Bay 12 Games Forum

The easiest way is to drain them, by channeling out tiles adjacent to the murky pool. You can build a ditch that drains it down a slope or otherwise gets rid of the water.

Be aware that once the pools are drained of water, they are gone forever, leaving your fortress less water to use.

You may need to build floors from stone on top of the drained murky pool tiles before you can use them for anything else.

I have a fortress near a brook, and because my murky pools were all freezing over every year (and because my military was complaining about having to drink from them anyway), I decided to divert some water from the brook through an underground aqueduct to a cistern where I could store it through the winter, and draw it up through a well. This has worked great, except that the water the dwarves get from the well always seems to be stagnant with a grime covering. This is even though the well descends into a flow coming directly from the brook. Is there something more I need to do to make the water not be stagnant?

Below is an image of what I've built (I've compressed the distance by about one and a half screens). You're looking at Z-1 below the level of the brook. I had my dwarves tunnel into the side of the water source, and off that tunnel I channeled out a little basin one more Z-level deep. The well is channeled into it from two floors above. The water in its bucket, and my dwarves' waterskins, is always stagnant.

I thought maybe this had to do with water not flowing per se, since it's just a dead-end spur off the brook, so I built the second (rubble-filled) tunnel that you see leading southwards; off the screen it turns west and reconnects with the brook to form a loop. The water is still stagnant.

Is it possible to have my plumbing provide non-stagnant water?