Mineral scarcity to about 1000. Most agree that this is the most comfortable value. I have made some tests, by the way.
You hit a jackpot if you find magnetite on your map. But how do you encounter this lucky find?
First, you want to embark in some forest area (but try to avoid aquifiers). Perhaps you will want to use Perfect World to create a map that has a plenty of such areas; they generally are sedimentary.
Use the site finder, of course, to discover shallow metals in these embark locations.
Once you embark, the first thing you do is hit k and look around for stone pebbles and boulders. Whatever material you see here, is what you will hit below your soil layer.
If you hit dolomite, calcite, limestone, chalk, then you're on the good path, you've found a sedimentary layer where magnetite can appear, embedded into one of these flux layers. A definite plus is that you also get pretty much unlimited flux for steelmaking.
Usually one type of stones will dominantly appear in large veins in any of these flux layers. Magnetite is not guaranteed, so dig around, and if you hit (say) a large vein of rhyolite, you're out of luck - those veins could all have been magnetite, with some luck. Dont try another fort right next to the first one, as it's likely to have the same stone vein. Perhaps you always get this same stone vein in a single closeup embark screen.
Alternately, as soon as you embark, run DF prospector from the DFhack toolset. It is not AS cheaty as DF reveal, but if your idea of fun is having iron in your map, then getting to the fun part will be much less tedious with this tool. Remember, this is a singleplayer game and you only have to worry about your own fun.
Oh and yeah, on a 3x3 embark, I found 30.000 magnetite tiles. After digging a single vein out, I have had enough to train up some of my smiths all the way up. Good luck striking this in your maps.
That said... I wonder, how much of all this is wrong? =P
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Topic: No iron (Read 4470 times)