Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Name Lips]

I remember once starting a fort with a big cliff and waterfall on the surface. It was fun building my entrance halfway up the waterfall, so everybody entering or leaving got a refreshing spray of mist.

Is there a way to find such places before I embark? Or just trial and error until I get one?

[acetech09]

When embarking on a river, use the hill detector and see if there are sheer cliffs over the river. good chance there's a waterfall.

[Ross Vernal]

Build a pump stack and make your own.

[Poindexterity]

almost any time 2 rivers connect, there will be a waterfall.

[Urist Da Vinci]

When embarking on a river, use the hill detector and see if there are sheer cliffs over the river. good chance there's a waterfall.

To elaborate, when you are selecting a site to embark at, you can hit the tab key to change the display. One of the views shows sharp changes in elevation, which usually indicate a cliff and waterfall if a river is passing through the tile.

[krenshala]

There are two views I use to determine if there is a waterfall.  One is the general elevation map (solid blocks of varying colors that indicate relative ground height), the second is the height-change map (numbers, and a few special chars, that show how much the elevation changes in that particular embark tile).  A spot that has a large height-change and a river/stream running through it might have a waterfall.  If the path of the river changes suddenly in teh general elevation map at the same spot (say, from light grey to brown) it indicates a sudden drop of elevation.

The game doesn't have rivers slowly change altitude.  They flow level, or go over waterfalls.  The only exception is player created whitewater (which is something I want to do now ... too bad I just started a new fort that has the wrong terrain for this idea).

[Abraxis]

With the pheobus pack, I have just noticed that the blue door symbol on rivers in the region map on the embark screen indicates a waterfall  (at least every one I've checked so far has been).  They're all enormous too, averaging at 8+ cliff rating.

[Urist Mc U-man stabber]

Usually if you find a river coming off a mountain and follow it till it crosses with another river you get a pretty spectacular waterfall. Use the relative elevation window on the embark screen and look for a sharp change in color to the next square and that's your waterfall

[SixOfSpades]

Or go the alternate route of making your own waterfalls by finding a site where a river (or brook) is at the TOP of a cliff/slope, and simply carving a new bed for it. You will have drainage problems, however, if there isn't a river/lake for it to flow into at the bottom . . . you may have to use the "carve fortifications into the edge of the map" trick to create an outlet for all the water.

On a related note, I've heard that man(dwarf)-made waterfalls eat up way more FPS than naturally-occurring ones. Is there any truth to this?

[Vehudur]

Or go the alternate route of making your own waterfalls by finding a site where a river (or brook) is at the TOP of a cliff/slope, and simply carving a new bed for it. You will have drainage problems, however, if there isn't a river/lake for it to flow into at the bottom . . . you may have to use the "carve fortifications into the edge of the map" trick to create an outlet for all the water.

On a related note, I've heard that man(dwarf)-made waterfalls eat up way more FPS than naturally-occurring ones. Is there any truth to this?

Yes.  But it's because dwarf-made waterfalls are generally very inefficient in regards to fluid movement, whereas natural ones are more efficient.  If you build an efficient waterfall there is little to no additional impact.

[Armeleon]

As I understand it, Terrain in Dwarf fortress is generated in a series of steppes with several Z levels between each steppe. This is then smoothed on terrain (generating hills, and mountains, etc.) but is not smoothed for rivers, generating waterfalls whenever the water wants to decrease it's elevation. There is no such thing as a 'sloping' river. To find these places where water changes elevation, all you have to do is export the topographical map from legends mode and look how the color changes in the rivers.

DO THIS:

1: Export a height map from legends respecting water level
2: Open it with something like paint.
3: Get the paint bucket and click on one of the rivers to paint it black or red or something. It will only color in one little section. where the color starts and stops there will be a waterfall.
4. Find the same spot on the map when embarking in fortress mode.

It's always worked for me, hopefully it will work for you

[daggaz]

Speaking of the topographical function in the site finder, is there any way to edit the colors it uses as a display?  I have no idea what Toady was thinking, but the overlapping color scale he chose (mine at least, is various shades of blue and grey and brown, and they OVERLAP) makes it nearly impossible to discern many of the elevations.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I was just thinking about this the other day.
Really wish in the FIND options there was a 'Waterfall' option.

I cannot tell you the amount of times it SHOWS A river going out from a High Level to a low level area.
Only to find it is simply cutting through the mountain instead of dropping off the end.