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[PatrikLundell]

Yes, however, I think tile sets and TwbT affect things, and pure vanilla ASCII probably would match (I haven't tried). It seemed Phoebus without TwbT matched, but the downside to that is that the presentation replaced things (I got a floor rather than colored numbers for one parameter, for instance, and all my red '@' were replaced by little red dwarves).

I've considered adding a cursor, but firstly, I don't know how to do that (trying to draw the characters with a different background color didn't work when I tried early on, probably because the page has a background color of its own), and secondly, I've already used up all the movement keys for panning...
When it comes to the surface biomes, I use pools as reference points, but I agree navigating the surface can get messy.
I don't think counting is too bad in the air, though, because each block is 16*16, so you should be able to count the blocks and multiply by 16 in the view, and use the shift-move to move 10 tiles at a time within DF itself. At least that worked fairly well for me while testing.

[Fleeting Frames]

I dunno about cursor (could use unmoving yellow X with x,y location of game cursor with report at top of what biome is under cursor), but the panning around is real nice, thanks!

And did I get it correct that the @s are potentially just one of the listed potential air biomes, or is the selection wider than just those?

Spoiler: As a bonus, I saw a 1x3 5-biome embark and thought of you. (click to show/hide)

Found it while messing with volcanism (guess that isn't completely safe, whoops).

Looking around, thanks the the multiple clays the path through swamp is aquifer-free, other areas have 1 or 2z aquifers (just uneven terrain dragging it out).

By no means perfect yet, but it's tweakable.

Also, showbiomes reports 5 land, 1 definite and 3 potential air biomes.

Parameters link.

[PatrikLundell]

Hm, the idea to carry the DF cursor up into the views is interesting and might be doable, instead of having an independent movable one. I'll take a look at that idea.

The @ areas could be any of the biomes listed in the two lists:
- Any of the biomes listed as potential air biomes (it really is potential additional air biomes)
- Most of the biomes detected on the surface (some might not be possible because of tropicality, but if so the other version is possible and is listed in one of the lists)
- Any of the biomes listed as detected air biomes.
At least, that's the theory I'm working according to until it's disproved. Your embark looks like a good testing ground, thanks!

Edit:
Implemented a cursor indicator in version 2.1 2016-10-13.
The embark was indeed a nice one with 5 biomes on the ground, but I didn't get any shears...

[Fleeting Frames]

Found two bugs:

1) The panning is real nice, but doesn't work on help page
2) Off surface biome, the cursor carries it's own color off for the next line or until interrupted.

Spoiler: image (click to show/hide)

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks.
1) That's not really a bug, as it has never been intended to be possible. Implementing it would be tricky, though, as it would require messing with things I don't understand, namely manipulating the weird sets consisting of strings and pen drawing directives. The normal screens work around that because they're built up from one character at a time, so I just rebuild the whole sequence from scratch for every panning movement, skipping the addition of the parts that shouldn't be there. The help screen, meanwhile, is built up from lines of text mixed with pen drawing directives, so panning that would require either finding a panning operation (which I've failed to do) or somehow locate where in those sets I'd need to cut them, find out how to do that, and then splice the thing together while still getting the appropriate color directives to work.
2) I actually wondered why it worked, as it didn't on my next project. Since I've found a solution there it shouldn't be hard to fix though.

You may be interested in looking at that project http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161188.0, by the way. It can provide some interesting insights into where you can place biomes (I've picked apart ragundo's code and used it to check for biome placement viability) even if the main functionality isn't of interest.

Edit:
#2 has been addressed in version 2.2.

Edit 2:
I've managed to pan the part of the help screen below the key binding descriptions, but I'm not sure it's worth the heavy cost, since panning is slow, and very slow when the help screen is displayed. Version 2.3.

Edit 3:
Updated to version 2.4.
- Panning separated between the help window and the others.
- Starting Z level = max - levels_above_surface
- Restructured the display logic to improve the display speed.

[Fleeting Frames]

Found an interesting dead almond sapling (temperate broadleaf forest) on grassland embark on the east edge of the world (no regions to NE/E/SE) with no forests nearby when running a wet/dry plants experiment.

Found out that the script lists two biomes and segfaults in such a situation. I guess that literal edge case isn't handled ?

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks for the report.

Actually the edge cases were handled, so it should work for North, West, and South, but I'd made an error with East (checked vs "x" rather than "x + i"). That doesn't mean the last bug has been found, though...

Fixed in version 2.5

[feelotraveller]

I got this last night with version 2.0 (sorry out of date, will check tonight with 2.5) on 43.05 linux 64, with dfhack alpha 4.  Doubly strange as there were no terrifying shears or biomes listed at all (in fact no evil biomes) on this embark.  Maybe you can understand why the terrifying dwarfs?

p.s. Everything else seemed to be displayed correctly.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[PatrikLundell]

It's a display artifact. Some characters get replaced by symbols when using a tile set and not using TwbT. I'm not sure what happens without a tile set. Regardless, this indicates a shear of an unidentified biome, but I haven't found any way to determine which biome it actually is short of physically building a farm plot to figure out what can grow there (and I haven't found a way to automate such a test). The only thing we know is that it's a buggy anomaly, and the theory I have so far is that its biome will be either one of those listed as confirmed to be present, or one of those listed as potential shear biomes. I'm not sure the potential list functionality was finished in 2.0, though.

[feelotraveller]

Vanilla returns @ in place of dwarfs.  2.5 showed same potential biomes as 2.0.  Unfortunately this a was from a quick test embark of df/dt/hack and I'm not planning to play on so elevated farms are out of the question.

Thanks for the reassurance (was thinking that it might have something to do with 64bit) and it got me updated to 2.5.   

[Fleeting Frames]

For test embarks with farm plots, liquids plugin makes it far quicker to check: just paste section of obsidian wall that you can dig into a rampway/staircase to the desired z-level and drop water from above or side onto obsidian floor, then build farm plot on top.

Though I think I recall that farm plot and evilness need not match. I'd want to doublecheck to be sure, however.

[PatrikLundell]

Good/evil plants can be cultivated even if the farm plot's biome doesn't match (Sliver barb always show up for my good desert farm plots, for instance, together with the more logical sun berries [although I'll never get any of those in a desert since they're wet plants]). I suspect the same goes for savage crops (whip vine, is one, I think), but again, I'm not sure. And the wet requirement is also ignored for cultivated plants.

The reason I used '@' for shears is that '* is already used for glaciers.

[Fleeting Frames]

Indeed, the only definite way to double-check is an evil effect with farm plot biome belonging to something that is good ground-level.

I'd have to go back into messing with evil effects to check, though, so it may be a bit till I encounter it again.

[PatrikLundell]

My latest embark is weird in that there is not evil weather in the evil part. I've turned off interactions, but I should still get blood rain. I initially though it was due to my messing with the region map info, but I've test embarked in the naturally evil part of the region without getting any abnormal rain (nor any other evil effects, apart from eyeballs and such).

[Fleeting Frames]

Even if your number of evil cloud/rain types outnumber the evil biomes, I find you can still get none of them reasonably often - maybe something like 1/3 to 1/2 of time?