Bay 12 Games Forum

Another mining idea! Sorry if these are getting annoying. I have read some of the others. This idea doesn't quite make it easier or faster to get rid of leftover stone, though it does give some more options, depending on preference.

Other stone management and mining threads for supplemental readings and to save someone the trouble of replying with it later 
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On to my ideas...

3 ways to designate natural walls to be removed:

Dig: Similar to the current mining designation. The fastest way to carve out tunnels and rooms, although this method will leave boulders (that block building!) and stones, that will need to be cleared out. Mining skill will increase speed.

Mine: This designation will only work on Ores and Gems, and not rocks and sand. Much slower than digging, but a higher chance to leave behind useable ores and gems. Again, Mining skill increases speed. This would be nice also in that ore veins are generally NOT rectangular in shape, and would make designating those veins after revealing them via exploratory mining much quicker. When a miner runs into stone that is not minable, that tile will automatically be undesignated.

Quarry: This designation works on stones. Again much slower than digging, but will leave behind (stackable!) blocks of stone. People who don't like cleaning up after themselves might like this idea, as the product can be shoved into bins. A slower process, but a single tile may possibly yield more than one block. Great for megaconstructions. Quarry out a bunch of blocks, pack them up into bins, and ship them off to the construction location. Possibly have Masons take this job instead of Miners? Mining skill would, once again, simply increase speed. Mason skill could increase the chance to drop a block, or multiple blocks even.

I know none of this really addresses the matter of having a lot of leftover debris to deal with. The problem currently is that debris is a pain. It doesn't make sense to dig out half a mountain with all the waste pulverized into dust somehow by one inexperienced miner (of course the legendary one leaves a TON for you to clean up), or to have a 1 tile dump with a mountain's worth of stone in it. This leads me to my final suggestion, which I was surprised to have nothing show up when I searched for it.

*EDIT* Never mind, I realized I was only searching within the thread that was then open. No wonder there were no results -.-a I KNEW someone had to have thought of it before =P */EDIT*

TNT or Dynamite: A mechanism/trap/building that can be triggered by all sorts of triggers, that would also allow for boatloads of Fun. Something modest.. like destroying a 3x3x3 area around the barrel, and randomly a little bit more? (Oops. Sorry about your pets. Didn't expect the explosion to be THAT big...) Would cause tons of dust, maybe a cave-in or two, and the removal of walls, boulders, stone (or send it flying a bit at least), goblins, supports, cats, dwarfs, err... yeah. Bring a ton on embarkation! Get your fortress expanded in a snap! Deliver a few barrels of these to your friendly neighborhood goblin tower's (new) basement, and tell them to check out your gift! Make sure they bring some torches, its dark down there...

I don't know how it would be made, or if dwarfs have the know-how to do so. Maybe you can only get it from trading with humans...

Don't have to worry about firearms, since even if you have explosives a gun would still be far off. Fireworks on the other hand... happy thoughts? Reveal ambushers? Invite the vile forces of darkness to gather?? Medical dwarf training for removing shrapenel? Dwarfs DO like making everything out of stone...

Hope you had a nice read, and hope some of the ideas were new enough to warrant a new thread. Otherwise sorry for repeating what was probably mentioned before somewhere and I didn't find it.

I'm having trouble draining out my waterfall into a brook.

I have an aquifer on the same level as my main fortress. I have the water falling down through grates into my basement, and down again into a channel. The basement is on the same level as the surface of the brook, and the channel is on the level with the brook's water. The channel goes out and connects to the brook. I built this system and everything seemed to be groovy for a while, then later my basement started getting flooded! Eventually the water filled up and started flowing into my main floor, where my unsuspecting lazy dwarves who were sleeping got a shower every time they tried to get out of their bedrooms, then starved after a while. Most of them got really good at swimming though. The dwarf I named after myself locked himself into the throne room with some food and a couple of barrels of ale, then went insane after some time. Fun.

I went back and tried again. This time, I walled off the waterfall area in my basement, and built diagonal walls in the channel to depressurize it. It worked in that my basement no longer got flooded. Unfortunately, the walled off area just filled up with water, back up to the level of the aquifer. No more waterfall. No fun either, since I installed doors at the entrance to the aquifer chamber. Sadness.

Third time I tried experimenting by knocking out the wall in my basement next to the brook. Previously, I only had a drain exit on the channel level with the water in the book. Once again, I let my basement flood. This time though, when the water got out over the surface of the brook, it seemed to muddy the tile, fall in the brook and dissapear. Great! But my basement still eventually filled to 7/7 water, and then back up to the same level as the aquifer, and once again no more waterfall.

It seems like its impossible to make an artificial waterfall, as the area under the waterfall will always eventually fill up to the source of the water. Am I missing something or doing something wrong?? Is my setup impossible to do unless my waterfall is directly on top of the brook?