if only there was some kind of utility that could generate a world for us that would ignore certain rules and just make it playable even if it shouldent work.
ik theres perfect world or something, and thats close, but it dosnt just outright magically make a world that works, and is flat, and has exactly what we want
Perfect world works by vanilla world painter, which lets you determine six factors(elevation,rainfall, drainage, volcanism, temperature, savagery) down to a region tile.
I usually remove all rejection parameters other than playable civs, and rarely see worlds with more than 5 rejections - I'm leery about even one, though, since I've had that make the worldgen not work cross-platform when sharing the parameters.
Anyway, topically: When I plan a new fortress, I ask myself what I want for it. So, before embarking I have a checklist for world gen.
It will most likely look like this:
Desired biomes F,P,T.
Desired neighbours g,h,e.
Desired features ®, ©
Desired minerals $, Š
So...A CHECKLIST FOR THAT:
1. Paint desired elevation, deciding at this time where e, h, g, dwarves and potential sites for my desired embark will go. I frequently make use of oceans here to enforce a geographical separation, which forces either medium+ or low elevation (lest it be eaten by lake and ocean merge) for the desired embark. Rivers and lakes also require elevation cliffs and canyons to have semblance of directing them further out.
Wiki also suggests they're relevant for surprisingly common alluvial layers, which don't take anything away and add clusters of gold, tin and platinum.
2. Paint savagery, and if need to be, temperature, to corral those civilization to the start spots I want. Notably, elves won't settle on taiga and I find humans like 25 savagery the most and dwarves are typically placed first. Dwarves will outright fail with anything more exciting than calm mountain, but others find wilds pretty tenable. Using 67 savagery squares works for relatively easily-expanded areas that will not be settled on, to corral the growth of civilization to end with a town towards my location.
3. Paint their and my own desired embark's required rainfalls, then drainages, then temperatures. Notably, I frequently go for large evil and medium good regions or vice-versa for neighbours e and g, controlling them indirectly through painted region sizes.
4. Paint volcanisms as desired. I by default go for a grid of 2-51-99 volcanisms. Keeps the soil layers more varied between biomes, but unless you really want a volcano, magma pipe, to avoid stone aquifers or aluminium(only significant thing unique to igneous extrusive) I'd recommend going for lower end volcanisms for desired biome.
Note that for biomes that shear in you can get things like flux and clay through their tiles, but the minerals present will be determined by the base local level map you see pre-embark; there will never be limonite and native gold veins in same 48x48 square.
(Though I've at least once found a magma pipe in sedimentary layer tile - albeit only once.)
5. At this point, the long-ass checking for desired features ® and © starts. I likely already have made them more likely, but I nonetheless have to gen numerous worlds to year 2 and check for embarks with ®, © and F, P, T, something which takes exponentially longer as the lists of those grows.
Of particular interest is that layer materials go under here as feature rather than mineral. Though you can often keep geography the same while changing their materials by changing volcanism - even directly on top of them - so if you accidentally painted an igneous extrusive on your embark, fret not. This means that I may very well gen something with F, P, T (easy) and then fine-tune towards ® and ©.
Other single-tile variables can also often be slightly changed without messing up the geography, but it'd be better to not rely on any of them - they very well may be, especially if you had rejections in world gen (as each rejection gives another chance for it to not gen to the same end result).
Here I would ensure my evil biomes are just as evil as I want them to be, by changing the relevant variables of evil cloud, rain and regional interaction numbers. Only really works fully with more than 1 evil biome.
6. Desired minerals $ and Š This means things like veins or large or small clusters. I typically start out with mineral scarcity set to 500 and then increment downwards till I have what I want. Prospecting here helps.
7. Desired populations of biomes F, P, T. It'd suck to embark on joyous forest for unicorns and sun berries to find there aren't any, right? Well, very likely are (~est. 80% for any one plant from about 8 counts), but I use region-pops list-all to check. Of note, all the previous stuff would affect the plants, which is why this is here.
If 6. isn't blocking, I like to do 7. or 8. by mineral scarcity since it is such a large range for effects.
Not only surface plants can be affected; Somewhere between 7 and 8 is changing, say, min or max amount of water in caverns - can use this to ensure you have all desired cavern plants with just 1 cavern.
Messing with demon numbers or other cavern parameters should also work.
8. The growth of neighbours e, g and h as desired. Ideally, I'd do this by history seed, and intermittently pausing the world gen to check the status of sites. Legends mode is useful as well to jump into history at the mid-point of a war.
However, goblins have a nasty habit of wanting to settle on human sites, should I decide to use humans. This can be avoided by keeping history seed constant - keeping their first site locations the same - and changing other parameters that affect the history. If not going for something like mineral scarcity, could perhaps use werebeast, vampire, (semi-)mega, secret, etc. counts, though I haven't been yet forced to use those.
9. Embark and check if e, g, h are in range and show up. This does mean running for over a year and making a good-sized trade to see human caravan alongside performance troupes, for instance. If one of them doesn't show up, go back to 8.
Also of interest is that surface webs and air biome layouts are determined at embark time.
10. 
?
11. Find that there's still more you're capable of improving, and do so. Back to earlier steps. Perfection is unattainable.
No. I leave the volcanism setting alone. Instead, I force the worldgen spinner to increase the world flatness, forcing it to generate more sedimentary and deep soil layers.
Hm. While I haven't tested this much across varied elevation, in my experience the top layers will be either rarely metamorphoric or igneous extrusive / sedimentary depending on the volcanism value of the biome.
Since wiki doesn't mention it, have you done any science that higher elevation variances generate sedimentary layers less often? I've certainly seen them in mountainous areas.
As for your lack of aquifer, could take this and put civilization numbers to 1 to remove danger of invasions:
PS: It's not really newbie-suitable on account of the neighbours + possibly wanting a rainfall tweak for giant elephants, but I recently did do a 43.03+ flat volcano for request, if you're interested wierd.
PS: If you hit sphalerite early, you're definitely in sucky metamorphic layer, and there isn't any sedimentary in that biome.
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Topic: Fortress Checklist (Read 15513 times)