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[Avin]

I've been having trouble lately where my worlds do not have much in the way of metal diversity and to make it worse Iron is impossible to find anywhere. Is there anything in world generation that can help improve the number of metals found through out the world and possible increase the frequency of metals like Iron?

[PatrikLundell]

Yes and no...

There's a mineral scarcity setting, and the lower the value the less rare (i.e. more abundant) minerals of all kinds are. Advanced world gen allows you to pick values outside of those available to normal world gen. However, there's no in-game mechanism for selecting which ones to increase. It's possible to hack the geo biome(s) of your future embark prior to embarking using DFHack enabled scripts, however.

[Fleeting Frames]

You can also decrease max volcanism to ensure you get no igneous extrusive (or volcanoes). Remember to zero the number of desired volcanoes  if you do this or you'll get infinite rejections.

You can also mod in more iron sources into the game. Whether they take the form of duplicate ores named ETITAMEH, or giving stones like Olivine with iron in their chemical composition chance to extract some, or extracting iron from black sand, or from swamps and marshes, or massively more numerous and common iron men/goblins/humans, or low odds when grinding down on all sedimentary stone, or something else is up to you.

Can even avoid another worldgen entirely by repeatedly smithing/melting leggings/giant axe blades for extra bar per melt-smith cycle.

[Avin]

I should have specified I typically create new worlds using "Design New World with Advanced Parameters" but that's mainly because I like to influence the shape of the land masses. I haven't found any information that explains how the vast majority of the settings interact with each other so mostly all I do is modify the number of ocean edges on an existing region and I try to avoid a world that has lots of large islands.

If I decrease volcanism should I also be increasing Mineral Scarcity?
By how much should these values be changed before they'll start causing problems?
Is there a way to create region type worlds using "Create New World" or is the Design option the only way to achieve that?

[Fleeting Frames]

There's wiki pages on advanced world generation, biome, and world painter if you want certain shapes for your land masses (Perfect World may be more comfortable if you want to recreate real-world landmasses though). Though yeah, they're not complete X parameter in regards to Y parameter; experiment.

Volcanism (among other things like rivers and elevation) affects what layers are present. Mineral scarcity determines what veins and clusters are in them. Higher mineral scarcity number means less minerals, which means less iron ores. Lowest it allows you to edit inside the game is 100, which is about 4-6 veins, always large clusters and many small clusters per 48x48 tile.

If you have really high mineral scarcity (think 10000+), the world might not have any iron available for purchase on embark, you'll be forced to get steel anvils, and only spoiler/steel/bronze/other reaction-only metals may be available to any civilization.

Create New World is just advanced worldgen presets.

[PatrikLundell]

I typically set mineral scarcity to 80000, which is just above the "Very Rare" setting, and with most civs I'll have to go for either bronze picks and axes, or steel anvils (because copper or iron isn't available, respectively). Sometimes both are missing, which strains my embark points, and sometimes both are present, though.

Also note that with reasonably normal worlds you have more than one dwarven civ to embark as, so if one or more key products are missing (could be cavern tree logs and above ground crops as well, as well as high boots), you can back out of the embark and select another civ and see what they offer.