Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Dwarf Mode Discussion => Topic started by: PatrikLundell on January 16, 2018, 11:44:53 am
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I'm considering setting up a Dwarf Washer at my fortress entrance, but as I botched my last attempt I'll ask for advice.
I tried a trench with a grate on top and a powered screw pump pumping from the trench onto the grate, but that caused the water to flow sideways as much as it did back down in the trench (down the stairs).
1. If I pump the water out at the level above the entrance to fall onto the grate but fall down to the aquifer (i.e. at least one more level), would the water spill sideways again?
2. Would dorfs have trouble passing through the falling water? I did get cancellation spam on my attempt, but that might be from the water flowing down the stairs.
3. If water flows sideways in 1., would a grate before and after (with a hole beneath, of course) solve that issue?
4. Assuming the above works, should I expect issues with a construction where the entrance is two tiles wide with a pump on each side, to wash both sides?
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I just run a 1-wide tunnel from a river under my entry way and out of the map edge (going down to find stone for fortifications if necessary). Then I channel into that, and I place a horizontal grate at either end, mostly to keep my dwarves from getting sucked down the tube. The trench runs immediately outside of my first drawbridge and no dwarf can enter my fort without stepping in it.
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Isn't a pool of 2/7 water to wade through enough to decontaminate dwarves?
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You're both describing a dwarven foot bath. My experience is that contaminants washed off into the water can be picked up from the water by the next dorf passing through. daggaz avoids that by having a flow that washes contaminants downstream.
The reason I wanted a shower was both for more efficient decontamination (i.e. other body parts than the feet only), and also to hopefully bring about the positive effect waterfalls (or, more precisely, mist from them) are supposed to generate.
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Do the same thing, but make a small cistern upstream, install a few pumps to bring the water level 1 z level above your entryway, and now drop it down onto the same channel system which again leads out of the map (but is not this time connected to the cistern).
Now you have a shower/bath, that self-cleans. Should be pretty effective. You can even do dwarf physics and set up a water wheel to power the pumps that create the flow that powers the water wheel..... but there you have to be careful with the whole pressure vs flow thing.
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Could an array of mist generators (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=34407.0) be placed in a narrow hallway so it would hit 100% of passing dwarves? That would clean them up nicely, at the cost of some task cancellation spam.
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Thanks Staalo, that answers my question #2, and I definitely don't like cancellation spam...
It seems that a dwarven foot bath will have to do, while at the same time somehow ensuring the water depth lies in the 2-3/7 interval.
Unless, of course, whatever mechanism is used to keep the water level steady can be used on the dropping water and if lower volumes of dropping water doesn't cause cancellations.
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2/7 or 3/7 foot bath is easy enough to accomplish with a pit/pond zone set to pond, and some bucket hauling micromanagement (so they don't pour in too much).
If 1x1 is too small, you can use floodgates to connect a few 1x1 ponds.
Example
WRRRRW W - wall R -ramp
W.XX.W . -floor
WRRRRW X - floodgatedesignate two 1x1 ponds above the floor tiles, have your dwarves fill them to max (6/7, have never seen dwarves fill a pond to 7/7), open floodgates, end up with 1x4 footbath of 3/7 water traversible in north-south directions, unless evaporation mechanics just kick in at the wrong time and evaporate a 1/7 while it's settling.
EDIT: crap, I just realized the ramps mess it up cause they fill with water too. I guess leave out the floodgates, and manually fill it, working against evaporation
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Filling a pond is easy, but engineering a screw pump driven flow isn't quite that easy if you want the foot bath to be passable at all times.
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Hehe, yeah, you're gonna need pressure plates and drains. A pump turns 1/7 input into 7/7 output, right?
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No, a pump doesn't generate water, so a closed, properly calibrated system should require only occasional topping up of water lost to evaporation (like a dwarven water rector, if I understand it correctly). I don't know if a pump takes 1/7 water or if it requires 2/7 to pump anything, though.
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Unless, of course, whatever mechanism is used to keep the water level steady can be used on the dropping water and if lower volumes of dropping water doesn't cause cancellations.
Here's a setup that should work:
(http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/7/79/Dwarf-shower.png)
The diagonal paths force the water to flow (instead of teleport), reducing 7/7 from the pumps to an average 1-2/7 at the output. The second mirror pump should increase the frequency of the drops (though probably not to 100% coverage).
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I'm not understanding that image. Where do the dwarves walk?
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I'm not understanding that image. Where do the dwarves walk?
There is a two-tile wide hallway on the z-level below (running east-west). The central tiles are channeled to drop water on dwarves in the hallway.
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My pump operators pump until they starve to death or go insane, is there a way to prevent this?
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Many thanks Loci, this looks like something worth trying out.
ChristianWeiseth: You've probably managed to block the pump operator's path so they're locked in with the pumps. My pump operators eventually tire and go to eat/drink/sleep after a while when I pierce aquifers. However, the setup really ought to be powered.
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How does the water return? Are there grates on the floor where the dwarves walk? Is there a second pair of screw pumps somewhere?
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It's been a while since I made a concerted effort on this topic, but I'd love to see what you come up with the current version.
One issue I ran into was that falling water creates mist, which washed contaminants off dwarves, but the mist might spread to either side of your designated washing area, causing contaminants to drop on the floor outside of it where there's no liquid flow to remove them. For me, this killed the viability of any shower-type system.
Another problem I ran into was that contaminants are unaffected by gravity, so toggling a grate/hatch/whatever doesn't cause them to fall out of the way.
At some point I think Toady caused flow to have a chance of destroying contaminants in addition to moving them? So I started using a 1x3 ramp trough set into a 3-wide hallway, with 2/3/3 or 2/2/3 water depths, so there's continuous random flow, but no evaporation or impassible terrain. The theory here was that the flow would create a self-cleaning trough. I didn't test exhaustively, but it seems like the contaminants usually were moved from the floor of the trench to the walls of the trench, where they won't harm anyone.
Before that, I would install a few decontamination troughs in parallel, with each one having a separate dedicated airlock to cut off all access, a bridge to atom smash the liquid (which doesn't kill contaminants), and metered water and magma supplies for each trough. The sequence would be dwarves pass through for a while, accumulate contaminants, seal the airlock, smash the water, let magma in (which does destroy contaminants), smash the magma, refill the trough to 2/7 or 3/7, open the airlock.
That required a bit of careful bridge/floodgate arranging and some logic to semi-automate it all, but was generally sufficient for keeping the really deadly environments at bay.
None of those were great solutions, since none of them offer instant contaminant destruction that would protect anything not wearing shoes that immediately follows a source of contaminant through the trench.
I hope there's something that works! I've never seen a real solution posted here.
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How does the water return? Are there grates on the floor where the dwarves walk? Is there a second pair of screw pumps somewhere?
You'd need to feed the pumps on the level in the picture, so either you have a second pair of pumps to return the water from the level below the floor one, or you have a flow and a sink. I'm thinking of using an aquifer as a source and sink.
@gchristopher: Thanks for your input. Contaminants carried by mist would be annoying, so I'll look out for those when I finally get to try it out (still waiting for an LNP for a playable DF version (haven't checked yet, so one might exist already).
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Are contiminant spreading by a secondary means still such an issue? Just after trying to first vampify my fortress through vampire blood in the well and then trying to coat my arows in venom it seems that they no longer spread and work like they used to.
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One issue I ran into was that falling water creates mist, which washed contaminants off dwarves, but the mist might spread to either side of your designated washing area, causing contaminants to drop on the floor outside of it where there's no liquid flow to remove them. For me, this killed the viability of any shower-type system.
Mist doesn't spread diagonally. Here's a mist-containment shower room:
(http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/5/5b/Shower-hall.png)
And here is a functioning example save of an unpowered dwarven shower (v0.44.05):
http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=13443
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Many thanks again, Loci!
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Mist doesn't spread diagonally. Here's a mist-containment shower room:
(http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/5/5b/Shower-hall.png)
And here is a functioning example save of an unpowered dwarven shower (v0.44.05):
http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=13443
I like the small file size of the save. It seems like most save files on dffd are so large.
Also good work improving the cleaning (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Cleaning) article on the wiki.
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Inside of my fortress I have soap, hospital area with soap in chests with 2 wells and water source area with 3 wells. Still my Dwarves never ever bath. It is so depressing. I think the only time I saw Dwarves taking bath, when I have build my water reservoir on surface beside my fortress and put couple wells on its top. Dwarves simply couldn't stop washing themselves there. I do not know what I am doing wrong. It suppose to be simple. Water, well, soap and dirty Dwarf needing bath. Bathing was giving them good thoughts, if I recall it correctly.
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I finally got a 0.44.05 LNP and took a look at the save. A very nice setup with the use of the aquifer to provide the water and a Deployable Drain to dispose of it.
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I'm pretty sure my setup abuses permaflow:
╔╦══╦════╗
╠X77X▲▲▲₵║
╚╩══╩════╝
The floodgate on the left blocks the flow of water from above. In my case this is an aquifer, but you could use a river or a reservoir with pump. With the left floodgate closed, the floodgate in the center lets a measured 14 units of water into the trough. This leaves exactly 2 units of water in each of the 7 tiles. The central floodgate is then re-closed (don't want pets in there.) The floor hatch leads to a map-edge drain. From my understanding, I'm pretty sure wagons can path through it. However, I placed my washer past the depot so I can't be sure.
The drain was used during construction, due to the aquifer. Contaminants disappear as soon as they touch the trough. It seems to keep working even after a refill (with the drain dried out,) so I don't know if the permaflow ever goes away. There's no real reason to drain the trough except for emergencies.
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I'm a happy customer of Loci's design. It works fine and my dorfs get happy thoughts about waterfalls.
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(Sorry, I don't have 44.05 installed yet, so I'm asking questions that are otherwise easily explored.)
I assume you're washing down through grates?
Do contaminants accumulate on the grate? (They used to, annoyingly)
Do you get pathing cancellation spam?
If that's all happy, then your only other obstacle is sanitizing caravan wagons, but in a truly hostileinteresting biome, a working entrance shower is the least of your problems keeping merchants alive.
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- I wash through grates, yes.
- I haven't seen any contaminants on the grates.
- I haven't seen any cancellation spam.
- I've seen blood contaminants inside, but I think that's because the evil rain syndrome induces some bleeding, not that the blood contaminant was brought through the washer.
- Only 1/9 of my embark is evil, so I only have partial problems with evil rain. So far no caravan (out of 2) seems to have been affected. I've seen in the past that evil rain falling has caused caravans to scuttle and flee, but I don't think that happened when they just trudged through the blood (no syndromes at that time, just <sapient> blood).
The essential parts of Loci's setup are:
W = Wall
. = Open floor
, = Open floor with water entering. This can either be from above (aquifer) or from the side (pump)
= Open space, i.e. a hole to the level below.
G = Grate covering hole to level below
r = Ramp (left from channeling)
D = Deployable Drain (requires removing ramp), i.e. track stop dumping into wall with mine cart on top. I set up a track route stop to get the mine cart there, but I assume it can be dumped as well.
Z + 1:
WWWWWWWW
WW.WW.WW
W.W W,W
W,W W.W
WW.WW.WW
WWWWWWWW
Z:
WWW..WWW
WW.WW.WW
WWWGGWWW
WWWGGWWW
WW.WW.WW
WWW..WWW
Z - 1:
WWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWW
WWWrrWWW
WWWDrWWW
WWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWW
I've channeled away two of the 3 remaining ramps on Z -1, but that has no functional impact. You can place the Deployable Drain in any of the 4 tiles under the grates, but make sure it dumps into a wall. It can also be noted that Z - 1 can be an aquifer instead, in which case you only need the 4 ramps as the aquifer takes care of the draining.
Also note the the above is not a sufficient building description, as you need additional tunnels to provide access to the essential parts. Those can be plugged with built walls and/or doors (if you use an aquifer above for the water supply you probably want one door for each of the "pipes". I then bricked up the access to both doors for good measure when the aquifer had been pierced).
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- I wash through grates, yes.
- I haven't seen any contaminants on the grates.
- I haven't seen any cancellation spam.
- I've seen blood contaminants inside, but I think that's because the evil rain syndrome induces some bleeding, not that the blood contaminant was brought through the washer.
- Only 1/9 of my embark is evil, so I only have partial problems with evil rain. So far no caravan (out of 2) seems to have been affected. I've seen in the past that evil rain falling has caused caravans to scuttle and flee, but I don't think that happened when they just trudged through the blood (no syndromes at that time, just <sapient> blood).
The essential parts of Loci's setup are:
W = Wall
. = Open floor
, = Open floor with water entering. This can either be from above (aquifer) or from the side (pump)
= Open space, i.e. a hole to the level below.
G = Grate covering hole to level below
r = Ramp (left from channeling)
D = Deployable Drain (requires removing ramp), i.e. track stop dumping into wall with mine cart on top. I set up a track route stop to get the mine cart there, but I assume it can be dumped as well.
Z + 1:
WWWWWWWW
WW.WW.WW
W.W W,W
W,W W.W
WW.WW.WW
WWWWWWWW
Z:
WWW..WWW
WW.WW.WW
WWWGGWWW
WWWGGWWW
WW.WW.WW
WWW..WWW
Z - 1:
WWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWW
WWWrrWWW
WWWDrWWW
WWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWW
I've channeled away two of the 3 remaining ramps on Z -1, but that has no functional impact. You can place the Deployable Drain in any of the 4 tiles under the grates, but make sure it dumps into a wall. It can also be noted that Z - 1 can be an aquifer instead, in which case you only need the 4 ramps as the aquifer takes care of the draining.
Also note the the above is not a sufficient building description, as you need additional tunnels to provide access to the essential parts. Those can be plugged with built walls and/or doors (if you use an aquifer above for the water supply you probably want one door for each of the "pipes". I then bricked up the access to both doors for good measure when the aquifer had been pierced).
How on earth did you get those examples to align without using code tags?
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Courier is a fixes space font, which makes it very useful for those kind of things.
Edit: Regarding contamination of the grates: I've observed them being contaminated by blood, only to have that washed away shortly after.
Edit 2: I've seen the strange effect that water that occasionally gets through the diagonals of the washer spontaneously has transmuted the rock into muddy sand. I know of the effect/bug where building on top of mud and removing the mud can randomly transmute the rock underneath, but this is the first time I've seen it happen on its own.
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Necro AND double post, but I think the Dwarf Washer is handy, and I encountered a solved a problem (I'm using Loci's design).
In my previous embark I pumped from and to the aquifer, and it worked perfectly. On my current embark I'm blessed with a center tile without an aquifer surrounded with tiles that do have it, so I drew water from the aquifer through a sideways channel (with a bridge to cut the flow, or I get the basin overflowing). However, I got too much water (resulting cancellation spam) raining down on my dorfs. After a few attempts I've managed to stem the flow to mostly a single unit of water by reducing the access to the tile each pump draws water from to a single diagonal access. Two diagonals mostly worked, with occasional 4 units of water. Thus, there seems to be a need to both restrict the input AND the output (although input restriction might make output restriction unnecessary: I haven't tried).
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Be wary of these Dwarf Washers. I once read 2 or 3 stories online about a monster with deadly blood contaminating the water and giving all of its Dwarves necrosis. I remember one of them they just killed a tick(Funnily enough) so the dwarves covered in blood walked through a water fall which went into the water supply and it caused an out break of the necrosis. Needless too say that fortress was abandoned and a new one was erected beside it.
But for an entrance washer you should be perfectly fine. But still its best to be careful.
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The purpose of the washer is to wash it away. If a contaminant goes down into the water it will be purified by the magic of the screw pump before it's showered on the next dorf. A trench foot bath could spread contaminants, though. The well cistern draws its water from a different aquifer location.
Leaving the dorfs to trail the necrosis inducing substance all over the floor inside without any washing is not a good idea either, by the way. I definitely needed a washer for my previous embark, as the syndrome rain caused permanent tuberculosis (i.e. coughing of blood), so I wanted to restrict the number of dorfs affected (I also turned off cleaning, as that was rather pointless).