Nice work! Based on your research, would you recommend a "sweet spot" range for world gen values that result in large areas of the map that freeze in winter but remain unfrozen in other months?



Hm, neat!



The min-max of -50 to 150 of exported grayscale maps or specificially quantifying mountain lowering is definitely new to me. Haven't paid much attention to those things, in part because it is difficult to line them up with what I'm curious about - I prefer embarking instead. Still, the anomalies do somewhat fit in with not getting wholly tropical worlds even with over 85 min temperature.





Worth of note: iirc biome is dependent on the summer temperature, which is around +20 over the ...average, maybe? It's been a long time since I read that research, so don't call me on this. Anyway, this is why you can get freezing grasslands and such.



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Also worth nothing: Like elevation, rainfall also cools down - hot areas in particular, as those have more rainwater to boil. You can see this in the differences between 75 and 100 rainfall forests with 85+ temperature. Interestingly, the worlds seem to generate wholly the same within even so grand rainfall range as long as the biome doesn't change, something that often isn't true for options like volcanism, savagery or elevation. I suspect part of the disrepencies was tied to your 0-100 randomized rainfall cooling hotness in addition to the orographic precipitation.



(Which ties well in with them showing up as hot areas started showing up.)



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The 85 temperature also makes more sense now, given the 67% grayscale value. This makes it fit in better with the drainage and rainfall cutoffs biome generation uses.



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PS: Some notes regarding your pre-set values: Consider them like a really fine mesh size. This means your lack of seeds and elevation variances are both going to alter the resultant geography a bit. Also, you could have just set volcanism to min-max 50 and ditched it's map, since you never varied it.



Absolutely! A great follow up study would attempt to more clearly define the boundaries between climates (which is limited with my study thanks to the 5 step increments I took). However, the groundwork for those definitions is done with this study.Looking at the wiki page on climates , temperate biomes are the ones that melt in the summer and freeze in the winter. So if you have a min/max & mesh combination that can emphasize parameters 15-45 (without elevation, or poles), then you'll be mostly temperate. If you don't mind excluding other possibilities, limiting the min/max range to 20-45 (without poles) should ensure that only temperate climates are created. If you wanted to have, say, warm climates as well, but half as likely, you could define a temperature range of 20-70 and mesh weights of something like [4:4:3:2:2]. But the true power of this research gives you even more control than that!I think one of the more interesting things about the results is just how wide the temperature range for some climates are vs. others. What it tells us is something we already kinda knew: that there are temperate biomes that are much warmer than other temperate biomes. What this means is that if you don't want your water frozen in any month *except* the winter months, then you should aim for the higher end of the temperate spectrum, probably parameters between 35-45.If you're including poles, things get tricky. That said, generating a 50-50 temp world with poles and loading the temp map should provide the insight needed to understand how the poles are going to skew the results your temperature maps generate (and if anyone does so, I encourage them to share their results here!).TL;DR: my best guess for the range where water only freezes in winter (but not the other months) would be when the internal temperature parameters are between around 35 and 45, although I didn't collect any data from after embarking, so I'm not at all sure. Careful though, achieving that consistently means looking at poles and elevation to tune your min/max and mesh settings. Good luck!Yeah, I didn't load any embarks on the worlds, and there's no DFHack for 44.02 yet, so I didn't even try taking data in degrees urist. A great follow-up study would be to generate similar worlds but with easy/zombie dwarves via raw tweaks (immortal, don't need anything), so you could easily load up embarks in them and actually look at temperatures over an entire year in-game.Yeah, I suspected it had to do with rainfall. It'd be interesting to do more research on the topic!I think the grayscale values do a great job of showing just how hot Toady thought things would be, like "okay anything past here is just not worth recording". It sounds to me like you're already familiar with 85 as a sort of cutoff for consistency. If you know of any more research that has been done past that, or on the drainage and rainfall cutoffs you're talking about, I'd love to see it!Oh yeah, the way I did things is definitely not the most consistent. I did the volcanism the way I did because I chose to fix volcanism on a whim while I was in the world painter gui xD. But there was a method to my madness. Because it's a simulation, I sort of took the liberty of knowing that the parameters were indeed linearly fixed to the outputs (which would be horrible practice in any real world science). Instead of trying to 100% silence the noise, I thought more knowledge might be gleaned from the study if I actually left noise from rain and elevation in. The results were kinda perfect in that regard: just enough consistency to establish that the theoretical framework was sound and provide a trendline (the hottest temperatures are consistent), while also allowing us to see temperature changes elevation variations and also the anomalies w/ drainage and rainfall. Now, enough is known that temperature could be controlled and other causes could be explored for the 85+ distortion effect.