Bay 12 Games Forum

Just thought I would share my techniques for building custom worlds. Might make a tutorial on the wiki if people are interested. Why settle for random when you can play God and create a world exactly the way you want it? Desert goes here, major river goes there; mountains, hills, swamps: you decide. And the best part is that all the tools are free.

GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ is an open source image editing program. I use it to draw the outlines of my continent or island, white on a black background. Start with a 1028x1028 pixel file, it gives you more control and you can scale it down to 257x257 (the size used by Perfect World) later. after I the use the levels command to set the white point to something quite low, around 80 or so. This is your sea level land. Next I like to make mountains and hills. I usually make a separate layer for these features. You can draw them in manually or use the selection tool to draw an outline. Then use shape filled gradient to draw mountains that slope nicely from their peaks to the plains. I like to use the fingerpaint tool to drag some ridge spurs out from the main mountain, and give more interesting topology to the coasts. There are really an endless number of techniques you can use to create your basic land mass.

After you have some topography drawn in GIMP, save the file as a .png. Then use the excellent free height map editor, Wilbur http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html, to perform some tweaks and pre-erode your map. Wilbur has two erosion tools, a "precipiton" based system that simulates rainfall washing soil downhill, and an "incise flow" tool that calculates water flows for the whole map, and erodes rivers based on flow rates. When using the incise flow tool, be sure to use the "fill basins" tool, every single time. I like to run a few passes of the precipiton tool, fill basins, and then run a few passes of the incise tool, using gradually increasing gradients and decreasing widths. This creates river valleys  that are wide near the mouth and narrower near the source.

If your rivers aren't going where you want them to, you can use Wilbur's hill and valley tools to get them to go where you like. On one map, for instance, I created a large, high plateau where all the water drained off the plateau on one side. This created a major river feeding into another major river over a HUGE waterfall. I will often switch back and forth between GIMP and Wilbur in order to use the different tools each provides. The curves and levels tools in GIMP are very useful for fine tuning your contours, using curves for instance you can create continental shelves, flat topped mesas, and sharp spiky peaks.

After you have your map looking as you want it to, it is time to bring it all together in Perfect World http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=2354. First, scale your image down to 257x257, then save it as a bitmap (.bmp) file. Import your bitmap into Perfect World, then use the various tabs to calculate rainfall, drainage, volcanism and savagery. Import your world gen file, set your map generation parameters, export your world gen file and give it a test in dwarf fortress!

Just started a new fort, half calm forest, half sinister hills. To me zombie badgers aren't sinister, they are terrifying. There are ten of them about 40 squares away from my freshly arrived wagon. I've got one guy with an axe, xbow and leather armor, but he has with pathetic weapon skills. What should I do? Think I can dig a trench before they get to me?

I've got an underground cistern that draws from an underground lake through a pump. The lake is two z levels deep. Although not connected to the edges at the surface, the deeper parts do connect to the edge. Oddly, the lake refills slowly, and even more oddly, the only tiles that permanently decrease in depth are those with underground trees in them. Now I have a lake with mostly 7/7 water, except for a few patches with depths of 5 and 6 where the trees are. Anyone else notice that tree filled tiles don't seem to refill correctly?

So my latest map has a lot of kaolinite, and I had been playing some Civ V (blech) and I saw they had a porcelain pagoda wonder. So I started building that. Boring. Then I re-watched an old Saturday Night Live. Anyone seen the "Porcelain Fountains" and the "Marble Columns" fake commercial sketches with Scarlett Johansson? Hehe. My map has some marble too, so I'm going to do BOTH porcelain fountains AND marble columns!

Nothing says "I'm a Noble like PORCELAIN FOUNTAINS."
You put a porcelain fountain in ya fortress people are gonna say “What is this, a mountainhome?” I’m telling ya! Ya gotta get’chaself some PORCELAIN FOUNTAINS.
If you order one of these things you got nothing to worry about. I come to you. I load up the wagon with the pipes and the wooden corkscrews and the porcelain blocks and I come to you. If you experience any problems with piping or drowning of your entire fortress or your framerate just call and I come to you. Don’t like where we installed your fountain just call and I come to you.
I come to you.

There's no way to get an actual jet of water shooting up, right? But I can make a pump stack inside a porcelain sculpture. I believe I've got it! My first megaproject! A giant sculpture of a dwarf, shielding his eyes from the sun, endlessly vomiting water.

Swim. Ahahahaha, but seriously, I'm swimming in elephant parts right about now, a really good hunter just showed up and killed two, boom-boom, one after the other and now I'm afraid all that meat is going to rot. I think I need to build a second kitchen just to handle the surplus.

Now here's an even dwarfier joke about elephants.

Q. Why do ducks have flat feet?
A. To put out !!Shrubs!!

Q. Why do elephants have flat feet?
A. To put out !!ducks!!

A basic idea that can be applied to all reactor designs, I know someone has probably thought of this before but I didn't see it in the wiki: diagonal flow to regulate pressure. The problem with many designs is that they are quite dependent on water level, ceasing to function with too much or too little water. By putting diagonal pressure reducers right before your water wheels, you will get a perfectly regulated flow across the wheels. I just made a three wheel version, with four pipes feeding down into the three wheel race channels through diagonal connections. It can't be overfilled, the upper half can be totally full and the diagonal connections will keep the excess water from jamming the wheels.

It also works with very little water, which is a problem for me now because I put the outlet in the wrong place, and it bleeds off very slowly. The thing is down to 1/4 the water it had when full, water at 1-3 through most of it, but the pressure regulators are still at 6-7, and feeding the wheels perfectly.

Anyone know why pressure might return water up a z-level... but only to a depth of 1-2? I built a j-pipe feeding my underground reservoir, using a floor hatch to keep out bad guys. After hooking it all up and opening the floodgate, it filled my reservoir to a depth of 1-2. I've done this before and had it work, the only two differences I can see are: 1, I didn't get rid of the ramp under the grate, and 2, the intake pipe flows under a murky pool. Any thoughts?