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Is there anyone way to access the topographical map created during world generation?

During in-game play it is easy to see if a piece of outside land is up-slope or down-slope. And in-game you can easily view higher and lower levels in your mountain fortress. What I need is some way to access information on the topology of the generated world. This would allow me to create a 3D map (think Minecraft or Oblivion) of the outside world.

For the moment, I don't care if the game is playable in this way. Don't worry about that. I just want to be able to see these wonderful worlds I am generating.

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Start a new game in the "Legends" mode. This allows you to export a multitude of detailed information about the world, among them detailed maps using the [d] key. The options "Elevations including lake and ocean floors" and "Elevations respecting water level" both produce heightmaps of the world while the other options allow you to export a texture to match it.

enter image description here enter image description here

The graphics are exported into the base Dwarf Fortress directory (the same one where DwarfFortress.exeresides), under the names ...

  • world_graphic-el-region name-some numbers.bmp for the "elevation including lake and ocean floors" map
  • world_graphic-elw-region name-some numbers.bmp for the "elevation respecting water level" map

For the highest size region (257x257), they are 4112x4112px in size. They look like this, scaled down (in order: with lake/ocean floors, with water level):

enter image description here enter image description here

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  • Thanks so much! These are great surface maps. Is there any way to get maps of the below-the-surface information, like the levels of your fortress, on a map of some/any kind? (Or is that hoping too much?)
    – john_science
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 21:38
  • @theJollySin: Not with in-game tools, but obviously memory hacking allows you to view all of the in-game map ... but only of the loaded area (which is really small, compared to the whole world). The main tool for such is DFHack, which includes the Stonesense isometric visualiser nowadays.
    – Martin Sojka
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 21:44

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