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v0.31:Caverns
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
Caverns are huge natural underground tunnel systems, inhabited by strange and dangerous creatures and plants. They go up, down, left, right, and about anywhere else. Vanilla worlds provide three cavern layers, the first one residing about 15 z-levels below the surface. Number, size and z-position can be altered in the world generation parameters.
The caverns will usually have open map edges, allowing animals to migrate into and from the cavern. By exploring the caverns in adventure mode it is possible to travel large distances below the surface - the caverns effectively connect all sites that acess them.
Layers and Types
The cavern closest to the surface usually has few monsters (the occasional giant olm or toad) so it is pretty safe. The subsequent caverns will become increasingly fun, so don't dig too deep without making adequate preperation.
Depending on your world generation settings, cavern layers may come in the following variations:
Dry: Regular cave floors with no vegetation.
Wet: The whole layer is muddied, providing soil to a variety of underground plants.
Aquatic: Mayor sections of the layer are filled with water, forming a gigantic underground sea, including fish and possibly camps of olmmen and other aquatic creatures.
Magma: Always present in standard worlds, the magma of the bottom layer is vital to forts with little acess to wood and other smelter fuel. Depending on your biome, its firy inhabitants may pose a serious danger to an unprepared fort.
Other Features
Deep pits: deep pits are... deep pits, they go from one cavern level to the next, and they are a fixed shape, when they hit the next cavern level they end up 'merging' into it (no other way to explain it), and the top z-level, the z-level it hits the next cavern level, is unmudded rough rock floor where the the normal space of the deep pit and the random rock spires of the cavern collide.
Dangers
There are many, many dangerous Template:Ls in a cavern, including Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls, and others. Also, any cavern of sufficient size will be inhabited by Template:Ls, which can be both benefit and hazard.
Vegetation
Depending on whether they can support plants, caverns will, from the topmost to the deepest, feature the following vegetation:
Level one: a benign (or as nice as caverns get) level, it has shrubs, Tower-caps, and Fungi wood, it will very likely have a gigantic pool at the bottom level.
Level two: a level filled with, in addition to the above, Goblin-caps, Spore trees, Black-caps, and Tunnel tubes.
Level three: a level lacking the trees the first level had, while still having those the second introduced, also has, Nether-caps, and Blood thorns.
Plants from recently discovered layers will also start sprouting in your artificially muddied areas.
Benefits
Caverns provide ever regenerating resources in form of underground forests, animals to hunt, and fish. On breaching a cavern layer, a variety of ores and gems lining its walls will be revealed. Also, underground caverns can be used in constructions and traps. Throwing your prisioners into a damp hellhole filled with ravaging beasts is a nice addition, too.
When should I start exploring?
Likely the best time is when you get your first migrant wave, and have a military. As you can handle what tries to attack, and you don't have a siege to worry about, earlier is fine, but you will likely get a bunch of dwarves killed. The subsequent caverns will become increasingly fun, so don't dig too deep without making adequate preperation.
Not all parts of a cavern are immediately visible; A good portion of a cavern is revealed once you breach it, but other parts remain hidden until your dwarves explore them. Since you often don't know what you'll find in a cavern, they can be exciting places, but also very dangerous.