So after finding a good embark (an ocean with a few copper-type ores, coal, and a tiny corner of tundra with no aquifer), I accidentally normal-embarked as dwarves. I landed on the tundra, as I had selected the tundra in embark. I quickly dug down to below where the ocean froze (~3z down), and made a burrow, meeting area, and pen in a 5x5 hole. I got everyone and all my animals down, the only injury being some frostbitten teeth. I think this is a pretty awesome, thing, as I have food for a while. I dug down to the caverns and got my dwarves to cutting trees and digging some workshops an quarters. I don't know how migrants are going to get in. I might autodump their corpses down to my dwarves if they can't get in.
Okay, all this talk of insta-shattering barrels and whatnot sounded like an interesting challenge, so I spun up one of these worlds over the weekend. No modded races, all I did was set the min/max temps to -1000 and null out all the "Min map tiles in X biome" requirements. The world genned just fine that way, no problem placing dwarves and goblins (actually, quite a lot of goblins!) all over the map. I ran a couple hundred years of history and saw roads and a tower or two pop up, which seems in keeping with the idea that actions during worldgen are too abstract to care about things like Neptunian weather. It'll be interesting to see if that's still true in the upcoming release, what with all the semi-realized armies and such moving around.
So I found myself a volcano embark right at the boundary of the glacier and tundra, thinking hey, if we survive embark there might be some interesting temperature-related engineering to try later. In the interest of getting underground with some urgency, most of the embark points went to making everyone a miner and handing out seven copper picks. The rest went to a couple of pigs and random standard embark supplies (for science!).
Some observations:
Upon arriving, I got the phrase "before the Beasts get hungry " -- in every other case that message named some particular animal. Maybe "Beasts" is a default if no surface wildlife exists in the region? Sure enough, upon unpausing, no wildlife entered the map. I had the usual selection of domestic animals in the embark menu, though, so clearly animals do exist in this world. Perhaps we'll also only get inorganic surface titans?
About that unpause -- I only ran the game for a couple of seconds to see what wildlife would spawn. That was enough time for the wagon to deconstruct, and sure enough, the thread, bags of seeds, and anything made of wood had already vanished from existence. There's a big purple splotch (okay, actually just one tile) where the wagon used to be, indicating the frozen globs of wine sitting on the ground. The animals did just fine, though.
Stuff in a dwarf's inventory takes cold damage much slower, though. My seven dwarves only took a few hundred ticks to dig a 3-wide tunnel into the mountainside, but even the idlers who weren't actively digging (and started wandering off across the surface, no less, before deciding to head for the meeting area in the tunnel) managed to get inside without any cold damage to their clothes or selves. Maybe one had frostbitten teeth, but they healed up just fine. A few months later we had five migrants arrive, and they had to schlep across ~40 tiles to the entrance and help deconstruct the wall I'd thrown up (mostly to keep my dehydrated idiots inside until I hooked up a bridge). Even so, they all survived, and although frostbite of the skull sounds pretty painful, it evidently isn't life-threatening. On the other hand, two of them had their clothes completely freeze off, and one ended up with XXclothesXX.
I always thought the subterranean temperature was fixed, but apparently not? Without even using DFhack, you can quickly check by starting to define a meeting zone -- the screen will note if the chosen tiles are cold. So far, everywhere I've tried this on the map, including down in the first cavern, is considered cold. However, it can't be all that cold, since the water in the cavern is still liquid, and nobody/nothing seems to be taking cold damage as long as they stay off the surface. Still, I'm thinking once I tap the volcano and/or magma sea, some heated floors are in order.
About that dehydration I mentioned: I don't know if this is just my bad luck in picking an embark or somehow related to the cold, but this map definitely has some unusual features. I'm thinking that maybe erosion didn't run normally. Fully half the world map was mountains, and even the tundra/glacier I embarked on close to the (frozen) ocean has basically mountainous terrain. Steep cliffs, ~40 z-levels of surface relief, but unlike a mountain there's plenty of clay soil under the ice. The first cavern is almost 80 z-levels below the embark point, and has only a tiny channel of water running through it. My dwarves almost died of dehydration before they found it after a solid month of continuous digging, and were hungry enough to start hunting for vermin by the time they finished drinking. We might not have made it, except that one beard managed to catch and eat a cave spider, which was apparently either filling or disgusting enough that after that he walked right upstairs and finally carried out my instructions to butcher the draft animals.
As of now, it's early fall. We've only had the five migrants I mentioned, but I'd expect the second wave will be along soon. It'll hopefully also be small, given that we've created almost no wealth at this point, because resources are still at a premium. Following some hijinx with troglodytes and a cave troll, we've got a nice expanse of cavern walled off and we're gradually bootstrapping farms off the plants gathered from there. So far it's been a struggle to maintain even one unit of booze per dwarf, though. We've gathered and spun a few webs, too, so with any luck we can get some replacement clothes made before the migrants whose threads froze off start tantruming from nakedness. All in all, for starting on basically a moon of Neptune, not a bad start.
A final thought: it sounds like underground adventuring is going to be much more viable in the upcoming release, what with the tunnels and mountain halls and such. That's going to make adventuring in this kind of world a whole different game than it is now.
