After a little trial and error, and some drowned dwarves, and one encased in cooling magma, my dwarves developed an ingenious method for using magma vents to penetrate below aquifers - no pumping involved. I'm certain others have figured this out, but if you've been put off by aquifer locations in the past, and want a good method for building under them....read on.
The first step is to find a safe location in the igneous below the aquifer next to a magma vent, which is *directly* below magma (the alternating size of magma z-levels makes this possible). Keep tracking upwards through the aquifer levels. Just above the highest aquifer level, channel a nice big pool of magma from the vent and then create a channel one level above to a water supply. Little ponds work well. The pond water flows over the magma, turning it to obsidian. Dig down through the obsidian, channel to get a magma pool, drain another small pond into the pool to create obsidian, and so on. You'll need to do this a few times to finally get below the aquifer, but should be able to get it down well before the autumn trade caravan arrives.
I don't recommend using a large or flowing body of water as a water supply for this, or using the aquifer water in any way. In the first case, you run into trouble controlling the amount of water - since you don't want that much at any given stage. In the second case, the unending supply of aquifer water will stymie the plan - in either case, you'll usually have no rocks for building floodgate controls, though I suppose you could use obsidian you make yourself. Hmm...next time I'll try using aquifer water - that sounds cool. But the way I did it didn't require any floodgates.
At any rate, I just nabbed my anvil from the caravan and am going to start utilizing that magma. I think this is a great technique for penetrating an aquifer, as it makes it relatively easy to find a good fortress site on any map. Just make sure one of your dwarves has some decent civil engineering skills.
Anyone have suggestions or ways to improve the process?
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Topic: Penetrating aquifers with magma - some tips (Read 952 times)