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[FortressBuilder]

DF does a decent job with procedurally generating world history, but sometimes I want to have a finer control of it. It is already possible to control the terrain by setting temperature, rainfall etc. on a tile-to-tile-basis, but you cannot control where cities are placed, when wars start, which historical figures are created etc.

It should be possible to import a legends xml file which holds information about the world history. It would have the same (or a similar) structure as the exported legends file. DF would then take these settings into account when creating a world, so you could for example tell it where you want a city of a given civilization with a given name. Most of the settings would be optional and DF would generate the rest you didn't explicitly tell it how you want it. So you could:

• Tell DF where you want your main cities, how they should be called, how much population they should have, but don't care about the small villages around, which would be taken care of by DF.
• Set some skill of a historical figure to some value and let DF generate values for the other skills.
• Tell DF that the historical figure you created has three children of some ages and let it come up with names, skills, etc.
• Tell it how the important historical figures in a city are called, set their skills, birth years, genders etc. but don't care about the small folk or lesser nobles that live in the city. This however doesn't mean that there couldn't be historical figures (like great artists) in the small folk.

This would allow controlling all the things you care about in your world while letting DF handle the rest. You could be as detailed or vague as you want, i.e. you could give it a fully fleshed out historical figure or only a few guidelines after which it will create them. Especially for challenge worlds or succession fortress/adventurer games this could be useful, because you could determine which neighbors you have, which nations are ruled by which kings or where tombs, caves and necromancer towers are.