As the seven dwarves arrived at their allotted settlement site, and everyone started preparing to build the fortress, the expedition leader saw that the miner was doing something rather... odd.
"Likot, what is that in yer beard? It looks like a ☼Marble Drum☼."
"It's my new invention. I set the drum on the ground, where it picks up tiny vibrations, which I can feel through my beard."
The expedition leader considered this carefully.
"Have you been smoking the rope reed again?"
"Not at all, Mr. Expedition Leader. By picking up the vibrations, I can tell where structures under the ground are."
"I thought that's what your pick was for."
"This lets me see them before I dig. Just watch." The miner crouched down so he could set the drum on the ground, his beard stretched taut, then hollered "Hey Thīkut, do it like I told you!"
Farmer Thīkut looked down, his eyes unfocused as if he was looking at something far off in the distance instead of at his feet, and shouted "BUILD A FARM HERE!"
So I discovered something. If you designate a large farm plot (b-p, then u and k to make it max size) and then go to a unmined underground level, the entire plot shows up in red, and you get this text message.
BUT, if even one square of the farm plot covers the cavern floor, you get things like this instead:
By panning the farm plot across the level, you can find areas of cavern floor. And because caverns have lots of ramps, you can actually follow the floor from level to level. I started a new fortress, and poking around with the farm plot, found that level 115 had the highest floor I could find. I marked this area where the walls would be so you can see the layout:
I then designated stairs to be dug, to break through the ceiling over this floor, where the cursor is. After my miner dug to it, sure enough, the cavern was there:
Note that this trick can only reveal floors, so the open spaces were not marked in the before shot. But it did identify all of the pillars in the center of the area (although you can see that one of them is actually a tree).
This trick is quite useful if you missed a cavern level on your dive to the magma sea, and want to find it without doing exploratory tunnels.
EDIT TO ADD: CaptainArchmage discovered that this trick
works with paved roads and zones too. This makes it possible to see more spaces than farms (which require soil), including the location of certain spoileriffic things. This also gives this trick a good name -- Road-Dar.
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Topic: Dwarven Ground Penetrating Radar (Read 55018 times)