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[andrian]

Okay, so I've been playing DF for awhile, and by far my favorite embark biomes are savage tropical forests. As such, I want to know how to generate more of them. While forests are fairly easy to generate - non-freezing, mid-elevation, high rainfall, high drainage, tropical areas seem to be a bit of a mystery to me. I don't understand advanced worldgen parameters very well, but I've done a few experiments and here are my findings so far:

1. Tropical regions don't show up much unless there is a pole.
2. Tropical regions always show up in the areas furthest from the pole.
3. Temperature has almost no appreciable effect on whether a region is tropical. So long as the temperature is not freezing, tropical regions will form far from the pole.

Is there anything I've missed? Is there a way to increase the amount of tropical areas on a map?

[Fleeting Frames]

On worlds with poles, topicality is indeed primarily dependent on latitude. In fact, Tropical Dry Broadleaf Forests will only appear between moist and temperate ones in worlds whose 'height' is at least 127 tiles (width can be 17 tho). Not all biomes become tropical at same latitude.

On worlds without poles, they need a temp of ~85+. Rainfall and elevation (helpful for reducing aquifers) both lower temperature, so even in a world with 100 min and max temperature there will likely be some regions not tropical, but they'll be mostly so. Nonetheless, it's entirely possible to have a world that is entirely tropics. Don't worry about being too hot if you don't have any poles, either; in that case the temperature gets capped to dwarf-safe limit (in a world with poles, your dwarves can die on embark with excessively inhospitable temperatures).

[PatrikLundell]

Fleeting Frames typed faster that I did, so there's a considerable overlap:

Worlds are divided into 3 types of zones:
- Tropical
- Maybe tropical
- Temperate (which includes arctic, etc).

For worlds, how these zone types are determined depends on whether the world has at least one pole or not.

For a world without poles, a temperature at or over 85 results in a tropical biome (excluding those without distinctions, such as mountains and deserts), 75 - 85 results in a "maybe" zone, and everything below 75 is "temperate".
Thus, for an all tropical world you'd use a world without poles having temperatures >= 85.

If there are poles, the zones are dependent on latitude:
For a single pole world of a height of 257, the latitude is tropical if its 200 or larger (assuming a North pole, it's mirrored for a South pole).
For a double pole world with a height of 257 it's tropical from 100 to (257 - 100) = 157.
The "maybe" zone streches from > 170 - 199 for a North pole only world, with corresponding logic as for the tropical boundary for a dual pole world.
Worlds smaller than 257 have these boundaries divided by the appropriate factor (2 for 127, 4 for 65, 8 for 33, 16 for 17).

Whether a world tile in the "maybe" zone ends up being tropical or not is dependent on the biome and parameters, and these parameters vary per biome. The parameters are primarily rainfall and temperature.

It can also be noted that the elusive tropical dry broadleaf biome only occurs on world with at least one pole having a height of 127 and 257.

If you're using PSVs for world gen and want specific biomes you may want to use the DFHack script tweakmap http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161188.msg7228166#msg7228166 to specify the values, as that editor "understands" biomes and latitudes (the built in World Painter only deals with the raw number, not the resultant biomes).

[andrian]

Thank you to both of you! That really helps me a lot, actually!

As for dwarves dying due to unsafe temperatures... I only recently discovered that was possible. I could never figure out what was killing my dwarves and why only my miners were immune... until they went outside.

Is there any reason why I might want a tropical dry broadleaf forest? I've never embarked in one before because I tend to use small or smaller size maps.

Also, I'm sure there has to be a way to transfer worldgen params from one world to another. What file(s) do I copy and where do I find them?

[PatrikLundell]

There is at least one plant that can be used for booze production that only exists in dry broadleaf forests. There might be some animals as well, although I haven't checked. Otherwise, no particular reason.

The world gen uses the file <df>\data\init\world_gen.txt for parameter sets. You can add your own set to that file and the entries will show up in advanced world gen. This is also the file you paste Legends Mode exported world gen data into.

You can't "transfer" parameters from one world to another, but you can generate several worlds from the same set of parameters.

[Fleeting Frames]

No animals exclusive to it - though there are handful exclusive to moist ones - though peregrine falcons are notable for occurring in most biomes but not moist forests. If you're generating tallest or second-tallest world, you'd likely embark in one if you're looking at embark that is on the boundary of temperate and tropical.

The brewables exclusive to drys are Tomato and Buckwheat. Also, some tropical fruit trees are exclusive to plains while others are exclusive to forests in general (while temperate fruit trees have no such distinction).

If you want to get a preexisting world's parameters, you need to go into legends mode and ex(p)ort the parameters/gen info.

[andrian]

Oops, I mistyped when I asked about transfering parameters. I meant to transfer them from one GAME to another. Fortunately, the wiki has my back and I figured it out. Now that I'm doing more advanced worldgen, it gets really annoying to have to manually enter every set of parameters every time I switch from one game to another (for mods and such).

Anyway, thanks everyone for your help!

[PatrikLundell]

Most parameters affecting a game are stored within the save, and thus aren't affected by changes for new worlds. Some, like pop caps, are global, however. If you want to play several fortresses in parallel with different sets of global parameters you may consider having several copies of DF, each copy containing the set you want for that world, and the same goes for several mod sets: on DF per set. DF is blessedly free from the stupidity of registry guff, so you can have several DF installations in parallel (and run them at the same time as well).

[andrian]

Most parameters affecting a game are stored within the save, and thus aren't affected by changes for new worlds. Some, like pop caps, are global, however. If you want to play several fortresses in parallel with different sets of global parameters you may consider having several copies of DF, each copy containing the set you want for that world, and the same goes for several mod sets: on DF per set. DF is blessedly free from the stupidity of registry guff, so you can have several DF installations in parallel (and run them at the same time as well).

Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I have one vanilla DF, one Masterwork DF, etc. Basically, I wanted to figure out how to copy parameter sets between copies of the game, and I found out how to do that by copying sections of the worldgen file.