Bay 12 Games Forum

The area I set up has no surface trees, no adamantine, no fuel sources, and extremely limited iron ore available. It does have some tin, and a LOT of copper. Should be enough for full bronze armor + silver warhammers for my military.

I almost always use the stupid embark trick of embarking with plenty of cassiterite and tetrahedrite and the occasional oddball like bismuthinite because both bronze and bismuth bronze make great starting metals to get a weakish military at least able to repel common early game stuff.

It depends on whether I'm doing my current thing of dwarftopias surrounded by evil or just directly embarking on evil biomes.  My usual in the first is to take advantage of the lush environment but have a "naive" approach to the world where the taverns and temples are open to all and while I generally have a "turtle up" lever somewhere that can completely lock the place down instantly, I am agnostic to the foreign villains congregating in the place.

In genuinely horrific biomes, though, I use the technique of immediately channeling down, turning on dumping refuse outside, and then dumping absolutely everything in the wagon into a 1 square quantum stockpile underground, deconstructing the wagon, and moving everyone underground and blocking the entrance with constructed floors/walls/etc. and just gauging what is going on while making a bunch of bronze weapons with the cassiterite/tetrahedrite I brought along.

ETA:  remember to unforbid everything, do away with the dump, and turn dumping outside refuse back off (unless you have reasons for wanting that).  Also the quantum stockpile should include food so it doesn't go rotten.  You don't want a giant stinkbomb and on top of that to run out of food.

Oh wait, I thought you'd asked what I did when I know what I'm doing.  Not "generally."

Okay, well, generally, I dig into the magma pipe and flood my fort with magma, or accidentally lose half my population in a sad attempt at a megaproject that ends in a tragically imprudent digging designation that somehow drops an entire mountain on top of us.  One of my favorites was when my attempt to create a pleasant waterfall resulted in drowning every single dwarf.

Quote from: Orange-of-Cthulhu on May 22, 2022, 03:02:59 pm

It would be cool if you got some sort if indication on embark as to the difficulty - like if you embark right next to 3 dark forts and a necromancer tower, the game should tell you there will be a lot of action.

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 There is a screen in the choose-the-embark-point that tells you how hostile the area is, and who your friends and enemies are at that point. Legends Mode Viewer tells you who your civilization is at war with.
 
 'Embark Anywhere' allows interesting location options ( including inside other settlements ), and sometimes a world record for fastest way to kill all of the dorks.

I don't generally use embark anywhere (other than to embark on mountains when bizarrely of all the biomes you would think embarking directly on a mountain would be the dorfiest thing ever), but I have fairly often embarked within a day's walking distance of a bunch of obviously completely hostile stuff and then had a completely idyllic time where the only threat to my fort's continued existence was, well, me.

And then I've embarked in joyous wilds that look like something from a children's cartoon and then a were-elephant shows up before the end of the year and wrecks absolutely everything that wasn't destroyed by that cute unicorn.

I hope the necro isn't unwelcome, I just want to point out this fairly old script still appears to work just fine, and for its intended purpose.  I'd just embarked in what looked like neutral terrain in the embark assistant, and had near dwarf utopia, i.e., a volcanic island (with a huge impractical peak), metals deep and shallow, a light aquifer (albeit salt water requiring desalination), a bit of stagnant ground water, flux, sand, and no neighbors at all.

It was called the "Land of Mortality" and it was in "the Ignoble Sea" but hey, it said it was neutral so whatever.  Okay it's in a slightly bad neighborhood but tons of trees and no knife-eared hippies to whine about whatever we did with them, all the magma anyone could want, so what?  Evil schmevil.

But then we started being incessantly pestered by undead albatrosses.  They are absolutely helpless and easily wrecked, but why?  Apparently while the ground is (relatively) neutral albeit with somewhat high savagery (on purpose), there is serious evil in the air.

[DFHack]# cat showbiomes.lua
cat is not recognized. Did you mean catsplosion?
[DFHack]# showbiomes
biomes found: 4
Biome reference: x: 59, y: 9, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 62. Evilness: 94, found in the air only
Biome reference: x: 57, y: 7, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 63. Evilness: 79, found in the air only
Biome reference: x: 58, y: 7, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 55. Evilness: 71, found in the air only
Biome reference: x: 58, y: 8, biome: FOREST_TEMPERATE_CONIFER, Savagery: 59. Evilness: 60, found at ground level
Potential air biomes found:5
Biome reference x: 57, y: 8, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 61. Evilness: 79
Biome reference x: 57, y: 9, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 63. Evilness: 75
Biome reference x: 58, y: 9, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 57. Evilness: 81
Biome reference x: 59, y: 7, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 58. Evilness: 93
Biome reference x: 59, y: 8, biome: OCEAN_TEMPERATE, Savagery: 56. Evilness: 69

(Tbh what is on the ground is not that fantastic either.)

I don't think there should be something as crude as a "difficulty slider." 

I think it should be an extension or maybe even a simplification of the current situation where you craft the difficulty to yourself by literally generating and playing in the kind of world that has what you want in it.

You get to pick your own idea of fun.  I like volcanoes and metal and lots of megabeasts and semi-megabeasts to make it not such a playground.  The embark is dwarf utopia but the rest of the world has other ideas.

Good call on your part. A pod of undead orcas can be very nasty. They don't actually need the water at all, so they just hop out of the sea and skip right where your dwarves are.

The island I'm on is so small I think my 3x3 embark may be one of only a few that has no beach tiles.  So I might find out whether undead orcas ever jump out of the water and travel a square or two.  I have a feeling of foreboding that I may not be far enough away from the creatures of "the Ignoble Sea."

Is there an evil biome near? An evil ocean maybe. Just check it out in the legends. Copy and paste.

I'd guess that would be a yes, considering that green square is my location, a neutral and extremely isolated island, but the sea it's in is pure evil.  The darker colors are an overlay using the Evil map from exportlegends.  I should be glad I decided not to embark on the beach because otherwise I would probably be encountering stuff way worse than these flimsy albatrosses.