Bay 12 Games Forum

Dunno how that posted twice.  Delete this?  I can't see how.

I don't believe it even has to be named, just to have "tasted blood".  I may be wrong.  Just a warning.

Hammerer.

Ouch, was wondering if someone would go there.

Okay, the deal is that I want to build an aqueduct to ferry water from a brook to my fortress.
The brook is in the northeast corner of my map, and my fortress is more or less in the middle.

I plan on building an enclosed pipe out of stone constructions and suspending it in the air. Then, I will use windmills to power a system of pumps, which will bring the water up 5 z-levels to the aqueduct, and transport it (downhill if necessary) to my fortress, where it will pour in from the topmost level to a pool. (Yay waterfall.)

My problem is, how do I get rid of the water?

If I dug a shaft to the bottom of the map, then dug a channel at the bottom of said shaft, would this function as a "bottomless pit" where I could dump all this excess water?

Also, does this overall plan seem sound? Will it work?

And if you want to dump your water out the bottom of the map, need to find a bottomless pit/chasm/underground river.  The square will be labeled "Chasm".  Chasms are found at the end of all underground rivers (as far as I know), which are what the rivers empty into.

I like making a waterfall that goes from as high as I can get, and falls through the top of my mountain, straight through my big central hall/meeting place, and all the way down to the bottom, then have it empty through a chasm.  At the bottom I leave a place for a few z-levels of a pool to gather, which I use for a couple wells which I place back up in my meeting chamber.  Supposedly, dwarves like deeper wells more.  This makes them pretty freakin' deep.

I like it when it calls all my things "completely sublime"

This is close to an idea/question I had come up today. I somehow underestimated the water pressure on this well I was building and discovered, to my delight, the pond I drained into the depths of my fortress is now pushing its way back up the shaft, flooding my lower levels. For whatever reason, this made me wonder if I could create a sort of fire hose that would jet high pressure water to blast invaders off a ledge. The design in my head involved a roughly J shaped curve that used gravity and screw pumps (?) to increase the pressure enough.

So I learned water can push things, but can it knock creatures around?

It most definitely knocks creatures around; you'll find that as soon as you accidentally dig into an aquifer.  Also good for raising a dwarf's swimming skill, give him a task he can never reach at the end of a tunnel of water rushing towards him.

As far as actually "launching" things... if you want to launch stuff, dwarven catapults [drawbridges] may be your best option. 

If all you want to do is push some goblins around... say, off a cliff or something, that should be easy - just make sure you have a way to turn it off.  And don't leave the lever in a place where you might not be able to access it.


EDIT:  To clarify, water, in my experience, pushes rather than propels.  Water needs to flow for this though.  If a tile of water is [7/7] and the tiles around it are the same water level, then no flowing occurs.  A pump definitely does the job to push creatures.

I think the pump/stream system would be better, you'd never have to worry about pulling levers, it would all be automatic.
The only downside is the constant flowing water is tiresome on the CPU.

Embarked on freezing biome. The glacier never thawed naturally, so I set up a system to melt the ice with magma and direct the melted ice to the well, via waterfall.

Except I crossed the magma lines and the melt lines. And didn't use magma-safe materials on what should have been the water side of the line. And put all the levers to the magma supply in a little closet behind the well room, which is now full of magma.

Also: Mass construction?!?

Your fault; you should have paid attention when watching Ghostbusters.

A way to permanently delete items without magma or a pit (or using a drawbridge) would be nice, though an incinerator implies it would use fuel. And that is itself a problem, especially on maps with no coal.
I'm not sure if there's any alternative, though. Still, more dumping options would be nice. We've already got metal recycling, maybe glass could join it. Make a compost heap to turn biodegradable refuse into fertiliser? There's lots of options, I suppose.
However, I think that's at something to a tangent to your suggestion. Perhaps a de[s]troy designation, like [m]elt, [d]ump, [f]orbid and [h]ide, which would simply delete that item by crushing it to dust or some such.

You can use a drawbridge to destroy trash?  I thought that dropping drawbridges should destroy items (never done it before), but just a few days ago I tried it.  Designated a garbage dump on the tile that a raised drawbridge will lower on.  A few items were dropped on the tile, then I lowered the bridge.  Nothing happened, it just showed the items as now resting on top [somehow] of the bridge.  What was I doing wrong?