World generation: more good biomes

[Frito]

I'm still learning this game and it got to a point where I start generating worlds over and over again looking for these settings:

- A Mountain with a river right next to a serene or mirthful forrest
- not completely drop dead peaceful until the end of times

It doesn't matter how low I set the Savagery option - there are always very few (most of the time 0-2) spots with these light green-tinted good surroundings. I had a look into the detailed settings, but I'm no programmer at all and I don't understand terms like "mesh" and stuff. There seem to be dozens of settings regarding the savagery of the world and the map doesn't have to be happy fairyland everywhere. I just want to have more embark options per generated maps without altering everything too much.

Thanks in advance :)

[Leiflen]

as i under stand it your trying to make more "good" areas to increase your options for embarks right? so the advanced world builder. i believe these are the settings your looking for (some one correct me if im wrong)
-desired good square count in subregion.
theres an option for each size of subregion small, medium large. change this to higher will increase your good terrain. dont mess with meshes. those are more for the game use i think.

[Leiflen]

also this guy has a decent vid on youtube explaining some of the options that are available.
https://youtu.be/ZgCMdJ9SwVs

[Frito]

Originally posted by Leiflen:

as i under stand it your trying to make more "good" areas to increase your options for embarks right?(...)
theres an option for each size of subregion small, medium large. change this to higher will increase your good terrain.(...)

Exactly! First to say: thank you very much for answering. I tried your suggestion out and it did give me way more good surroundings, but at the cost of a planet-sized map my poor old laptop won't be able to handle I fear. The video you've linked was interesting to watch, but didn't give much further information.

But once again: thank you :) I will try to fiddle around with these settings a bit more now that I know I could leave all those other savagery settings out.

EDIT: I didn't recognize the pre-selected "Large Island" setting on top of the "Detailed settings" menu. Changing it to "Medium island" did the trick.

Greetings and have a nice weekend :D

[dovedozen]

I did almost this exact thing a bit ago (except that I also spammed volcanoes, lol). you will have to get to know the advanced worldgen settings a bit but it's very very doable. Took me a good couple hours to trial-and-error it; pls take my knowledge.

I'm going to try and figure out how to upload the actual settings I came up with somewhere so you don't have to translate my freakishly verbose paragraphs into action with no point of reference but I don't know how anything works so hopefully this (vvv) helps in the meantime.

PRINCIPLES:

1. mesh allows you to adjust the weight of different "ranges" of savagery, elevation, etc. Eg: if you enable the savagery mesh and set the 80-100 range to 0, but leave the rest alone, your world will have NO regions with maximum savagery, and all other ranges will have a 25% chance of appearing (as opposed to all ranges, including the 80-100 range, having a 20% chance).

2. the size of the mesh affects how. ??frequently that parameter will change, across the map of your world. think of it like a literal wire mesh or something. the total area (of the map) is the same size no matter what; the MESH size affects the size of the holes. 2x2 is a couple big holes. 16x16 is a lot of small holes. for the purposes of this explanation, each hole holds One Kind Of Savagery (0-20 savagery, 20-40 savagery, 40-60 savagery, and 60-80 savagery being the kinds, if you've disabled 80-100).

3. having a higher mesh size (16 being high, so we're clear) means you need a higher x- and/or y-variance for that parameter. otherwise, the game will try to cram "too many" different regions into your map and then complain about it. for your purposes, for example, you want VERY HIGH ELEVATION VARIANCE, along with high elevation mesh size, because otherwise mountains will generate too far from rivers and forests. (more variance == very different elevations can generate closer to each other.)

4. forests need middling elevation, high rainfall, and high drainage. try enabling the mesh for all of those and putting higher numbers in the appropriate ranges, and increasing the x-variance for rainfall and drainage and the y-variance for elevation. or vice-versa. you can also set the minimums according to the chart on the "biome" page on the df wiki - 66+ rainfall and 33+ drainage will give you lots of forests.

4.5. (66-75 rainfall gives you conifer forests and 75+ rainfall gives you broadleafs, if you have a preference one way or the other. also, setting the temperature between 60 and 90 or so will give you more broadleaf forests; colder than that and you'll get more conifers. I think.)

5. you can get pretty wild with the settings for "minimum forests", "minimum good squares", etc. (the ones near the bottom of the list, after all the stuff about secrets and curses.) I think the easiest way to get what you want without getting a million world rejections is to DECREASE THE MINIMUM for things you DON'T want - so tell the game it doesn't need to generate evil regions or deserts, for example. (that said - I did something ridiculous like octupling the number of good squares and BOY DID IT EVER WORK. just make sure SOME neutral regions generate, or dwarves can't appear during worldgen. YES I had this problem.)

5.5. also increase the total number of rivers probably. decreasing erosion cycles might also be something?

6. [ ADVICE, NOT FACTS ] pushing the worldgen way too far in one direction is a pretty good way to get a feel for what the different options do. generate smallish worlds, copy your parameter set often so you can go back to an old one if you want, and enter in absurdly high numbers sometimes. the worst that will happen is you'll get like 50 rapid-fire world rejections in a row and the game will complain. I think I had it crash once when I was doing something really egregious but it was nbd. P.S. "cull unimportant historical figures" makes worldgen faster too.

FINALLY: long embarks can help if your river and/or forest are still a bit far from the mountain you want. I think my current one is like 3x6 or something? narrower than 3 and it might start feeling small, depending on how you play, but it really helps expand your options without completely exploding the game. (my pc doesn't break a sweat on a 9x9 embark, BUT DF DOES. even on a powerful machine I wouldn't go any bigger than maybe 25 total tiles; there are just. unavoidable periodic massive lag spikes. in my experience.)

I hope this helps to some extent? if you read all that and have followup questions or whatever, definitely hit me with those. i'm barely a programmer which makes me slightly better than average at translating the obtuse stuff they say into sentences other people can derive meaning from. sometimes. either way GOOD LUCK!! mountains are COOL + we all very much deserve to have access to mountains + feather wood + An Water Source on the same embark!!