Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm not entirely certain this works, but you could try digging out more aquifer walls to get more water being added. You'll have to channel it carefully from above, but if you make a large-ish space with lots of area adjacent to aquifer walls, and then run that water through a narrow tunnel which houses your waterwheels, out to the area where you are having it run off the map, I think you'll get more reliable flow that way.

If you loaded from an auto-saved file at some point, all saves will take the name of that file you loaded from. For example, if you loaded from Region2-Spr-93, your new auto-save files will take the form Region2-Spr-93-Season-year. Your saves will probably take the form of Region-Spr-93 (for example).

If this confuses you and you really need to load from autosaves due to excessive fun, I recommend closing DF, then changing the name of the appropriate directory (once you find it's name by loading it) in [dwarf fortress directory]\data\save\ to something else to make it a little clearer. This doesn't cause any problems, that I am aware of anyway, because all world data is stored in each save directory.

This confused me a bit as well, before I started renaming when forced to load an autosave.

Ah, I see... There is a gear in the example for a normal waterwheel above, and another one of those ambiguous O symbols. Very confusing. Well, this shouldn't be an issue anymore, and I learned that you can't place a pump on top of a gear mechanism, unlike with a windmill, which helps I guess.

So, I've been attempting to get my dwarven water reactor(s) up and running. I've tried almost everything at this point, going exactly off the design on Magmawiki. No matter what I do, I can't get a dwarf to start pumping and start the reaction. Here are things I have tried unsuccessfully, many of which I have tried in combinations:

1. Removing one or both of the waterwheels.
2. Using both wood and stone/metal components for the pumps.
3. Training pump operator on some of my dwarfs in case the combined system provides too much "resistance".
4. Multiple pumps connected to the chain to try to split the workload (this does not seem to be how these work as the extra pumps just get spun without any added benefit and the main pumps sit and collect dust).
5. Building extra floors after removing waterwheels to ensure pathing issues aren't the culprit.

Since none of these work, I have to start asking myself : is this design really correct? What is the purpose of the gear on the lowest Z-level? All it seems to do is make it impossible to build a pump on top of it, adding a complication to the building process. It doesn't seem to actually connect to anything. The water wheels should connect directly to the pump, in theory. Is this gear the thing that is throwing me off?

Elf sympathizers! to the magma with them!!

I'm embarked on a volcano, and at the moment the only thing that's holding the volcano in is floodgates, so that can be easily arranged.

I didn't think it was, but apparently it's a pathing issue. And the wiki made it sound so easy... Gonna have to come at this differently.

Even with the pump operator profession activated on many, I'm having trouble getting my dwarves to show up to pump manually to start my reactors. Despite 40-some dwarves, none of them have any pump operator skill, but I didn't think it was really required. Anyone have suggestions?

Well, you can either abandon and reclaim, or try to hold out till a caravan comes around.

I've started a similar fortress, except I have no flux at all, a warmer area, only salt water lakes, and savage surroundings. The only entrance to my fort is a drawbridge one Z level higher than the volcano's lip, and I've dug out everything else around the ramped entrance and installed a half a dozen floodgates in such a way that opening them will flood pretty much everything on the volcano (except my fortress) with lava. This is in addition to the hopefully lava-proof traps.