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[Aetharan]

I'm playing Masterwork DF, and have started playing around with adding my own elements to the game (being careful not to tinker too much with the balance).  One thing I've noticed is that Slade can be mined in MW, which has me thinking.

I attempted to make a mineral that would spawn in veins within the Slade, using the token [ENVIRONMENT_SPEC:SLADE:VEIN:100], but it doesn't show up at all in generation.  Did I do it wrong, or is there something in the code that keeps the bottom layer completely uniform?

Ultimately, I have the goal of modifying the environment down there so that it feels like a living, breathing environment appropriate to its default residents.  I want an ecosystem down there, with grasses and trees adapted to the environment (and downright evil, preferably with syndromes involved in trying to make taming them even more FUN), and a number of various minerals that are only available if you've made it down past the semi-molten rock.  I'm guessing that I'm going to have to create a soil with [DEEP_SURFACE] and take that tag out of Slade, replacing it with an [ENVIRONMENT_SPEC] tag to spawn as clusters or veins in that soil.  Am I moving in the right direction?  Is what I want to do even possible?

For the flora, would an [UNDERGROUND_DEPTH:4:4] tag make them grow in the appropriate place, or should those be 5s (or is the token incapable of making things grow that deep, even once there is soil?)

[Halfling]

Someone smarter may be able to do it (looking at Meph), but here's some thoughts on adding grass/soil to hell in another thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=127552.msg4410741#msg4410741 (other posts on topic above that)

Consider this watched

[Aetharan]

Well, an early experiment with both the token [SOIL] and [DEEP_SURFACE] created some fun.  My black dirt did, indeed, form the deep surface as intended...  but it also formed two of the four soil layers on the initial test site.  The fun bit was that it had included clusters of Slade as intended (with that having embedded veins of Obdurium), but only on the top surface layers.  The inclusions didn't appear buried hell-- that was uniform.

I'm going to have to test various methods of excluding it from the surface without removing SOIL, and adding plants to it...  then see if specifying multiple DEEP_SURFACEs will share the space, or each one take a biome of its own.

EDIT (11:15, CDT):
I'm keeping a record of what I learn here, on the off chance that anybody finds my experiments useful, or can provide me with some insight.  An experiment was run with the "deepsoil" material having been given the tokens [SOIL][DEEP_SURFACE][SPECIAL].  It once again showed up at both the top and bottom of the map, with inclusions of Slade (and my Obdurium, which I'm still working on balancing) only in the top layer.  I revealed Hell and let the game run for about ten minutes...  none of the grass I created was growing down there.  Tried muddying it by creating a river source down there and letting it muddy things up, then drying it out and letting the game run a while longer...  Still no growth.

Next experiment:  Remove the [SOIL] token, make it vaporize on mining instead.  Soil obviously isn't making things grow on it anyway, so I might as well take it out.  Guess I'm going to have to try to find a way to muddy the HFS while the player's busy above.  Generated a world with three [DEEP_SURFACE] materials to see if I can get some diversity down there that way, with plants on the back-burner until I figure out how to muddy the floor.  The first embark in this world has only Deepsoil down there, no Slade or Obdurium despite all three having the [DEEP_SURFACE] token.  Abandoned, looking for a site where I can find a meeting of multiple biomes...  Site found, and Hell revealed.  Once again, uniform.  At this point, I'm stuck.  I don't know what to do to break the uniformity of the bottom layers!  Does anybody have advice?

[MagmaMcFry]

Does anybody have advice?

Looks like Toady simply coded HFS to be uniform. There's nothing you can do about it.

[Hugo_The_Dwarf]

also as a tip, when you revealed hell did you also activate the hell feature (found hell?) and plants/grass won't grow normally in hell due to there being no water (idk if you can simply add [DRY] to the plants and they will grow or not) but underground plants and grass only start to grow when their features are discovered.

[Aetharan]

Thank you for pointing out that error, Hugo.  I went back and ran a new pass, muddying a bit by creating river sources down there on a hill and giving it some time to marinate.  As an interesting side-note:  This world ended up with the entire deep-surface being the ore that I meant to occur in veins down there.  Seems it just randomly picks from among the options with the appropriate tag and runs with one of them.  The plant that I created with [UNDERGROUND_DEPTH:4:5] didn't grow with Hell discovered, but the moment I toggled the caverns on, their mosses started to grow in my piles of mud, so obviously properly-configured plants -will- grow down there, just like anywhere else.

It becomes a question of whether there's any way to make the floor automatically muddy and get plants spawning on it before discovery, which I'm beginning to doubt is any more possible than embedding veins in the Slade.

(For the record, the ore I've been trying to include is my 'Obdurium', the metal of which is comparable to Adamantine in every way except solid density, for which I'm currently using Platinum's numbers-- something designed to be very hard to find and get, very strong, but heavy enough to be a very unattractive option for armor despite the near-invulnerability it promises.  I really wanted to make it only possible to mine once you'd successfully colonized hell.)

[Meph]

Then make vermin that lives in hell and make their webs an ingredient for your magical metal... or make slade diggable and make a reaction to "extract obdurium from slade". Or make it the itemcorpse (BAR:NONE:INORGANIC:OBDURIUM) of custom-written non-flying depth:5:5 creatures that live down there. Dwarves colonize hell, kill creatures, get magical metal. You can even make them tame/shearable for it, if you like.

[Aetharan]

Thank you for the kick in the bum about needing to think outside of the box, Meph.  If I can't play with the geology or flora directly, then I'll have to focus on fauna to give the place the elements I want it to have.  I suppose that the sheer difficulty of colonization down there should count as enough of a balance against Adamantine's rarity.  Heck, if I'm not mistaken, Adamantine's similarly farmable in Masterwork as is.

I feel a little foolish for having tunnel-visioned on geology like that.

[Meph]

I personally think that making slade digabble and then adding a reaction to slowly extract your metal would be the best solution to what you proposed. After all, it will be mining and refining, just like you wanted.

I have diggable slade in hell, mostly for making colonization more interesting, I use "soul harvester" webs that are magma-proof that people can use for cloth, and I have adamantine beetles living down there that can be farmed for adamantine, and I have "souls" that can be killed very easily (to free them from damnation) that drop nice little items as itemcorpses.

I also use naryaths demon mod for some custom demons, but most of them are still the random vanilla demons. Hope any of these ideas helps