40d:Advanced world generation

On this page is a collection of the various advanced options available to costumize world generation. Please add as you experiment, but do so responsibly. I've also included a quick guide on how to receive feedback from rejects.

Advanced Parameters

To access advanced parameters, press 'e' when at the screen for creating new worlds with parameters screen. This will bring you to an editable list of various guidelines the world-gen process will use when creating your new world. I have taken the liberty of sorting the guidelines into four groups I thought might be useful in organizing an understanding of the parameters.

These are basically my best guess with my own insight and experimentation. This is supposed to be the beginning of the collaborative effort to sort this massive feature out and get its discussion off the forum.

Seed Parameters

Use Seed

This determines the seed number that will be used by the random-number generator in determining the randomness factors that go into creating your world.

Use History Seed

Same as above but instead of determining terrian and world structure it handles historical figures and event outcomes. Some experimenting will need to be done to see if the same seed and a different World seed produce different events and figures.

Use Name Seed

Same as above but used to determine the randomly selected name used by the program.

Historical Parameters

End Year

Used to determine when the program will cease its generation and allow for play. As of right now other factors prevent the generator from getting to this date and is often cut off long before reaching it.

Population Cap after Civ Creation

How many creatures can exist in the game once civilizations have been added into generation.

Percentage Beasts Dead for Stappage

Determines how many megabeasts need to be dead before the world gen stops creating history. Is one likely cause for why the generator rarely reaches the entered End Date.

Year to Begin Checking Megabeast Percentage

Determines when the game begins checking for the above precentage to see when the game should stop generating the world.

Cull Unimportant Historical Figures

Instead of listing every event that happens, this option removes those events without related importance to the wider world, effectively reducing the number of events reviewable in the legends screen.

Reveal All Historical Events

Determines whether all events are open to review in the legends screen when you choose to begin a game. Setting this to no would require the usual exploration, talking, and engraving searching as before.

Creature Parameters

Maximum Natural Cave Size

Determines the size and depth of caves formed by world-gen. Currently unknown what the number means and effects. May determine the number of caves period.

Number of Mountain Caves

Determines the number of caves to be placed in mountain regions.

Number of Non-Mountain Caves

Determines the number of caves to be placed in other regions.

Make Caves Visible

Makes caves visible on the world location selection screen.

Number of Civilizations

Determines how many civilizations will be seeded into the generated world. Five is the typical number to produce the usual Dwarves, Humans, Elves, Goblins, and Kobolds.

Playable Civilization Required

If set, all worlds where the no playable civilization has been placed at the begining of history are rejected.

Experimenting with Parameters

To experiment with the parameters and to effectively see why rejections are coming back because of changes to the parameters, first you need to edit your init.txt and set [LOG_MAP_REJECTS:NO] to YES. This will create a text document that will describe why each copy of the generated world is rejected.

By going back and forth between this document and the parameters, you can begin to get an idea as to why endless cycles of rejected worlds come up. As you experiment please share your findings under each heading.