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Author Topic: Finding a good fortress start location  (Read 1162 times)

Quarthinos

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Finding a good fortress start location
« on: December 16, 2007, 07:50:00 pm »
Has anyone done any research into world.dat?

After I generate a new world, I spend hours looking for the perfect spot to place my fortress.  I've read the various other threads about good seeds, and also checked the wiki, but my new computer is running Vista-64 (8Gb FTW!).  It occurred to me that I can write a program that will take the data that's visible when you're picking a new fortress (climate, woods, plants, creatures and rocks, magma, etc.) and let my computer scan the world looking for a site that meets my specifications.  The problem is which file to look at (I assume world.dat), and the format of the file.

Has anyone done anything with this?  Even how many bytes(bits?) is used for each square of the medium-zoom map would be a help.

Toady One, if this is something that you don't want to be done, then I'll do it the old way.  Conversely, if you don't mind releasing the format of world.dat (or whichever file), that would be an enormous help!

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