Bay 12 Games Forum

Yup. Had multiple people coming and going as they pleased, picking up furniture and the like.

Dismantling the bed kicked him into motion. He's dead now, but he infected someone else.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to kill a werelizard without magma or other people getting infected. Crossbows seem to be barely effective, though part of that is because most of my marksdwarfs run at the sight or aren't carrying bolts in their quivers, despite me having hundreds of bolts available.

So I've started my first game of DF in a year or three. I'm starting in a barren granite wasteland (with a little bit of black-sand desert to the north west). A brook runs through the area, splitting it in two.

The area is a relatively flat valley between two sloping hills to the east and west, neither of which is really suitable for a grand dwarven mining entrance, so...

I'm thinking of trying to make an above-ground fort to protect the entrance to a mine in the center of the area.

I'm just not sure how I secure the brook running through the middle. If I build my fort with the river running through it, can I secure it at all? Or do I have to avoid the brook?

The area is hot, so I doubt it'll ever freeze, so waiting for it to turn to ice and mining parts out to place grates down is not an option.

It's easy enough to just have a dwarf manually operate the pump until the cistern if full and then turn it off.   It only needs to be monitored if there's potential for flooding. The water doesn't get used up very quickly at all, and if you really want to fill the whole thing back up to 7/7 it's easy enough to have another dwarf turn the pump back on.  A complex system of axles and gears and waterwheels/windmills is unnecessary unless you need to make a big pump stack which shouldn't be necessary.

Except that my flow control system is a series of floodgates, not pumps. I shouldn't have to send one dwarf to a lever to open a floodgate and *another* to work a pump, only to discover that one dwarf pulled the lever, but the dwarf that normally operates my pump is sleeping, or got eaten by a vampire, etc. Or the pump operator is pumping away, only the floodgate never got opened and water's not even there to be pumped. The fewer dwarves involved in the operation of my water system, the better.

Also, the cistern should be at least 2 z-levels deep.  If it's only 1 z-level, the water gets laced with mud or something.

I was wondering about this. The last fort I had (v34.01) had a clean water source using this same system, and when I irrigated my first farm, I discovered that there were 'dusting of mud' and 'pile of mud' in the farm area. When I later saw the "Laced with Mud" section right next to the "Stagnant" description, I wondered if this might affect my cistern. Hrm.

Anyone have any more info on this? It kinda sounds like this actually will only be a problem for the exact tile a dwarf gets its water from, so I'd only need to worry about depth directly beneath wells, if I have no other exposed water in the entire water system. Right?

Quote from: Moleculor on February 25, 2012, 05:20:24 pm

From what I understand, if you move Naturally Flowing water in a river to another z-level, chances are it loses its Natural Flow status. I suppose I could move this water 50 tiles off to the side, into the side of a mountain, but I'd rather not.

I have never heard of natural flow before, but water that has flown before always keeps its flowing status

MagmaWiki: Water that naturally flows but changes z-levels loses its natural flow.

Quote from: Moleculor on February 25, 2012, 05:20:24 pm

Well, I'm flushing the water through a grate, a fortification, and another grate before dropping it down several z-levels to the cistern, so securing the water is not too much of a problem. A building-destroyer who chooses to go the water route would probably ruin my day and flood my fortress... hm. I'll have to think about that. While I do...

How is the water route exposed?

Uhm, the only exposure point this water system has is a floodgate-blocked tunnel dug from underground into the side of the river (ok, wait, it's a 'brook', and there's a technical difference, apparently. Dunno if it matters). No channeling from above (yet, maybe ever if I can get this filter made before the river unfreezes). The only way into the tunnel (right now) is if a creature can withstand 7/7 water for a few ticks, and they can smash through the closed floodgate. A few ticks is not much time, so I'm guessing most building destroyers could do it if they didn't mind getting wet. Once I open the floodgate, ideally the whole system will be flooded with water (hopefully clean), and the only way anything is getting in is if it can swim and breathe underwater for the time it'd take for them to swim through forty or so tiles. Then there should be a couple grates around a fortification (~~GFG~~) at the brook end of the piping (before the pump), which I've been told should block any non-vermin from entering the pipe (except maybe swimming building destroyers). Then the pump should block the vermin. Maybe. Dunno, don't care. Vermin aren't too much of a hassle.

Quote from: Moleculor on February 25, 2012, 05:20:24 pm

Is there anything stopping me from just shoving a waterwheel above the inlet channel AND the outlet channel and connecting both to the pump? The initial water-flow in to the pump might start the pump going which MIGHT keep the flow on the inlet side long enough for the flow to hit the other waterwheel?

1. Nope, there's nothing stopping you.
2. The initial water flow should start the pump, unless you use depressurized water (well as long as you use the river this won't be a problem). After this the outlet wheel will keep it self powered.

Well, that would solve everything. I think. I just have to get the design right on the first try. It's "only" been about two or three years since I used a water wheel or pump, so here's hoping.

Quote from: Moleculor on February 25, 2012, 02:31:38 pm

I want to put a pump (or some other de-stagnantization system) between the river and my cistern, which is several z-levels below and several squares east of the river.

*is confused by topic*
*is ignoring everything but the OP*

I give you cookie. Here is snickerdoodle. I luffs joo. Many <3s.

Is absolutely the whole thing stagnant? I've had a couple of rivers suffering from stagnant water, and they've both passed between murky pools at the point where the water starts to stagnate. If some of the water nearer the source is fine, you could run the river under the ground into the area you were going to fill from. (caveat: see below)

The whole thing.

Looking again at the wiki, the source of the stagnation might be my biome? Are there brooks in wetlands? Are those always stagnant? (Turns out this is a brook, not a river, and there's a technical difference. Oops. Didn't realize.)

From there you can build a water reactor attached to the pump you're using to transfer water. To do this you build your water reactor somewhere close to the pump, and then connect the reactor and the pump. The reactor will probably start itself while filling, but if not then it only takes a quick pump from a dwarf to get it running. (Water reactors haven't changed between versions.) In the last version water could only change levels by moving directly up and down, so running power to the cistern pump from below is possible if the axle is beneath the impassable tile. I very much doubt this has changed in .34.

Yeah, I'd been curious about possibly setting up my very first water reactor. I'm just a bit worried about the potential FPS hit.

Incidentally, the test fortress I made to see if reactors still work is stagnant in a small portion of the river close to a single murky pool. Both ends are clean water, it's just those dozen tiles that are stagnant. I suspect that the only reason it's not spreading is that the water is teleporting from the source to the other end of the river, and that if I were to start diverting the water for a cistern the change in flow would spread the stagnancy around. I could probably get around this by pumping the river back into itself upstream of the pool, both with the flow and against it to stop stagnant water from getting into the physically unseparated clean water tiles. Then I could put a wall in.

That went right over my head. These fluid dynamics rules are still tricky to wrap my head around. S'why I felt it necessary to ask about pumps and waterwheels before building some, especially in the inaccessible fashion I'm going to be building them.

Quote from: Moleculor on February 25, 2012, 04:15:45 pm

So is ignoring what I'm asking, forcing me to re-explain multiple things covered in the first post, and then just flat out telling me I'm wrong for wanting to do things a certain way.

This is really heavy derail material.

...says the person who was answering questions I wasn't asking, was offering options that ignored the original topic, etc.

If you cared about keeping the thread *on-topic*, why does everything you offer veer away from the topic?

I was trying to help. You were being rude.

*I'm* being rude? For trying to keep my own thread on topic in the very first page of the topic? Yeah. Sure. Lets call it 'rude'. (Note: That's sarcasm.)

Did you consider that I may have missed what you said?

Then be mature, apologize for missing the original topic, and get back on it.

I never said you were wrong.

I asked for a non-dwarf powered solution. You told me to use dwarf power.

Or that I was trying to tell you an easier alternative to something you had little information on?

Easier is not mentioned in the original topic. Anywhere. Efficient, yes. Self-sustaining is implied, but that's in no way "easy". And I *very specifically* state I don't want it to be exclusively dwarf powered. I even specifically state I want as little dwarven intervention as possible. If I wanted a dwarf manually moving 2800+ units of water by hand for just the initial filling of the cistern, plus more for whenever I want to use water, I'd just set it to dwarf power and be done with it. But that's not what I asked for, is it? (Not sure you'd know, seeing as how you haven't been on topic yet this entire thread.)

To give an example of how I like to do things, the very *very* first well I ever built in Dwarf Fortress was self-regulating so that it would auto-fill from a cistern and automatically shut off the cistern refill when the well had sufficient water to ensure that it would never overflow, all without dwarven intervention or even intervention from myself. I like automated structures.

Quote from: Moleculor on February 25, 2012, 04:15:45 pm

Same question for you, though a bit broader: Is this in any way protected from things that would normally destroy buildings?

You can make the above system completely underground if that's what you mean.

From what I understand, if you move Naturally Flowing water in a river to another z-level, chances are it loses its Natural Flow status. I suppose I could move this water 50 tiles off to the side, into the side of a mountain, but I'd rather not.

To make a completely secure water source, you either have to run the pump manually, or use a water wheel.  You then have to make sure nothing can get at either the pump or the water wheel.  The pump can easily be protected by surrounding it with walls and having a floor grate on the inlet side of the pump where it's drawing water from the river.  The water wheel is tricky, since it needs to be built over open water and can be attacked by something in the water.  You might be able to get away with building the waterwheel over a sealed basin, pumping some water into the basin manually and then hoping that the horribly buggy code that DF uses to tell if water is moving doesn't notice that the water isn't going anywhere.

Well, I'm flushing the water through a grate, a fortification, and another grate before dropping it down several z-levels to the cistern, so securing the water is not too much of a problem. A building-destroyer who chooses to go the water route would probably ruin my day and flood my fortress... hm. I'll have to think about that. While I do...

Is there anything stopping me from just shoving a waterwheel above the inlet channel AND the outlet channel and connecting both to the pump? The initial water-flow in to the pump might start the pump going which MIGHT keep the flow on the inlet side long enough for the flow to hit the other waterwheel? Maybe? Confirm/deny? Or is the shut-off from the power of the waterwheel's loss of flow so fast that it would only work one time, and never again? Or might end up in a state where the inlet is completely full (and thus not-flowing) and the outlet is dry (and thus also not flowing).

I'm talking about building an underground waterwheel.

Yeah, I managed to figure that out about twenty minutes too slowly.

Water which is connected to a river, even if it's not a part of the original rivercourse, even if it has been diverted some distance into a dead end, will still power waterwheels. I just realized you might have water pressure problems if you divert the water underground before using it to power a waterwheel. However you can always build the waterwheel and pump at the same level as the river, and if that's on the surface, just enclose them with walls and a roof.

I am definitely curious about trying this out, especially just shoving a walls/floors around the whole construction and saying "VOILA!"

I am starting to realize why I don't understand your drawings though... I don't have that font on my computer, so they're not mono-spaced.

I'm beginning to think I should just save-scum, experiment, and see what works. I've been playing Dwarf Fortress since the 2D era, and I've never seen a clown. 3D? Never been past the first caverns. I keep getting distracted, or the occasional "I don't know how to use civilian alerts!"-esque problem crops up.

It's the easiest way and it doesn't require much Dwarf attention at all unless you have to constantly refill it, which won't be a problem if you make it sufficiently large.

So in other words you're saying "I don't want to answer your question, here's an entirely different answer to a different question you didn't ask".

Gee. Thanks.

Pump one z lvl up and into your cistern. Easiest way to

And the pump operates... how? This is my question.

Do I put water wheels both before and after it? Will that work? Will it break? Is there a chance that once everything fills up, everything stops and won't start up again, ever?

I have a lovely river running through my dwarven valley. Sadly, it apparently touches a murky pool somewhere in the area, because the entire thing is marked as 'Stagnant' despite being very much a flowing body of water.

I'm trying to reroute the water from the river to an underground cistern I've built. Unfortunately, I noticed the river was stagnant AFTER I'd spent all the time planning, carving out the cistern, and clearing it, so I don't have a lot of room to build in (though I do have multiple Z-levels, so I think that qualifies as "has enough room to do whatever is needed").

I hear that using a pump will de-stagnate water. How do I build one that requires little to no (preferably no) interaction from dwarves to start up, will run on its own, and be secure (i.e. no mice, goblins, eagles, etc crawling into my pump-works or cistern)?

EDIT: Ok, apparently I wasn't very clear.

My cistern is *empty*, and has never contained water.

I want to put a pump (or some other de-stagnantization system) between the river and my cistern, which is several z-levels below and several squares east of the river.