Bay 12 Games Forum

As with all interesting things, this was not a "Eureka!" moment, but a "Well, that's funny ..."

I've gone and created a pumpless water reactor. But I don't know how I did it.

Here's the top of my farm level. The water is coming down from the caverns, and the diagonal walls prevent overpressure.



Note the waterwheel at the bottom is turning away, currently powering a millstone.

Here's a picture of the level below my farms:



Originally, the idea was that I needed a two-level water reservoir so that any buckets from the well (above my farms) wouldn't have any mud, and would thus protect better against infection. I was going to let the water flow right off the map.

But I messed up the design when I confused real-world pressure with DF pressure. I effectively created a U-bend, and the reservoir filled up only halfway (just the level shown in the second image). To get it to fill the rest of the way, I had to create a path for the water (note in the first image the little "L" connecting the pasture to the water, now walled off? That was my access tunnel for the miner to fix my mistake).

So I hit my emergency bridges on both levels, stopped the water flow, mined out the "L", connected the top of the reservoir with the water source that originally only went down the ramps, sealed everything up, and let the water come in again.

And that's when this weird thing happened. The waterwheel started to turn *before* I put the lower level's bridge down. That means there's water flow somehow.

I experimented with a lot of similar u-bend configurations, but I couldn't manage to replicate the effects. My working theory was that the u-bend was confusing the water physics - water flow would go up and down the ramps, up and down the reservoir, creating some kind of flow against the bridge. But any method I tried to make it all happen again failed.

So ... how did I do this? The waterwheel works, and I suspect that I could channel out enough space to power a dozen waterwheels, and thus a pumpstack or two. But this design is a little unwieldy, and I'd like to be able to miniaturize it in order to use in other forts.

We all know elves are conniving, hypocritical, and almost entirely worthless. The only reason not to simply genocide the entire race is that they're occasionally useful for bringing along some excellent tame animals.

But that list of animals also includes tigermen, which are a semi-sentient race. That, if not properly cared for, can die of thirst in your fortress.

Well, no more! The tigermen have risen up and taken over the elven place in society, with some minor changes: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=2836

Simply extract the archive into your /raw/objects/ folder.

Alternatively, you can make the changes manually by:

Replace the [entity:forest] entry with the following in the entity_default.txt file:

Replace the Tigerman entry in creature_savage_tropical.txt:

To get rid of elves, add this line to the elves in creature_standard.txt:

Does not include graphics. That will require some investigation into how to do that sort of thing.