export-world-map

This plugin exports world-map information to files in the DFHack configuration folder under the map-export directory. It must be run from the embark-selection screen. The exports are generated at the granularity of individual region tiles (16 x 16 per world tile). Those tiles are only generated by DF as you scroll around on the zoomed-in embark map, which thus needs to be done prior to running this export tool.

The supported export targets are:

  • regions: writes world tile regions and their biome information to regions.csv.

  • sites: writes site extents and ownership/civilization information to sites.csv.

  • rivers: writes rivers to rivers.csv.

  • elevation: writes elevation data to elevation.dat and elevation.vrt.

Unless you have software such as ArcGIS or QGIS/GDAL available, these exports will be of little use.

Usage

export-world-map
export-world-map <topic>
export-world-map <topic> <topic> ...
export-world-map all

If no topic is given, or if all is supplied, every supported export target is run.

Options

--group-by-world

Create a folder named after the world in the map-export directory.

--group-by-date

Create a folder with name year-month inside the world folder. Implies --group-by-world.

Examples

export-world-map

Export all supported datasets.

export-world-map regions

Export only region boundary geometries.

export-world-map sites rivers

Export site and river geometries only.

Notes on file formats

To avoid depending on external libraries such as GDAL, the export formats are kept as simple as possible to generate. This means raw bitmap data for the elevation export and CSV files for the others. Before these files can be used reasonably in software such as QGIS, they need to be assigned a coordinate reference system (CRS) and converted into formats that can be accessed more efficiently than CSV. While any CRS will do, WGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG:3857) is the preferred choice.

For detailed map data (regions and rivers), Parquet is by far the preferred format. The elevation export provides a VRT file to facilitate the transformation into a GeoTIFF with the aforementioned CRS.

Assuming a recent version of GDAL built with Parquet support and with all command-line tools in your PATH, this can be achieved with the following commands:

ogr2ogr -a_srs "EPSG:3857" -of Parquet regions.parquet -oo 'GEOM_POSSIBLE_NAMES=*wkt' -oo 'KEEP_GEOM_COLUMNS=NO' -oo 'AUTODETECT_TYPE=YES' regions.csv
ogr2ogr -a_srs "EPSG:3857" -of Parquet rivers.parquet -oo 'GEOM_POSSIBLE_NAMES=*wkt' -oo 'KEEP_GEOM_COLUMNS=NO' -oo 'AUTODETECT_TYPE=YES' rivers.csv
gdal raster convert elevation.vrt elevation.tif