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The first discussion.

"I have a special project for you, Cilob."

Ral Siknugmeng, queen of The Imperial Pick, had called me to her throne room.  It was elegant, though clearly not as lavish as she would like.  Great pain had been taken to spread the platinum and aluminum out, to give the impression that the statues were solid rather than hollow or plated, and a close inspection would reveal that only the most visible surfaces were plated with true precious gems, cheaper gems or even glass used where visitors would be less likely to notice.  It clearly wasn't as large as would be desired, but that was true everywhere in the cramped, overcrowded mountainhomes, where too many dwarves were trying to live in too little space and too little resources.

The one feature that the room did have, that the architects had not compromised on, was a magnificent view of a waterfall, a mighty mountain stream diverted from above to flow through fortress before emptying out into the valley below.  Nearly all of the Imperial Pick's mountainhomes incorporated flowing water into their design, taking advantage of the unusual number of rivers and streams emptying out of the massive mountain ranges surrounding the valley.

"I was once a fishery worker, long ago, before that minotaur killed the old king Kivish Masteredceilings so long ago. Not an uncommon thing here, I know.  We have many rivers and brooks, and many fishery workers.  Of course, I haven't had the time for that in a long time," she glanced down at her ruined, crushed left hand,  "And since that titan attacked, it would be difficult for me anyway.  I have but one regret now.  I never once was able to fish from the ocean.  Oh, we had that trip to the Sea of Waves once, but that's just a big lake, no matter what the elves call it.”

She turned to face me.

“I want you to conduct an expedition for me.  Take a team and supplies, and go to the ocean.  Build a settlement, somewhere where the ocean can be fished from, and whatever exotic creatures live in the depths brought forth.  I may never be able to visit it myself, but it will do my heat good to know that others may do what I can never do.  I have drawn some plans for you, of what I would like to see built.”

She handed me some paper with crude sketches on it.  I studied it, with dawning confusion.  It looked straightforward, a large curtain wall, a mighty tower over the ocean, but I couldn't make the directions match up.

“I hesitate to correct you, my lady, but I think you have east and west confused on this map.  The Water of Enchantments lays to the west of us.  You have the land drawn on the west here, and the water on the east.”

She laughed.  “Silly Cilob. I'm not sending you to the Water of Enchantment.  That coastline's full of human and goblin and elven cities.  There's no space for us there.  You're going to the other ocean. I'm sure you're aware that our General, Reg Logemiteb, has been scouting far-off lands?  Just last year she found a way through the mountain ranges to the north, a pass between the Constructive Spike and the Spikes of Stoking.  There's a whole land out to the east of the mountains where hardly anyone lives.   Past that, an entire ocean, with just one friendly human civilization on it.  There's more than enough room for a little settlement of ours there.”

“Go to Reg, she'll give you directions and supplies for the trip.  And send me back some fish!”

The second discussion.

Reg Logemiteb's office was deep underground, far from the scenic waterfall view of the Queen's throne room.  The walls were decorated not with gems and precious metal, but with simple if graphic engravings.  Most of them were about Reg.  Reg fighting monsters.  Reg killing elves.  Reg traveling to the underworld to tame terrible monsters.  Reg leading an army to attack an elven retreat during the War of Horns in 39.  The few engravings that didn't show Reg doing something heroic concerned the minotaur Abesp Qakeowls, and its attack on one of The Imperal Pick's mountainhomes in year 4.  One engraving clearly showed the monster striking down Kivish Masteredceilings, former king, and incidentally Reg's husband.

Between the engravings were trophies – weapons siezed from enemies, skulls of strange creatures – mounted in display boxes.  I suspect that if common decency hadn't forbade it she'd have dead elves stuffed and mounted as well.  In one corner of the room crouched a horrible creature, a thing having feathers and a beak but being far from any bird.  A Jabberer, it was called, and it was descended from a pair that Reg had managed to tame on one of her expeditions.

Reg  Logemiteb, General of the Imperial Pick, hero of the War of 39, was a terrifying figure.  Despite being no taller than the queen, despite being lower in rank, she managed to project an air of palpable malice into the room.  Her face bore the scars from a battle with a minotaur decades previous, her mirthless grin had gaps where teeth had been smashed out, but more than that some way in how she carried herself showed she had passed beyond the point of caring about anything but power and vengeance.  She looked at the orders from the queen and shook her head.  “Fishing expedition?  That's the excuse she's using for this one?  Oh, you're not the first one she's sent out, since learning of the pass and the lands to the east.”  She threw the papers on her desk.  “Wasting good dwarves sending them away.  With our excess population, we could make an army and drive away the elves bottling us up in this damn valley.”

She gestured at a map.  “The mighty Imperial Pick!  Half a dozen mountainhomes, crammed side by side so you can't even tell where one begin and the other ends.  Not enough of us, and yet we're overcrowded anyway.  You know, if she hadn't signed that peace treaty back in 39, I could have burned a path clear to the sea from here.”

Her eyes went to the horrible creature crouching in the corner of the room.  “But perhaps some good can come from this folly.  I know you, Cilob.  You're one of the best animal trainers we have.”.  A gleam came to her eye.  “Legend has it there are terrible monsters in the depths of the oceans.  Leviathans, dragons of the deep, fish big as hydra.  If we could catch some, if we could domesticate and train them.”  She chuckled unpleasantly.  “Wouldn't even need to be all that tame.  Just releasing them in the river and letting the current carry them downstream.  Wouldn't that be a surprise.”

“These other expeditions the queen is sending out?  They're all doomed.  But catch and tame me some monsters I can use, and I'll make sure yours survives.”

---

This is my first experiment with journal/community fortress writing.  The game-wise goal of this fortress is to learn more about how the new animal taming rules work, especially for taming aquatic creatures.  The larger goal is for me to stretch my somewhat lacking writing skills, and hopefully tell an interesting story in the process.  I hope to be updating this regularly, but I can't promise anything.

I will be using a copy of DF 34.06 with a lot of custom mods.  The mod package is actually my own personal mod set.  It uses lot of content copied from other mods - I've got metals and stones from Dig Deeper, creatures and materials from Genesis, most of Zero's metalworking mod, and a lot of other stuff I don't even remember where it came from.  If you notice me using something that comes from a mod you recognize, feel free to remind me, since I didn't keep track of where I borrowed all the bits from.

Of course, there's also a fair amount in this mod that is completely original, my own content.

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The embark map:

The embark site is 5x5, and straddles 5 different biomes.  All are Untamed Wilds.  Four of the five are ocean biomes.  This should be Fun.

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The embarking dwarves.

Cilob Amudaban, expedition leader and animal trainer.

Cilob is claimed as the journal POV character.  The other six are available for dorfing all claimed now.

Monom Dodokzalud Argel, Farmer, Brewer, and Thresher

Monom Edemkadol Will_Tuna, Butcher, Tanner, Cook, and secondary Farmer

Rigoth Esdorbomrek Phenix, Miner, Mason, and Mechanic.  Strangely, Rigoth and Cilob had already formed a strong grudge, even before the wagon had stopped.

Solon Mesirled Cain, our Doctor.

Thob Litastavuz Coraiunki, Woodcutter, Carpenter, and Herbalist

Zan Onulibruk Fishybang, Engraver, Building Designer, and backup Mechanic, and Mason

---

Deities of the Imperial Pick:

  Ustuth Blanketsafety, deity: fortresses
  Ber, deity: minerals
  Stettad, deity: wealth
  as Copperrock, deity: metals
  N shas Maroonochre, deity: jewels
  Adil the Flicker of Glowing, deity: mountains, volcanos, fire, the sun
  Guthstak the Bloated Mucous Snot, deity: blight, disease, deformity
  icum the Gladness of Trusting, deity: generosity
  Bokbon Calmstills, deity: peace
  Bisek Perplexknots, deity: the night, darkness

Oceanshoots is my last major 31.25 fortress, a fairly simple megaproject/experiment fortress set up for one purpose.  To create a situation where a dwarf could harpoon whales with ballistae arrows.

It's a bit of a silly goal, but I wanted to see if it was possible.

Challenge #1:  Catching whales.

In my earlier fortress where I set up a working sea serpent farm, I learned through trial and error several key points about how to capture non-vermin fish.

First, catching fish works best when you can get the fish to swim onto the cage traps under their own power.  Trying to force the fish through a trap array with flowing water is not very effective.

Second, aquatic animals compete with surface animals for the number of groups of wild animals allowed to be on the map at once.  Aquatic creatures also seem to be much lower priority when the game decided what group of wild animals to spawn next.  If you want to spawn wild animals in the sea, you need to prevent them from spawning on land.

Third, even creatures like sharks or sea serpents will run away from war animals.  Strategically placed war dogs can be used to drive fish into your cage traps.

I picked a 4x4 embark site that straddled two savage ocean biomes, to maximize the number of wild sea creatures that would appear.  The embark site I picked meant that the dwarves were the only civilization that could reach my fortress, though I didn't realize that at the time I embarked.  It didn't really end up making any difference anyway.

After setting up the basics of a self-sufficient fortress, I started making the trap chambers.  The embark site was divided vertically by a nearly straight coastline.  I dug chambers three tiles wide parallel to the ocean, separated by a one tile wide rock wall.   On the side of the chamber facing the ocean I built raising drawbridges, so that the chamber could be sealed off from the ocean.  The rest of the chamber was filled with cage traps.  After raising the bridges, I channeled out the last line of rock from above to connect the chamber to the ocean.


On the surface one Z-level up, I built a windmill-powered pump to pump water out of the chamber.  I also built a wall to prevent dwarves on shore from scaring or being scared by fish near the trap entrances.  I also had hoped the wall would block ocean waves, but it was completely useless for that.


The same lever was used to both open and close the trap, and to engage the pump which pumps water out of the chamber.  I'd throw the lever one way to let water and fish in, wait for the trap to catch something, then throw it the other way to seal it off from the ocean and drain it so the dwarves could remove the cages and reload the traps.

I built six of these chambers, which covered nearly the entire shoreline from one end of the embark site to the other.

Now the trap wasn't catching much yet, since the local wildlife spawns were being taken up by camels and vultures and other annoying non-aquatic life.  Step two was to build raising drawbridges lining the entire edges of the surface.  Fortunately the embark site was nearly flat, so I was able to use maximum-length bridges for most of it.  This also meant completely sealing the fortress from the outside world.  No trade, no immigrants, no liaison.  Didn't really matter at this point as I already had a Baroness and a self-sufficient fortress.

After that, I only had to eliminate the last group of camels wandering around on the surface for sea creatures to start spawning.  They'd wander around the ocean and eventually get caught in the traps lining the shore.


The traps worked for a bit, until I ended up with a group of fish sitting offshore, not moving.  Seems when you get one of those groups that moves in a line, and then catch the leader, the rest of the group gets bugged and doesn't want to move again.  To solve this I built a series of platforms over the ocean, where I then stationed war dogs to scare the stuck fish into moving into the traps.


I ended up with these spanning the entire ocean side of the embark, so that there was no place a fish could sit without being in sight of a war dog.  The platforms were set up to channel creatures entering the map straight into the cage traps.  This worked astonishingly well, groups of creatures would spawn and then almost instantly flee to the shore to be caught.  The only downside to the scheme was that I ran through war dogs quickly, they kept getting into fights with sharks and drowning or bleeding to death.

Once I had the platforms in place, the fish catching system was almost too effective.  I clear-cut the entire surface of the map repeatedly trying to build enough cages, and had dwarves working non-stop to move cages into storage and load new ones into the traps.


Soon enough I had a dozen whales for the next step, along with dozens of sharks and other fish.  I also caught two sea serpents.  Both were female, unfortunately.  As an experiment I deliberately released one, and made sure it left the map without being recaptured.  Later, a second sea serpent appeared, and was caught.  This one was male.  It appears that the game tracks local biome populations as numbers rather than individual creatures, so you can get a rare creature to reappear with a different gender by releasing it and then waiting for another of that species to reappear.

In this experiment I decided to set out and test what, if anything, would prevent the movement of creatures through water-filled areas.  It's been common knowledge that fortifications don't block passage when underwater, and disputed if grates and bars do.  Here I put together a experiment to test this.

Our experimental setup is as follows:



We have a corridor connecting to the ocean through a lever-controlled floodgate on the right.  On the left we have five experimental chambers.  Each contains a war dog locked behind a gem window, a cage with a tuna in it, a barrier of some sort, and finally a cage trap.  Each experimental chamber has a different barrier.  The five barriers, from top to bottom, are carved fortifications, constructed fortifications, a wall grate, vertical bars, and a statue.

The lever at the top is linked to the five cages containing tuna.  When the chamber is flooded and the lever pulled to release the tunas from their cages, they will attempt to flee from the war dogs, passing through the barriers is possible, and then being caught by the cage traps if they make it.

The experiment begins by filling the chambers with water.



As you can see it's harder to tell what everything is underwater, which is why I included the previous pre-flooding image.

We now pull the lever to release the tuna from their cages.



The tuna in the first two chambers pass right through the fortifications and into the cage traps.  The fortifications, whether carved or natural, seemed to present no barrier whatsoever to the swimming creatures.

The tuna in the lower three chambers madly swam back and forth in the two spaces available to them, but did not pass the barriers to reach the cage traps.  This appears to demonstrate that swimming creatures will not intentionally swim through wall grates, vertical bars, or statues, even when fully submerged.

For the final experiment we close the floodgate and begin pumping the water out of the chambers.



As the water filling the chamber began to drain, the tuna in the fourth chamber, the one with vertical bars, reached the cage trap.  The third and fifth tuna did not, and ceased moving as the water level dropped.  Eventually they air-drowned.

From this it appears that, while vertical bars block the intentional passage of swimming creatures, creatures can still be forced through them by moving water.  I suspect that the same is true of wall grate and statues, although I would need to run further tests with flowing water to be sure.

These experiments were conducted on 31.25, but I expect this behavior to be unchanged for 34.01.

Loading saved fortress...

In the cleverly constructed airlock chamber, the forgotten beast Remzu Zospuror (An enormous quadruped of clear glass, beware its deadly spittle!) clawed futilely at the indestructible artifact floodgate.  Across the chamber, behind a channel and wall of fortifications, the fortress's only marksdwarf fired bolt after bolt at the beast.  The bolts had little effect on it, despite a dozen sticking in it and more shattered around the chamber, the beast felt no pain and had no blood to spill or organs to pierce.  It had been good archery practice, but the decision had been made to finally kill the beast.  At least half a dozen more forgotten beasts waited in the caverns, gathered around the entrance to the airlock where they have been attracted by kittens dropped from above as bait.

By the fortress-side airlock gate, Urdim Dikefeast the Armored Plank of Distracting had gathered her soldiers.  Ten strong, four with hammers, four with axes, one with a mace, and one with an artifact spear, all clad in high-quality metal armor.  They had killed countless goblins and elves, along with the riding beasts they brought, and had even killed two forgotten beasts after an unfortunate mining incident had opened the fortress to the caverns.  They were not concerned about the monster waiting for them in the airlock, expecting this to be an easy fight.

At her signal, a dwarf pulled the lever to open the fortress-side gate.  The militia swarmed into the airlock.  Remzu Zospuror, who had ignored dozens of bolts, fell quickly to the axes and hammers of the soldiers.

The calendar passed from spring to summer.  Elsewhere in the fortress, the elven ambassador patiently waited for Duke Sibrek to finish drinking.  Down in the magma forges, a furnace operator finished smelting a batch of wolfram ore, went for the next, and found that there was no more.  In the caverns, a forgotten beast easily slaughtered two of the bait kittens.

Dwarf Fortress has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

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Loading saved fortress...

By the fortress-side airlock gate, Urdim Dikefeast the Armored Plank of Distracting had gathered her soldiers.  She paused for a moment in confusion.  Hadn't she done this already?  A glance told her that the door was locked, and the great glass quadruped was still waiting to be killed.  She gave the signal to open the gate.  The militia swarmed into the airlock.  Remzu Zospuror, who had ignored dozens of bolts, fell quickly to the axes and hammers of the soldiers.

The calendar passed from spring to summer.  Elsewhere in the fortress, the elven ambassador patiently waited for Duke Sibrek to finish drinking.  Down in the magma forges, a furnace operator finished smelting a batch of wolfram ore, went for the next, and found that there was no more.  In the caverns, a forgotten beast easily slaughtered two of the bait kittens.

Dwarf Fortress has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

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Loading saved fortress...

By the fortress-side airlock gate, Urdim Dikefeast the Armored Plank of Distracting had gathered her soldiers.  She stopped, thought for a moment.  Something wasn't right.  She turned to the dwarf waiting by the levers.  "Never mind for now.  Let the marksdwarf get a bit more practice.  We'll kill it later.  Soldiers, dismissed!".  At that, she and the rest of her squad headed back to their barracks.

The calendar passed from spring to summer.  Elsewhere in the fortress, the elven ambassador patiently waited for Duke Sibrek to finish drinking.  Down in the magma forges, a furnace operator finished smelting a batch of wolfram ore, went for the next, and found that there was no more.  In the caverns, a forgotten beast easily slaughtered two of the bait kittens.

Dwarf Fortress has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

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Loading saved fortress...

By the fortress-side airlock gate, Urdim Dikefeast the Armored Plank of Distracting had gathered her soldiers.  A look told her that they shared her expression of puzzlement - several of them had also started to realize what was going on.  "Doesn't seem to matter if we kill the beast or not" she said.  "What else could be going on here?"

"Perhaps an elven trick?" one of them suggested.

She smiled grimly.  "One way to find out."

The elven ambassador stood waiting as Duke Sibrek took his drink, in the disgusting manner such filthy, non-elven, mud-loving creatures did.  Not using a mug or other utensil, the Duke was bent over the barrel, his head and beard fully immersed in the alcohol as he drank deeply.  With the patience only an immortal tree-lover could muster, the elf stood without showing his utter disgust and loathing.  Not long ago, the elves had sent wave upon wave of soldiers at this fortress, riding on unicorns and pegasii.  After the last army was slaughtered, to the last elf and beast, the elven nation had finally agreed to send an ambassador to sue for peace.

Peace was not to be found today, as the axe-brandishing Urdim burst into the room, the rest of her squad just behind her.  The Elven ambassador fled, staying just ahead of the soldiers, nearly making it to the fortress's main gates, but collided and became tangled up with the war dogs stationed there.  Then the soldiers caught up and mercilessly slaughtered the elf.

Urdim spat at the sad mangled corpse.  "Couldn't beat us in honest combat, so you tried using your elf magic, to do whatever the hell that was?  Here's what we think of that!".  Feeling satisfied, she and the rest of the soldiers headed back to the barracks.

The calendar passed from spring to summer.  Elsewhere in the fortress, Duke Sibrek continues drinking, not even realizing that the elf was no longer waiting for him.  Down in the magma forges, a furnace operator finished smelting a batch of wolfram ore, went for the next, and found that there was no more.  In the caverns, a forgotten beast easily slaughtered two of the bait kittens.

Dwarf Fortress has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

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Loading saved fortress...

By the fortress-side airlock gate, Urdim Dikefeast the Armored Plank of Distracting had gathered her soldiers.  They stared at each other in confusion and despair.

"Not the elves after all?  What else could it be?"

"Perhaps the smelters?" one of the soldiers suggested.  "It's unnatural, some of the metals the alchemists are making down there."

Urdim took off towards the main staircase.  Running down it, past the dining room and hospital, she burst into the grand room housing the magma furnaces.  "Shut down the arc furnace!  Stop melting that wolfram!  Drop the yellowcake!  Get away from those hydrolysis cells!  No more metal production till we figure out what's going on here!"

The alchemists and furnace operators backed away from their equipment, none of them wanting to disobey the crazy woman with the axe.  She stared at them, waiting to see what would happen.  The calendar passed from spring to summer.   Elsewhere in the fortress, the elven ambassador patiently waited for Duke Sibrek to finish drinking.  In the caverns, a forgotten beast easily slaughtered two of the bait kittens.

Dwarf Fortress has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

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Loading saved fortress...

By the fortress-side airlock gate, Urdim Dikefeast the Armored Plank of Distracting had gathered her soldiers.  She groaned.  "Not the glass quadruped, not the elves, not the metals.  What could be causing this?  What haven't we tried changing?"

"What about the kittens?  The bait kittens, that we dropped into the caverns?"

Urdim stared at him.  "They get torn apart by the beasts there.  To stop that, we'd have to go into the caverns and kill all the beasts at once."

They considered this for a moment, none of them liking the idea.  The forgotten beast airlock had been constructed to isolate and deal with the beasts one at a time.  Mighty though the soldiers were, fighting an army of poison-spewing monsters from before history would likely be the end of them all.

Urdim smiled.  "If it doesn't work, we'll just be right back here anyway, right?  Nothing lost in trying!"  She turned to the dwarf waiting by the levers.  "Open the inner airlock lever ... and the outer one."

"Ma'am, that will open the fortress to the caverns.  All the monsters will come in at once!"

She stared at him, gripping her axe.  He turned, and pulled the levers, one after the other.  The militia swarmed into the airlock.  Remzu Zospuror, who had ignored dozens of bolts, fell quickly to the axes and hammers of the soldiers.   After that easy kill, the soldiers charged into the winding tunnel which lead into the untamed caverns.  They ran head-on into an army of forgotten beasts coming the other way.  Uthimi, An enormous serpent, beware its poisonous gas!  Ino, A great one-eye spider, beware its poisonous bite!  Oggez Rashmomuz, A great hairly slug,  beware its webs!  Others waited outside, spewing dust and leaving trails of poison as they converged on the now-open gate.

The soldiers fought well, dodging blows and striking down the monsters.  But the beasts didn't fight fair, spreading poison gas and dust everywhere.  Soon Urdim and her soldiers were reeling, dizzy and nauseous, their flesh starting to swell and putrefy.  One soldier staggered out into the caverns and was blasted against a wall and killed by a dust-spraying blob.  The others survived combat, killing all the monsters, but collapsing before they could return to the fortress, overcome by the poisons.  Many of those who came to their rescue, to bear them back to the hospital, were also overcome after walking through the poison-caked corridor.

The calendar passed from spring to summer.  Elsewhere in the fortress, the elven ambassador patiently waited for Duke Sibrek to finish drinking.  Down in the magma forges, a furnace operator finished smelting a batch of wolfram ore, went for the next, and found that there was no more.

And the world kept running.

As the weeks and months went by, the hospital was the center of a grim fight to save the lives of all the dwarves affected by the poisons.  The floors around the wells were torn up and replaced repeatedly after being contaminated with poison.  Chief medical dwarf Solon Stelideral worked tirelessly to clean infected wounds and cut away infected tissue, till he himself fell victim to the poisons.  Zas Rithmis, a recently immigrated doctor, stepped forward to continue the treatments.  Duke Sibrek defied the common perception of nobles as useless, cleaning wounds and bringing water to the injured.  He fell ill to the poisons three times, but in a display of amazing regenerative abilities managed to fight off the infection and return to work without needing medical attention each time.

In the end, only two more dwarves died.  One of Urdim's soldiers returned to duty, but succumbed to infections raging in her bones.  Another died in the hospital during surgery.  The hospital itself was left a wreck, with two treatment rooms permanently walled off after being contaminated.

Later, the surviving soldiers gathered in the barracks.  None of them had come through uninjured, all bearing scars from the ordeal.  They knew, however, that they had not merely saved the fortress.  Through some means they could not even begin to understand, they had somehow saved the world itself from becoming corrupted.

Saving fortress...

I can't get my desalination plants to not work.

No, that double negative isn't a typo.  I have so far been unable to make a desalination system not work, even when doing everything you aren't supposed to.

My first attempt was in a salty swamp marsh on the shore, with multiple salty murky ponds:


As a test of what you aren't supposed to do, I built a cistern directly on bare ground:


and filled it through the pump.  On testing with a water zone, the water was fresh:


This wasn't supposed to work, according to the common knowledge of how desalination works.

I tried again in a new location, again building a floor-less cistern, this time right next to the ocean:


Again, the water was fresh when pumped:


Even when I dug out the lower level, making sure the water was in direct contact with raw natural stone as shown:


the water was still fresh:


I did see the strange known bug where water near the ocean could not be raised above the level of the ocean.  Once I dug the floor of the cistern below the surface of the ocean, I could not raise the level of the cistern water above the level of the ocean.  Despite this, and despite being in contact with natural stone and sand walls two tiles away from the ocean, the water was still fresh.

I have since tried this in two more embark sites.  I cannot reproduce the claimed behavior of contact with a natural stone or soil wall or floor turning water salty.  I will attempt a few more times, but I'm starting to think that 'cisterns must have constructed walls and floor' is a superstition with no bearing on reality, similar to the claim that dwarves would stop drinking booze if only one type was available.

The closest I've found to validating this claim is on a seaside embark with an aquifer.  The aquifer is salt water, and if I permit the cistern water to come in contact with the aquifer the cistern turns permanently salty.  If I dig a cistern down to the level of the aquifer, the cistern is salty, but if I dig the cistern down one level shy and fill it by a pump, the cistern is fresh water, despite being in direct contact with sand walls:


Comments?

This is a simple mod I put together which adds eleven monsters from those super-cheesy monster movies shown on the Syfy channel on weekends.

Added creatures are:

Blood Monkeys: Giant bloodthirsty gorillas found in savage jungles. They are smart enough to sabotage traps and pull levers
Dinocroc: A massive bipedal crocodile-like reptile.
Dinoshark: Shaped like a shark, but with the bony skeleton and jaws of a dinosaur.
Frankenfish: Found in or near any fresh water, these fish can crawl onto land to hunt.
Ice Spiders: Pack-hunting, icy-bodied, giant spiders found in glaciers and tundra.
Mansquito: The result of an alchemical experiment gone horribly wrong. Humanoid body, but with the exoskeleton and wings of an insect. Latches onto its prey and sucks them dry of blood. Survivors of its attacks are left with a painful itchy inflamation.
Mega Pirhana: A pirhana the size of a whale, with jaws that can bite through steel. Known for leaping out of the water and exploding.
Mega Snake: A snake which grows from an egg into a massive size in only a year. Surprisingly hard to kill. Non-venomous, but can use its body to grab and choke other creatures.
Mongolian Death Worm: Man-sized red worms from the desert that spit fire and secrete a poisonous acid. Technically not supposed to be here as the legend predates the Syfy movie, but I included it anyway.
Sharktopus: Half-shark, half-octopus! It can climb out of the water to chase your dwarves across the land.
Supergator: A massive crocodile with bony spines down its back.

Download the file here:  http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=5083

To install, decompress the zip file.  Copy the three text files from the zip archive into your raw folder.  Create a new world.  Enjoy.

In the current version of DF, dwarves will clean themselves at a well.  A dwarf with blood or pus or forgotten beast extract will stand next to a well, lower and raise the bucket, then walk away clean, leaving a puddle of whatever he washed off behind.  This will often get on whatever dwarf uses the well next, leading to an endless cycle of re-contamination.

I've been trying to figure out a way to clean up this residue between uses.  Water isn't reliable at moving contamination, more likely to spread it around than remove it.  Placing a grate doesn't work, since contamination doesn't fall through grates.  Magma would remove the contamination, but a system to flush the well with magma between uses without clogging the whole thing with obsidian would be complex.

Then I realized that I'd seen fire remove blood splatters in adjacent tiles.  And I realized that artifacts burn forever.  So I thought, make a well with a forgotten beast bone chain I have lying around (and otherwise magma-safe materials), set it on fire, and it will then clean itself between uses.

Yeah, this was a terrible idea.  I set the well up and set it on fire with a carefully managed magma wave.  When the magma was gone, I channeled out the rest of the space under the well to connect it to the cistern.  A dwarf with some mud or something on his feet came by to use the well.  He lowered the steel bucket into the cistern, at which point the burning chain began boiling the cistern water away.  Despite this, the bucket managed to fill with water.  The dwarf raised the bucket, which boiled dry the moment it left the water.  Rather than canceling the job, the dwarf lowered the bucket again ... repeating the cycle over and over again, until the cistern boiled dry and the job canceled.  He then walked away, leaving the burning chain lowered to the lowest level of the cistern, and also leaving a trail of blood as most of his fat had melted out at this point.

I couldn't refill the cistern for the burning chain lowered into it.  I managed to deconstruct the well, and luckily the rope ended up next to where the well was built rather than falling into the cistern.  Now I have a permanently burning forgotten beast bone rope in a locked-off corridor, and a steel bucket at the bottom of the cistern.

I'm still looking for a way to make a self-cleaning well.  This was not the way to do it.  Amusing, but a terrible idea in retrospect.