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[Polar_Atom]

    Everytime I start a new fortress, I instantly pause and design out the whole thing, every detail. Its beautiful, I'm an artist. But there's always one problem. I always hit a vein of gold, or several. Or gems. RUINED! All of the walls are gold, and I have to dig through peoples bedrooms to get at them. Its a menace, I'd rather dig into bland and save the gold for later.

Is there some-kind of mod I can get where I can see the squares that are black? I've seen mention of it on the wind but I can't find it. Much help would be appreciated.

Polar.

[Agent_86]

I believe you'd be looking for one of the utilities in the DFhack pack... I don't use it so I don't know which one exactly to point you to.

[magic dwarf]

I downloaded something called DF reveal a while back. check the DF wiki

[Polar_Atom]

Beware, I should have said.

I'm on. A Mac.

[Starver]

One other thing about DFReveal is that it 'ruins' various things.  Not just surprises (wanted or not) by the player, but it gets past the point of the game saying "Oooh, now you can see that there's magma I'll let you build magma forges!".  I think there's DFHack tools (last time I looked at the list of them) that sort that out, but I think the best advice is to run the DFReveal/whatever on a copy of the initial savegame[1].  In which case you could just as well copy the savegame to a PC (Win/Linux) system and DFReveal it there, to get a handle on what's down in the ground, if you really can't do so on a Mac.

But don't modern Macs have a Linuxy background too?  I'm a bit out of practice with that platform (at anything like a system level, leastwise), so I'm not too sure about that.  If the Wiki doesn't tell you, then I'm sure someone else here will be along shortly to be more definitive.


[1] I set my Init settings up to save on embark, and seasonally, and though I don't use DFHack, I suppose I could start the most basic stuff up on the "region#" game, save that, open the "region#-spr-1050" game to run the DFHack tools and export all the images I want, then go back to the plain save in order to apply these to an unrevealed playing arena but with reference to your various exported images[2].  Although thinking about it I could just run DFHack, make notes and Ctrl-Alt-Del (substitute Mac equivalent here, in your case, if you get some sort of DF'Mac'Hack) and crash myself out without saving at all, because if I was cheating a little, I might as well cheat a lottle.

[2] The number of times I've accidentally (d)eleted a complicated Burro(w) designation (having not exited out of that before trying to (d)esignate a (d)igging tile or five hundred) is ridiculous, and I've long wondered about the possibility of exporting and importing burrow designations (also setting burrows to be supersets of various other burrows, without having to repeat designations, and perhaps even picking up changes to referenced burrows, but that's a different matter) so as to save time reinstating but if you could do that, I suppose another way would be to go to your Revealed map, designate a burrow to follow the subterranean contours that you can now see, export it, abandon and re-open the 'virgin' save, import the burrow, designate everything to be dug out (having left clues as to where to put key stairwells) but restrict the miners to just the template burrow.  Then tidy it up later.  But note that however great a suggestion this is, it has no (current) basis in reality and isn't (yet) possible.  But an idea for the future, that I've no doubt many other people have considered.

[Cpt.tazer]

just use the DFhack, when you run it it reveals DONT CLOSE THE PROGRAM, when you are done using everything then just type something into the box that appears and click enter, and it will unreveal everything again, leaving your designations

[Polar_Atom]

Thanks a bunch. I'll run DF Hack on an Embark copy on my Windows Machine, as a reference.

[i874236951]

dfreveal works perfectly fine and does not "reveal" the map to the game's knowledge (e.g. it does not allow magma forges, activate HFS, so on) unless you close the dfreveal program while it's running or unpause the game while it's running.  Even then, there's a newish dfunreveal tool that may be able to fix accidental perma-reveals (and you would, of course, save and make backups before running the tool in the first place).

Unless you're serious about getting every bit of every vein, don't start digging into bedrooms and messing up your design.  Smoothing and engraving gold and gem walls and floors seriously boosts a room's value, and, I think, looks pretty cool.  What I usually do is, first of all, not design floors on sedimentary layers if I have them, because they have the veins I'm going to want to pretty much decimate.  Then, when I want to do some exploratory mining, I start either above or below where my "main fort" floors are, and work my way through the layers without coming too close to the perimeter of my fort design.  That is, I like to leave a little gap of black, unrevealed stone between my actual fort and where the no-holds-barred mining operation is going on.  Even if a vein continues into that space, you're really only missing out on maybe 5-10 ores.

[Starver]

just use the DFhack, when you run it it reveals DONT CLOSE THE PROGRAM, when you are done using everything then just type something into the box that appears and click enter, and it will unreveal everything again, leaving your designations

That sounds much more civilised than how I thought it went (or possibly how it used to go).  You might even tempt me into cheating a little in future!






(I still want a burrow export/import feature, though. )

[Rallan]

If you aren't too worried about what colour your walls are, just set mineral scarcity to 100 in the worldgen parameters. There'll be veins of valuable metals everywhere, so leaving some of it in situ to serve as the walls for your bedrooms isn't a big deal. Big vein of gold running right through the bedroom area? No sweat, leave two thirds of it in place as bedroom walls, because there's stacks of gold on the rest of the map.

Alternatively, dig out the ores and replace them with constructed walls. Just keep in mind that this will have an affect on quality. If you construct a stone wall it will be rough and can't be smoothed or engraved. If you construct a wall with stone blocks (made at a mason's workshop) or metal bars (made at a forge), it'll count as smooth but can't be engraved.

[Kay12]

I favor constructed walls anyway. Most dwarves get along without superb bedrooms and those fancy nobles can be satisfied much easier anyway...

[Reelyanoob]

If you want total control, you can remove all the grey stones from the raws, and have embarks which are basically nothing but marble, admantine (ENTIRE LAYERS!), platinum, gold and iron (layers too).

You have no idea how happy natural solid gold floors made all my dwarves.