Bay 12 Games Forum

Have you (or anyone else) tested that? We know that wooden parts in pumps take heat damage just by being next to magma (without being submerged in it - if they are it's instant burn instead of slow damage over time), so I wouldn't say that wooden axles don't have the same problem without testing it (it'd be logical for them to take damage. Then again, DF isn't always the most logical). Non-magma-safe but fire-safe parts don't have that problem, so unless there's magma actually in the same tile, it would hold without problem.

I tried to perform an experiment on this, but I had a damnable time just trying to get wooden pumps to ignite. The conditions under which they will or won't burn aren't well-understood.
I'd like to see an experiment that runs a wooden pump right into the input of a magma-safe pump, so magma is never left next to the wood pump; if it burns, then wooden pumps are damaged by the act of pumping magma rather than the state of being adjacent to magma. You could also run magma up against the back of a dummy wooden pump that isn't actually being used for pumping. Closed wooden doors shouldn't have a problem, either. (Although I've seen unlocked stone doors appear to spontaneously open while exposed to magma - this also needs further investigation)

Anyway, the thing is, axles don't have a solid tile like screw pumps, so it's not possible to put an axle next to magma without putting it in a place where the magma can flow onto and submerge it.

I've allowed wooden axles to contact pumps that are actively engaged in magma pumping many times with no ill effects, so I'm inclined to call it safe until someone publishes an experiment showing otherwise.

Wouldn't be surprising. Local diffusion of water does tend to slosh back and forth a bit.

Also, fire doesn't burn hot enough to melt things. You need to use magma directly for that.

edited for being wrong, see below

That's going to flood your fort with magma. The magma will come up to the level of the screw pump.

If you get rid of the pump, it won't flood you, but it will fill slowly. Remove the last two tiles of channel designations and get an engraver down there with a staircase; then carve a fortification in the 2nd tile next to the magma, evacuate the engraver, channel the last wall to admit magma from the pipe, and build a floor over that channel. The fortification will keep imps out.
If you move the pump and its intake channel down one level, that will also work nicely. In that case, put a grate over the intake channel to obstruct imps.

Now, about your other questions.

Does magma move diagonally at the same speed as orthogonally?
Yes. Magma moving on its own power - local diffusion - will move any direction at the same speed. However, pumps will teleport magma only along orthogonal paths, so an orthogonal pump-fed channel will fill more quickly than a diagonal one (which will have almost no improvement over a channel without a pump).

Where should I put grates and floodgates, can I make them out of normal stone or glass?
Anything that is not submerged in magma can be made of any material. (Except that wooden screw pumps will catch fire.)
Stone will melt if submerged; glass will be fine. Remember that you need magma-safe mechanisms for anything that will be submerged in magma, because the mechanisms will otherwise melt and cause the building to deconstruct.
However, the design you're showing really has no reason to use a door or floodgate - and, incidentally, doors are better for almost every purpose. Floodgates are pretty much vestigial remnants from the 2D version.

Is there any danger to walking over a magma channel on a grate?
Not in the least.

if a magma workshop is over a magma tile but the magma tile is covered by a grate will the workshop function?
That situation is impossible. You can't build two buildings (a grate and a workshop) in the same tile.

Yeah, the middle pumps aren't really needed, just the ones at the end.
Both the pump train and a simple 1-wide tunnel have the same efficiency for how much magma ends up being needed to fill the tunnel, and the main limit on the speed of your magma system is how fast the magma flows underneath your intake pump, so I would expect the tunnel to work at exactly the same speed as well as being far more power efficient.

You can produce quarry bush leaves roasts far, far faster than dwarves eat them. If you made a giant quarry bush plantation and ran the fort making roasts until all of the farmers died of old age, you'd have enough roasts to feed the subsequent generations for a damn long time. Maybe not actually forever, but a longer time than you're going to spend letting the game run.
You might even be able to make it run on repeat without having to queue up a million work orders, if you crunch all the numbers for how fast a farm plot will produce bushes, how fast a legendary thresher will process bushes, and how fast a legendary cook will roast leaves, and balance your farm sizes/workshop numbers so that you grow enough bushes to keep your thresher and cook working through the winter. You could do biscuits instead of roasts to slow down the cook so he never runs out of supplies and cancels the job. You could also put extra farmer shops and kitchens behind sealed doors, and build an elaborate timing mechanism to shut down the old workshops (in case they were still running) and open up new ones (with repeating jobs queued before you set the fort on its own) every few years. That way if there's some disaster where a job cancels, the dwarves can live on their massive food pile until the next workshop opens.

Back in February I discovered ( http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31244 ) that a flammable object in a magma-safe bin can be submerged in magma to ignite the object, which is then shielded by the bin from any extinguishment by water. This has become famous because it was quickly recognized as an easy way to drain an ocean and is a cool trick in general.

It has become immortalized in popular imagination as the "lignite block in an iron bin" trick, and I'm posting just to clarify that although I happened to be playing around with a lignite block at the time (it was an experiment to see if you could melt blocks and then cool them into usable stones, which would make the blocks caravans bring useful, but it didn't work), any long-burning object will do. (Wood and cloth catch fire, but burn away too quickly to be useful)

If your caravan brings lignite or b-coal blocks, by all means use them, since they're no good for anything else.
But if you have lignite (or b-coal), please don't think it's the only thing you can do this with and carve it into blocks; you can smelt it to get two (or three) blocks of coke, each of which is just as good for your pyromaniacal schemes. Charcoal works too, so you can piss off the mer-people and the elves.
Graphite should be even better for this, if you happen to have it, because it doesn't have any economic use (steelmaking) -- though I haven't tried.

Today I had the revelation that there's no reason this should even need to be done with a block. It could probably be any item made out of a long-burning material that can be stockpiled in a bin.
I hypothesize that if you really wanted to drain the ocean in style, you could probably use a diamond.
But the main point of this realization is that you ought to be able to do it with finished goods, too. Since you get three mugs for every one unit of stone, the most efficient way to fuel burning bins might be to make graphite mugs. You could also, if pressed into wasting lignite, carve that into mugs (no point with b-coal, since it makes three cokes).

I haven't tried that, but someone should; if it works, then this really ought to be thought of as the "graphite mug in a bin trick", with lignite recognized as a last-resort substitute -- unless, of course, you get the otherwise-useless blocks from a caravan.

No, the only fire emergency in that fort happened before the sprinkler system was built and was the inspiration for its construction. Then the fort died in a tantrum spiral because I had, on the other hand, been extensively using the child sprinkler system I built for the magma vent.