Bay 12 Games Forum

What would that accomplish? I'd still be trapped underground, one of my miners would die to the flooding water, and the beast might've destroyed my windmills powering the river-drainer anyway. Also, what would minecarts accomplish? I'm new, you have to extrapolate. Sorry!

Oh my Armok, I just realized that I forgot to tell one of the best parts of the story. When I ordered the shaft be dug, exactly one miner did all the digging, and he was promptly named "fluidorf," and his job title changed to big damn hero.

After much brainstorming, I decided that the best way to deal with the water was the very dwarfiest I could think of. My first design choice was a screw pump which would be used to drain the river, leading into a long area sealed off by a series of walls built as close to the barrier as they could go. This way, the water would just drain off-map, without hurting anyone. Unfortunately, it takes more than dwarf power to drain a river, so that idea was scrapped.

Then, I came up with an even DWARFIER idea.

I would build floors covering the ridge which the brook flowed from, all the way out to the closest to the edge of the map that I could build windmills. On the underside, I built a series of floors forcing the water drained from the brook not to reenter the brook, and instead flow off-map through the pipeline of an artificial cave I'd created. From here, I constructed a series of windmill-powered screw pumps taking from every space that the brook flowed through, meaning it was only a matter of time until the screw pumps had taken so much out of the brook that the bed was dry or damned-near to dry!

With this method, I could eventually drain the river to the point that my access point leading down the channel to the cistern would be dry at the top layer, allowing me to build a secondary floodgate controlled from a location OUTSIDE of the flood zone.

That being done, I promptly began constructing a pump stack to drain out the fortress once the secondary floodgate was finally in place. What's more is that I was able to create a channel of walls to direct the water towards the front walls of my fortress, where it will finally fill the moat. Everything is coming up roses!

Well, looks like the !!fun!! is over...

Or not. There's a werepanda killing my workers.

Wait, no, it turned back human. I'll just have my militia dispatch it.

Oop, spoke too soon. There's a titan killing everyone. Better hit the drawbridge, and... There we go, it's walled out of my fortress, and MOST of my dwarves are safe inside.

...But now I can't work on unflooding the fort.

Well, I can always just carve some fortifications and shoot it.

...It can crawl through fortifications. It's in the fort.

FUN TIMES!!!

Sorry to have taken so long, you guys!

Well, anyway, I might as well get around to the story now.

So, it started after a bit of wiki-fueled updating and base construction. Being better at the game than I was previously, I quickly began constructing a base in a great place I'd found. Shallow AND deep metals, flux stone, a brook, clay, no sand though. After a lot of digging out, I was creating an enormous main area to serve as the base. About five or ten Z-levels down, before the chalk ended, I carved out numerous locations. A hospital, a barracks, the mayor's and broker's offices, the office for the future captain of the guard, a dining hall, and an enormous set of storage rooms with their own enormous workshop. Gotta hold all that chalk somewhere! The last thing I needed to complete my base was a cistern, so I got to work making a well and hollowing out a reservoir beneath it. Floodgates were constructed, levers placed in the common room where the well was, and a backup emergency release valve was created so I could drain it all into the caverns if anything went horribly wrong.

A few issues I had with that were that the emergency levers were all located in the room that the well goes to, and the cistern is fed by the brook.

The funny thing is, for quite some time (I was watching actively) water pressure didn't kick in, and the cistern only filled up to the point which the channel leading into it was located, and above that there was little or no water.

I, thinking that pressure would be nothing to worry about, decided to hop onto the wiki for a while and read about some interesting topics.

Some amount of minutes later, my dwarves were drowning, and an enormous flood threatened to kill off my fortress.

!!Fun!! times!

Huh. This thread's been dead for ten years.

Never mind that, it's necro time! Ñ

Genius idea if this ever gets picked up: salade colossus.

"This creature composed purely of a fantastically tough and dense material would be the bane of all beings, if it weren't for the fact that it barely comes up to a dwarf's ankle. They find contact with fleshy beings overstimulating, and prefer to flee basically any living creature they encounter, despite the fact that they pose ABSOLUTELY NO THREAT to the colossus's existence."

This would just be perfect. Just mining through the caverns and all of a sudden you see a tiny salade man being chased by a crundle. If anyone picks this up, do it; this would be amazing.