. Climb up the pillar, cross over the river on a bridge, and enter the fort. I stopped doing this due to the fact that there was no reason to have such complex defenses. When goblin invaders get smarter and caravans more effective you'll see less iron worries and more fortification worries. Right now, it's impossible to play if you don't got reliable sources of metal.

Just the same, all my forts have totally magnificent and worthless fortifications.

[runlvlzero]

40d masterpiece steel bolts were essentially 40mm armor piercing rounds, even in the hands of a novice marksdwarf)

lol =) good to know

I'm doing a story fort right now with a focus on soapmaking. The embark is the stuff of nightmares: no metal AT ALL, civ has no iron, eleven layer aquifer (!), terrifying jungle, nearby goblin tower, etc. It's the most enjoyable fort I've had for a long time.

Awesome - i found the story and am gonna check it out =)

Anyway thanks for sharing, honestly I like reading about the stuff people do in this game more then playing it sometimes lol.

[Lolzwheejars]

 I don't play vanilla anymore xD
I'm using some good mods, but I generally like to take flat deserts to start build on. And because of the mod there isn't much stone or metal to go about, so I either end up making walls and things out of half wood half ash bars xD
As for strange embarks. I started in a place where hostile enemies were friendly until the first siege came. And they newer ones started attacking the other ones, of course the ones that were around at the beginning turned hostile when the siege happened xD 

[tolkafox]

Haunted deserts, I've never seen one of these but it has to be awesome.

My favorite was a desert with a river, directly under ground was an aquifer. With no stone to spare for walls, 8 Z levels of aquifer to be pierced through, 30 stones of granite and 20 oak logs for pump material, and ornery giant scorpions wandering about it was much fun.

We never made it past the aquifer BTW, those scorpions were brutal. I blame the migrants, they upset the scorpions with their cheesemaking ways.

[Corona688]

Tiny embark area in a terrifying swamp biome.  I came looking for black dye, with a ton of herbalists, and sure enough sliver barb was there.

Two tries died from wild beak dogs.

The third from harpies.

I should have used a larger embark area, now that I think about it.  They just ran straight at the settlement right from the map edge.

[Koji]

I really liked my last fort. I was embarked in a good swamp on the edge of an evil lake. Something about large bodies of water seems nice.

I hate aquifers with a passion. They're such a pain to pump out, so normally I go for biomes without them. Usually I look for something cool in the environment like a cliff or islands or something.

[Satarus]

Just to see what it was, I embarked on a volcano in the middle of a lake.  The caldera was in the lake and so the water swept in.  After a few minutes of constant cave ins, the volcano had a nice obsidian cap.

[nogoodnames]

Embarked on an Island in a world I genned to have insane amounts of monsters. Over a half dozen night creatures on the map and a titan shrine right next to the embark point. Before this fortress I didn't even know sites like that would appear in fortress mode. Needless to say the first settlers did not last very long.

[Shook]

Embarking on a glacier is pretty Fun too. Not to mention the polar bear that crippled a miner on that embark. Getting water is hard, and actually farming is even harder, since i had no dirt below the ice. This fort, though inactive now (very rarely do i play a fort to its end), regularly deals with goblin invaders, and it has a pet hydra. "Pet" meaning "caged and seriously pissed about it" in this case.

[Untelligent]

When you've played DF for a while, at some point the local resources available cease to define whether a site is interesting, and you start to look for really neat geography.


For instance, the last time I embarked a fort, I started out at the bottom of a frozen major river canyon with sheer cliffs 8-20 stories tall. I had to quickly dig under the river before it thawed in and built my fortress in the caverns below. Each winter, I'd work on a massive ice castle jutting up from the river.

Or at least, it was going to be massive, but then DF was updated and a bunch of the new features would only work with newly genned worlds, so I lost interest in it. Oh well.

Also migrants and traders would arrive along the frozen river. The elf traders would always come just before the thaw, which was funny.