Bay 12 Games Forum

A pick is a weapon.  Some players prefer to have their military equipped with picks, so that they can become miners in their off time.  You can get legendary miners by having military armed with picks fight weak captured things or danger room, and in reverse, you can quickly armor your miners and have a militia.

Armouring miners helps if they meet cavern residents, but there are issues with assigning picks to dwarves with the mining labour attached.

Fun Fact: Normal soldiers become Heroes when they reach level 9 in a given weapon skill, and cannot be given civilian duties and don't really leave the military.  Pick-equipped soldiers will not become heroes, and can therefore become a legendary+5 army with civilian duties included.

In the current version of Dwarf Fortress, you can assign civilian duties to heroes, but they will get a bad thought about it. If you still play 40d though, this looks like a good way to allow high level soldiers to do civilian jobs.

Yep, it's 100% doable. In fact, you don't even need pumps, you can sometimes do it with a 1-tile hole designated as a pond and some buckets (it doesn't always seem to work).

I haven't tried filling reactors with buckets yet, but it would help to have a reactor pool at 7/7 producing power. Of course, when you have a reactor producing 10,000 units of power the 10 units of power for the pump are not going to matter unless you're using up nearly all of it. All of this testing has been done "Above Ground" so far, so I am going to do some testing underground.

Buckets may work because they "create" a 1/7 tile of water in the tile being filled a bit like pumps, aquifers, and rivers. I have actually tried turning off a pump system before and the flow seemed to remain.

Regarding the "brook makes all tiles flow," that may be true, but you definitely don't need a brook/river/etc to make the exploit work. Try it and see!

When I mentioned brooks and flow I meant they don't get gen'd through flow-stopping bodies of water (as far as I know). They don't seem to get gen'd in any world tile with a river or lake either.

If people dwarves want power generated without windmills on embarks without flowing water, they seem go for the dwarven water reactor. If the 7/7flow reactor works, it will be more effective for powering 8-wide magma pumpstacks, since 12 or so waterwheels should be sufficient to power one over 100 z-levels, including power conduits, and that will fit in a 5x14 space over 2 z-levels.

New lurker here. I've been doing some flow science and engineering with pumps and rivers:

If you pump water into a reservoir using a pump, the water will remain flowing after the reservoir reaches 7/7. This flow may remain after the pump has been switched off (verify?). The water flows in all directions. Since the water is at 7/7 everywhere, the reactor does not require refilling every now and then. This looks like the same thing that causes water from aquifers and rivers to be permanently flowing. I also know water moats connected to a river will have flow. The same flow rules should apply to magma (pumps only).

So far I built reactors pumping from a brook and a murky pool into reactors, with enough water feeding the pump to fill the reactor completely to 7/7.

I've Spoiler'd some reactor designs that worked for me.