Bay 12 Games Forum

I use a pair of blue peafowls, a pair of alpacas, a bunch of cats, and I modded those pesky unicorns to be [PET] and [TRAINABLE]. However, they do graze like lunatics, so I am hoping now for a male grizzly bear from the elves. They already provided me with a female one.

"Liontown" is the name. The ground is called "The Palace of Apes".

Both are the result of the random name generator.

You can't have flooding accidents with booze. Enough said.

Therefore, to construct a working cistern...

1. Dig out a room
2. Give it a constructed floor and constructed walls
3. Pump in water through a screw pump

Nope, you are mistaken. This is how I constructed the cistern from the bottom of the ocean near the other lower levels of the ocean. The result was salty water. Nothing did go wrong during the construction of the pump, there were no flooding accidents, and all the floors and walls were constructed.

On the other hand, I am quite confident that pumping into the z-level above the ocean's surface would result in clean water, without the hassle of having to construct a cistern.

I get the impression that everyone is spreading our urban myths here without apparently actually haven't done any constructions like this themselves.



Edit:

Just tried it. Ayup, no constructed walls necessary. What's more: The ocean waves did get into the little 2x2 room past the screwpump before my architect was finally done constructing it.

According to the "if salty water ever touches anything, the tile is poisoned for ever!" myth, this shouldn't be a water source now. However, it is.

Proof in the image in the spoiler:

I have some experience with salt water, but I usually end up on a salty aquifer. In these cases, all you need to do is to hollow out a space in the z-level above the aquifer, poke a hole into that from above, install a screw pump, and your clean fresh water is ready to go. No constructed walls necessary at all.

Your explanation also can't explain why cavern water below an ocean is considered to be fresh instead of salty, so there must be something more to it than just the constructed walls.

My dwarves selected a nice spot near another ocean, so the water is salty. The ocean is about 6 z-levels deep.

Well, since there is no aquifer, or since I was incapable to find it, I decided that the ocean would be my source of water for the plumbing. I pierced it with a fortification in its lowest level, depressurized it and filled a 7x7 room with constructed walls and constructed floors.

From there, I pumped the water one z-level up, into another 7x7 room with constructed walls and constructed floors.

The water does not touch any original surface anywhere. Even the pump sits on constructed floor tiles.

When I pierced my reservoir (the one filled with clean fresh pumped water... or so I thought) from above for the construction of a well, I found that the water was still salty. This room was of course still below the ocean's surface, so perhaps the z-level just "poisons" all of the water?


I then build a little reservoir up on the surface. It's feeding from a murky pool, and this water is desalinated completely and perfectly. This is above the ocean, of course.


I wonder now if it might be a total waste of time to drain some more water from the ocean, this time down a couple of z-levels, depressurize it, and have another go at the desalination. Because from my experience with oceans, the cavern water usually counts as non-salty, even if it's right below the ocean. This may be caused by the large vertical distance between the caverns and the ocean.


Before you suggest that I should use the cavern water... I don't have any on the map. There are just shrubs, moss, trees and spider webs.

Your farms are in z=151. Go to z=150, dig a way to the area above your designated farming area. Channel out a floor tile on top of one of the rooms where you want to farm.

Make an activity zone over the channeled tile. i-p. "P" to change the settings. "f" for "is a pond, not full yet". Dwarves will now fill a bucket with water from your water zone (you may need to declare your murky pool as a water zone for this to work (i-w)), and pour water through the hole onto your farming ground.

This will create mud, allowing you to farm on the gneiss and other surfaces.

Now, I don't know how huge you made these farming rooms. A 10x10 room or bigger will take a while to be muddied completely. But you should already be able to create your first small farming plots quite quickly.


What's important is that you don't expose tiles to the light in this fashion, because then the farming plots become confused about whether they're aboveground or subterranean.