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[Eagleon]

Dunno if this is possible at all, or if the engine would burp on it or something, but I'd love a utility that lets you start anywhere - middle of mountains, on top of existing mountain settlements, in the ocean, etc. Hopefully this would be put in later by Toady as an option for races that could support it. I've tried searching for a memory state that's on when it's embarkable and off when it's not, or vice-versa - when I freeze what I found, the state flickers very rapidly when you're over a non-embarkable area, and pressing e does nothing.

[Maher]

Its all about timing, you need to embark when it first lights up.  Try pressing "e" frantically for 5 minutes to see if this works.  

The embark-ability of a region isn't actually stored in the value you are changing.  It appears that there is a constant check to see if the terrain is passable/accessable on some level (like adventure mode world map travel)... not sure why it would do a constant check since embark-ablility should only change when you change position on the world map.  If you really wanted to do something crazy... you could try and find the biome tag for the region you are embarking into (pick something easy like a solid desert that is one geographical region),  hit e to embark into the region... but while you are being asked to prepare carefully or go ahead, switch the biome tag from desert to mountain/ocean.  On the off chance that the program doesn't access the biome tag until after you select how to embark, you could skip the embark-ability check.  Since the region isn't really generated until you select how to embark, it seems possible.  My guess though would be a crash... you would end up in a sand mountain or something.  Ask anyone who has ever played adventure mode with the flier tag, if the mountain regions are actually generated or not... they may just be black voids or something.

[BurnedToast]

when using prospector, uninhabitable mountains have chasms/cave rivers/HFS so I'm pretty sure they can be generated if you were allowed to embark there. Oceans can be swam across in adventure mode so they would almost certainly be embarkable too.

Oceans won't work anyway though simply because even if you mod them to breath water the AI does not handle it and they lock up and won't work or anything, and that's (as far as I know) hardcoded so there is nothing to be done about it.

Embarking on mountains would be nice though, and to be honest I don't know why we can't already.

[Maher]

Hmmm... so the biome switching might work.  
Since the biome is geographical region dependant... you could switch the biomes for any part of a region you are embarking into.  You could end up have a microcosm region (you can have up to 5-6 geographical regions, right?).  It would be cool to have a little bit of freshwater ocean, little desert, little tundra, and some mountains in the same embark.  Now that I think about it though... the heights and climates for everything have already been determined... you would only be changing the plant and animal life, right?  So if you embarked a desert and changed it into a mountain biome, you would find yourself in a desert populated by mountain creatures.  If you really wanted to do a mountain though... it would still be possible, but the biome tag isn't the only thing you need.  You would need to go ahead and make a complete editor for the height of each unit in the embark map.  

Now that I think about it... you really would need to make a full map editor to get mountain regions working by editing a different region.  However, the converse is not true; if toady has all mountain biomes disabled for settlement... just change the biome tag for the mountain region and you should be able to settle there.  

If you really wanted to find your problem though... start with a desert and start splicing in code from a mountain region until embark is disabled.

[ March 25, 2008: Message edited by: Maher ]

[Jurassiced]

THERE PROLLY MORE THAN 1 VALUE SO TRY MULTIBLE SEARCHS

[Eagleon]

I'm more interested in starting over existing mountain settlements, like you can with human, elf, and even goblin areas. That and starting on major peaks and such (^ symbols in mountains). I was a bit disappointed when I found I couldn't; even if there wasn't any trade, I love building on huge cliffs, and they're difficult to find close to the edge of a mountain range.

But searching for these values got me thinking - would it be possible to manually change the embark size to even smaller section of map than the existing 2x2 limit? Would be an interesting challenge if you could. You'd certainly be forced to rely a lot more on multi-level construction. I dunno.

"... try pressing 'e' frantically for 5 minutes ..." - >.> <.< I did. Hehe. Longer actually. I feel silly now.

[ March 26, 2008: Message edited by: Eagleon ]

[BurnedToast]

Toady limited the embark area to 2x2 because otherwise the game area is smaller then the (fixed) viewing window and it caused problems. So even if you could somehow change it, you would probably end up with problems of some sort.

If you want huge cliffs, check around rivers - sometimes they carve nice valleys and occasional you can even get the max cliff indicator on the cliff-o-meter. I've heard where 2 rivers meet this is common.