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[Impaler[WrG]]

Very nice stuff, I'd also like to small water sources under ground, basicaly a vertical shaft of 'aquafer' rock is generated and a spring is present on the surface trickling out a 1 tile wide brook too small to even have any fish in it.  If you mine into this you can divert the surface spring (it dries up) and you can have an underground well or pool.  The amount of water created wouldn't be enough to flood your fortress of course even if not contained it would just muddy the floods near ware its exposed, though potentialy a lot of them could contribute enough water that you need to pump it, though that would only be an issue if the area is particularly rich in springs.

A potential hazard one might discover underground a 'weak rock' tile or a 'fault' (a linear vein of weak rock), weak rock is just a modifier on any normal type of rock ("Rough Weak Granite Wall") and it can potentialy cave in at any time, especialy if their is nearby minning.  Having more weak rock as you dig deeper is a simple way to make the deep devling more dangerous (though a number of threats may be part of the equation as well).

[penguinofhonor]

Urist McMiner cancels dig: interrupted by acid blob

[Pickerel]

I agree with the 'more HFS-like things underground in areas'.  I like the antmen nest idea, And the queen would be a... Gi-Ant!  You could also have networks of naked mole dogs (imagine prairie dogs), molemen, and other things... and when you hit their nest, they swarm out like a siege at full speed!  And you could have different types of antmen nests, including leaf cutters (HUGE nests, with LARGE wide open chambers seperate from eachother, including a 'fungus chamber' where a patch of underground 'soil' has plump helmuts permanently growing on it, and a 'dump chamber' where long-decayed antmen remains could be found.  And having various types, from ant eggs (edible meat) to soldiers (big and nasty like ogres).  All just like real Attine ants), army ants (bigger, nastier antmen, possibly carrying weapons and armor and such, and coming in huge swarms), the usual benign ants (smaller chambers of regular antmen, though very abundant in comparison to the others), and Bullet Antmen (similar to bullet ants conceptually, not a large number of ants per colony, but they are themselves like semimegabeasts in difficulty).

And the having slimes and stuff in deep caverns isn't as far fetched as people think... look up 'gold mine bacteria' and 'radiotrophic fungi'.

And yeah, digging creatures would be a wonderful idea!  No longer can you hole up with a bridge over a moat permanently while goblins mill about.  Now you must FACE THEIR CHALLENGE OR DIE TRYING MUHUHUHAHAHAHAAAA

ANd yeah, geysers and hot springs are a great idea.  You may never know what you will get when you tap an underground water feature!  Some could be blatantly dangerous!  I have spelunked in mines in Idaho that were abandoned because they hit a hot spring and a bunch of people died of steam burns.

And I agree with the ability to find long-dead civilizations' ruins.  One could excavate items and put them to use or put them on display.  And the items can be considered legendary but always be worn and torn, like X*clay bucket*X sorts of things, or X*ancestral sword*X.  Still worth a lot, though.  And it would be rare, few and far between.

I must ask: how does one get this painter program people are using?

[penguinofhonor]

I must ask: how does one get this painter program people are using?

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=22266.0

[Puzzlemaker]

I really like the idea of different and better picks needed to get deeper.

Also hazards you can run into like hot springs and stuff I haven't  though of either.

Going deeper should definitely result in more danger.

And the bottom should always be something special, be it a magma aquifer, HFS, a rare stone layer, or whatever.

[Fieari]

*note, spoilers here.  HFS replaced by the actual terms*

I definitely like the idea of the magma aquifer, and would go farther and say that there needs to be a "HELL" biome located beneath the magma aquifer, with an antman-like series of caves and tunnels there, filled with things on fire and the rooms of torture and such.

The adamantine would, as mentioned, pierce the magma aquifer, and would be hollow, with ramps, so that breaking the seal would unleash the entire hell biome on you.  The magma layer would also be resting on top of a layer of HFS, so as to show why the demons don't just burst up anyway.

Furthermore, make demons able to tunnel through any material but adamantine, so breaching the seal is REALLY dangerous... not something you can wall off if you can repel them for a moment, unless you use adamantine doors.

Clearly, I also support the idea of needing different picks to go through different materials.  You'd need steel picks to get through the adamantine.  Adamantine, being a not-very-rare material, would then require WORK to get the insane 500% bonus it provides (not to mention the bonus to skill it automatically lends to even untrained workers trying to make stuff out of it).

On top of pick material there'd still be the speed penalty to working through harder materials, so you'd still need legendary miners to get adamantine in order to mine any of it in less than 1 square/year.  Maybe legendary miners, utilizing normal quality steel picks, could get through at a rate of 1 square/month, with a legendary miner + higher quality steel pick working faster.  An adamantine pick would go through adamantine at a normal rate.

[isitanos]

Also, note: Sometimes in underground caves, there will be crystals. Just random clumps of gems like we all enjoy seeing in fantasy novels.

I like that. And also: stalagtites and stalagmites.

  Although this is more of a site thing, I would like for there to be more varied sites. This does somehow tie in with underground diversity. Mines, fortresses, dungeons, farms, small towns, large cities, walls, all kinds of things that can be buried underneath some sedimentary layers. That would be kinda cool, having a wall built by humans in an old war uncovered during the construction of a dwarven fortress.

Excellent. That could be a very interesting part of worldgen, if old cities sank little by little in the ground as hundreds of years pass, only to be covered by new cities, and so on. It would be interesting to play if only to do archeological digs.
"Hey, this tomb surely contains an ancient mummy, let's open it!"

[Skizelo]

About the antmen colonies, can I suggest another new tag; [CAN COEXIST WITH ...]. Maybe not with ants, but I figure that olmen and snailmen would have a lot to talk about.

[Rawl]

Antmen using some kind of fungal farm would be an interesting touch! If I remember correctly from back in the day there are some types of ants that have this kind of behavior (even herding and protecting aphids as an addition "food" source") so seeing these types of concepts used would be nice. Trying to make it so unlike the common dwarven stock of fungus, have these a little more "exotic" where you could only grow them if you find them, similar to sunberries, could add a small incentive for trying to clear out these types of places. Another approach is only the ants could grow these, if you could find a way you might even be able to trade with them or trick them into leaving the growing area so you can nab some.

As far as dynamic fortress growth and chasm civs, imagine digging low enough to enter one of their homes, would they be sets of tunnels, giant towers of stalactite/stalagmite with walk ways connecting them honeycombed with rooms? giant chambers? Wow this is a good thread (heh heh imagine channeling out above a stalactite spire just to watch it fall and impact the floor below)

[Idiom]

SPOILERS USED! 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Actually, instead of continuously generating deeper levels as you dig, I'd rather the old version from the 2D that has a bottom.
You hit the bottom of the Earth's crust to find it's hollow, supported by a thin layer of adamantine. Beneath that, the actual bowels of the Earth are a glowing pit of hell from which demons crawl. The bottom few layers do have "crags" and "cracks", so you can accidentally stumble upon a crack into hell. There are always random pools of magma just before the crust gives way, mixed in with the cracks, so you can always have some magma, like in the 2D, but at the risk of hell's fury.
You could then get Adamantine from any map. It would be a guaranteed challenge like in the 2D. To balance this out so you actually bother with the mountain plugs of adamantine, the plugs should provide just as much adamantine as the bottom of the crust, so the draw would be 2X adamantine. The demon pit in the plug should be a full fledged mini-dungeon, with it's own treasures and such.
Between the surface and bottom of the crust should be the biome unique HFS.

[Pickerel]

Yeah, the aphids thing is really cool to see.  And really common: just go to a field and look for a plant with lots of ants on it, often you will find it also inhabited by a bunch of aphids... with good reason.  The ants stroke the aphids to gain the nectar from their backs.  It's like petting a cat to get it to purr, but instead of purring, it pees on your lap for you.

And I agree, instead of plump helmut, have it something new and unique, like Rawl suggested, where you cannot grow it, but you can find it and process it.  Maybe it could even be made such that it will only grow if there are antmen within X squares of it, to simulate them tending the garden like real atine ants, making is either a 1-time thing, or something that takes a lot of finageling to get ^.^

And as far as the [CAN COEXIST WITH] tag, that could be the way to easily make the aphids join them, or get all sorts of specialty ants, or the beetles that parasitize ants, ect. 

[Draco18s]

Excellent. That could be a very interesting part of worldgen, if old cities sank little by little in the ground as hundreds of years pass, only to be covered by new cities, and so on. It would be interesting to play if only to do archeological digs.
"Hey, this tomb surely contains an ancient mummy, let's open it!"

Old New York?
Old Ankh-Morpork? (and Older Ankh-Morpork?  IIRC A-M was rebuilt ontop of itself at least four times)

[Psyringe]

What about "Living Rock"? I.e. a kind of rock that "lives" in humid soil and that is able to reproduce. As long as you don't dig away all of it, you could turn it into a source of stone on maps where it's otherwise rare.

If the reproduction pattern is programmed with a rule system similar to "Life", you could also make replenishing rock farms, or send patches of living rocks across the map (to stop them somewhere else where you want to build a wall), etc.

[Osmosis Jones]

Thread is made of win.

On the hidden dangers side of things, maybe include magma upwellings, where just breaching the magma causes it to slowly (or quickly if you're an evil sod ) flow up to the surface. After all, in real life magma can be under extreme pressure.

[Bryan Derksen]

I think there may be too much focus here on spreading the existing type of HFS around with only minor variation. We already have HFS in the mountains; I'd rather see different stuff in different places.

How about hydrocarbons? We've already got coal, but in a pre-industrial world there'll still be sources of oil that are relatively easy to access. Process it at an alchemist workshop to get Greek Fire, perhaps. On the downside, hitting a pocket of natural gas might fill your mines with deadly vapors. Ventilation may become something one needs to pay attention to (there have been other suggestions involving smoke that could fit in well here). And this being a fantasy world, imagine what horrific beasts might live in oil.

Discovering ancient ruins buried in a rock strata would be fun, a way to 'explore' almost like adventure mode. If the ruins are constructions that are hard to dig through you'd have to dig along the hallways and streets. Once it's tunneled out you could even reclaim it.

Currently aquifers are very all-or-nothing; either you've got a torrential flood sweeping down your halls or everything's sealed up dry as a bone. How about an aquifer that just seeps in a slow, steady trickle? You could dig around in it with pumps running constantly to keep it habitable, but when you abandon sections or the pumps break down they slowly fill up. At the other end of the spectrum, how about artesian aquifers that are pressurized?