Bay 12 Games Forum

So you have found the perfect embark but it has one of those pesky aquifers? Fret not, breaking through is way easier than you think and then the aquifer is actually quite useful.

The premise for the below methods is always, that we want to get a single stair through the aquifer as quick as possible. Then it's easy to dig larger openings (or even mine out the entire aquifer layer) from below. These methods are probably not new, but I have not seen them mentioned anywhere so here goes.

Getting through aquifers, located exclusively in the soil layers is easy (just look at the first few steps of the below methods) so we will deal with deep aquifers extending into the stone layers.

If done correctly, all three methods should be 100% safe for the miner -- doing everything correctly on the first attempt is probably hard though.

Some general remarks:

Method I

This method ist the most versatile and the quickest way to break through an aquifer that I know of. You will need a pump, a pick and two beards and since a pump can be produced from the embark wagon wood, this should be possible in almost all cases.

Though getting through the soil layers using only the pump is possible, it's much easier to do by cave-in.
While the components for a pump are being produced, you can prepare the ground above the aquifer. When ready, the pump is assembled (here pumping from the west).



Once the pump is activated, the up-down-stair can be extended two levels down. Then the pump can be disassembled. Meanwhile you prepare the landing site for a plug on Z2. It is important, that the outer ring on Z2 are up-stairs since we will dig under them. It is equally important, that the other tiles are down-stairs since up-stairs are, unlike ramps, not crushed under a cave-in.



If you use a different layout, make sure that the pump components are safely out of the cave-in area. Then the plug is dug out, removing the last tile safely from a diagonal.



The plug is just large enough to place the pump inside and prepare an access to Z3. Don't replace the up-stair with an up-down-stair, since you will need a floor there later.



The down-stair on Z3 can be dug from the level above, even though the tile is flooded and it allows us to know wether there is another aquifer layer beneath. After the pump is activated, you can start smoothing the accessible tiles on Z3 and dig a new drain on Z4.



When the drain is done, the pump can be disassambled again and the up-down-stair can be connected to a down-stair on Z2.



Now prepare the space for the next pump. The channeling will take a while since the miner is being pushed around a fair bit but it will get done eventually. It might help to have an agile (and strong?) miner here.



Once this is done, remove the up-stair, construct the pump again and channel its intake tile.



And that's it essentially. You can continue like that, alternating between NS and EW direction for the pump, until reaching the last aquifer layer. Don't dig any stairs further down before all the tiles have been smoothed.



How long the process takes varies quite a bit, probably due to all the being pushed around by water.
On my test embark, I broke through on the 20th of Slate before the miner got hungry for the first time.

Further remarks:

Method II

For this method, you don't need anything but a miner with a pick and freezing weather.

Channel five tiles on the surface as shown in the image. All except the channel in the north-western corner can be extended right into the first aquifer layer. The channels can be floored over immediately.



Dig a stair in the center of the frozen tiles, then channel the ice on Z1 and then again on Z0.



This will create ice walls on Z1 and Z2. Dig a stair through the center again extending it into Z3 to make a drain.



Now on Z2 dig a ring of stairs with drains underneath.



When the ring is complete, extend the stairs to Z1 and channel the remaining aquifer tiles inside of the ring from Z1.



Now you can channel the ice walls as well as the tile to the north-west of the central stair all the way down to Z2. Z3 should then look like this.



There is still water trapped in the center. Just keep channeling the same ice tiles on Z2 until it spreads sufficiently to allow the miner to stand on the stair. Then extend the central stair to Z4. When this is done, dig out the NE and SW corner tiles and smoothe some tiles.



With Z3 dry, channel out the ice tiles again and repeat the process until you hit dry stone (then don't dig into the corners obviously).

On my test embark I broke through on the 3rd of Felsite, but the miner fell asleep immediately before finishing so it can likely be done quicker.

Further remarks:

Method II

This method needs nothing except a pick and a dwarf to wield it. Since you can use the wagon wood to construct a pump, it should rarely, if ever, be necessary to resort to it. Situations in which you might include:

• you needed some wood to ensure survival early on
• you needed some wood to make the pick
• your embark wagon is the center of a zombie apocalypse
• you are (by choice or otherwise) playing a hermit challenge
• any combination of the above

As a first step, you need to get into the first aquifer layer using a cave-in (of course you could also use a pump, but if you have a pump, why are you doing this in the first place.). In a fashion similar to the beginning of method I, prepare the landing site for a larger plug.



Notice the single unbroken tile on Z2. To the west,you can see the initial plug, except you can't see it due to the soil-transforms-during-cave-in bug. Now prepare the plug, cutting out a smaller, inner plug for later use.  The inner plug is suspended by a single remaining tile.



Once the dust settles, dig through the freshly dropped plug, establish a drain underneath and dig a diagonal, cutting away the last aquifer tile inside of the ring and letting the trapped water drain away.



Once that is done, the landing site for the inner plug on Z3 is prepared



and the plug cut loose. The plug is held by a thin strech of floor on the surface. You have to watch your miner closely here, or the dunderhead will carve the ramp from the surface, promptly to be sweapt into the hole by the cave-in dust.



The collapsed floor covered one of the stairs on Z1 so make sure to open that up again before going on. When the water has drained away again, you can dig through the center of the latest plug and again make a drain below. Yet again dig out through a diagonal. Before going on, all reachable tiles are smoothed.



Go on digging on Z3 making drains on Z4 as needed. Take care not to open up several tiles at once and smoothe each tile as soon as it gets exposed. It's also important to separate the various drains as seen in the picture lest the miner get flooded when working on the lower levels.



The northernmost stair extends all the way through the aquifer and will be the access to the pit after the next cave-in. Now channel around the second inner plug and remove the up-stair below.



The second inner plug is now held by the single up-stair and can be dropped by removing it -- again from a diagonal.



Work on Z4 proceeds essentially as on Z3 rotated by 180°.



The northern up-down-stair on Z4 is flooded so before you can dig the drain underneath, some more work needs to be done on Z3.



Finally, dig the missing drain on Z4, channel around the plug again and set of the next cave-in.



From here on, essentially repeat the previous steps.

Of course the process is rather lengthy, but it's not that bad. On my test run, I got through on the 23rd of Hematite. I didn't try particularly hard to optimize anything so i'm sure it can be done in less than a season.

Further Remarks:

let's say I set my pop cap to the number of dwarves that i have in my fortress after the second wave, e.g. 15

In the new version, you can even do without the first migration waves. If you set the soft cap to 0 before embarking you will not get any migrants ever. Your starting 7 will be on their own.

Note that you will have to make sure that you have at least two valid couples (not gay, age difference of at most 10 years) if you want a self sufficient fort in the long run. To jump-start your baby industry, check out Loci's speed dating method explained in http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=144945.45. Only make sure the dwarves you want to hook up together are friends before they get their pre-honeymoon suite or they will take very long/forever to marry.

If you are experimenting with your own hand-made worlds you should preferably set all the "minimum ... square count", "minimum ... region count" and "minimum number of ... squares" to zero to reduce the number of rejections.

Dwarves set up their mountainhomes in any non-savage, neutral (not evil or good) mountains (peaks are not relevant here afaik). With a permitted elevation range of 100 - 400 setting the elevation mesh for example to: 8x8, (20,20,20,1,1) you should be able to generate a world with very few mountain tiles. It appears that the mesh is ignored if you set very high elevation variance values, so don't do that. In the parameters you posted, the elevation mesh appears to be inactive. Set it from ignore to 4x4 (smaller region) or 8x8 (small region).

Apparently no two civs will be placed in one region initially, so if you generate a world with a single valid mountain range you will only get one dwarven civ. With the above mesh settings I just created a small world with 20 civs and only one type of dwarves.

I've encountered this problem as well. I think it is related to the new job application system.

You can do the chicken run as follows:  On the level above the aquifer, you dig an up-down staircase and a downward staircase next to one another. (It's probably best if the up-down staircase is the only access since then your miner will definately only have to take a single step into the aquifer layer.) This will reveal two damp tiles in the first aquifer layer.
Now on the tile below the up-down staircase, designate another up-down staircase and on the tile below the downward staircase, designate a channel. Now upon finishing the staircase, the miner will not cancel the channel designation - since it is in a tile already known to be damp - and proceed to dig the channel without erroneously running about first.

I just tried this with a legendary miner and it can probably be done with less adept ones but I don't know how exactly it compares to the old method.

Hi to everyone. I've been watching the forums for quite a while and wanted to say thanks to all the people whose posts helped me to understand df.

Here is what I did. I had a nice fort under the ocean going at framerates between 50 and 150 (depending on what critters where on the map). I only have a small number of dwarves (24) so this has helped me to keep FPS up through about 20 in game years. Then I installed a plug at the deepest point of the ocean and pulled it, not surprisingly murdering my framerate (there was a tick every 10 to 20 seconds). So I let it run over night and when I came back the ocean had indeed drained and the game was running again at a stable rate of 4 to 8 FPS. I did some work in the ocean levels, put the plug back and let the ocean refill hoping to get my framerate back. Unfortunately: no such luck. The framerate went up a bit to about 20 but it is still miles from before the draining.

I already did some testing. DFHack flows still reports several hundred thousands of moving water tiles although there are none I am aware of. So I set all the update_liquid and update_liquid_twice flags to false (using again DFHack) saved the game and reloaded. Now flows shows no more moving water but my FPS is still at 20.

I know that it is possible to get it back up by retiring the fort and immediately unretiring it again. The framerate goes up to the levels it was at before I drained the ocean. Unfortionately this has the anoying side effect of flooding every single tile of the fort that I dug out (exept for any stockpiles surprisingly) with salt water.

Now obviously I want my framerate back. So here's a couple of questions:

1. Any hints how I could tell the game to acknowledge that there is no more running water calculations to perform?
2. Why is my fort flooded at unretire?
3. As a possible workaround: does anyone know what flag(s) differentiate between tiles I dug out and naturally empty cavern tiles? Any ideas what is special about stockpiles in that regard?
4. Could this be due to pathing? Maybe once the ocean was drained the game marked all it's squares as ok for pathing and now the algorith is always scanning the vast watery expanse for a possible path, that of course is not there? If so, is there a cure?