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[Spatulor]

So, my current fort has the advantage of a volcano, and the twinned and complementary disadvantages of no river, and long freezing winters. Anytime I get dwarves with wounds that take a long time to heal, they die of dehydration when all the surface pools are frozen solid, and it's getting a little old. Normally I'd have an underground reservoir with wells.
I'm currently searching for the caverns in hope of an underground river, or at least a sizeable lake, but failing that, what other options do I have? Ideas are very welcome, I'm stumped.

[pisskop]

Drain a murky pool.  Depending on how far away you are you can make a cistern that's better than nothing.

What I do with murky pool cisterns is to build a floodgate and drain the pool.  Then I wall off the inside (leaving the floodgate outside).  then I add another floodgate in case the first one gets destroyed somehow.

So, a quick dingy:

D77777777D_FWFWF______C
DDDDDDDDDGGGGGGGGGGG_____
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG_____

7 = water
D = damp wall
F = floodgate
G = ground
_ = floor (implied ceiling)
W = constructed wall
*C = channel*

You can repeatedly drain murky pools, and if your well water is two z-levels full of water you don't get mud.

As long as the water thaws at least some of the time.

[Spatulor]

That'll probably work. The murky pools refill themselves, then?

[pisskop]

When it rains.  But if its frozen most of the year . . .

[Spatulor]

it's frozen maybe a little over half the year, maybe a little less than 2/3rds. I ususally get some rain every year, if not a lot. Setting up my cistern and floodgates now.

[Spatulor]

Thanks for the help, by the way.

[pisskop]

Yuppers, welcome

[Hurkyl]

Freezing gives you a nice advantage: if you can just drain *half* of the pool (or even better, five sevenths), then it instantly refills when the pools refreeze.

Even if this exploit is not your intent, a drained pool will still try to evaporate when its collecting rainwater, so it can be a good idea to only partially drain the pools even ignoring the exploit.

I keep envisioning an automated waterworks that will automatically open a drain when a murky pool fills up into a cistern  (and automatically close as the pool drains), but set up in a way that the whole pool won't empty. And when that gets filled, it would automatically get drained into a larger reservoir, and maybe even further than that.

(the point of the stages is to ensure that each reservoir contains enough water so that when it dumps into the next larger reservoir, there's enough water to skip past the point where it would just evaporate away)

[pisskop]

pressure plates placed underground.  a lever hooked up as backup if the triggers somehow cross.  I do it for hospital 'dwarven tubs'.

[slothen]

dig into some cavern layers.  It'll be a long trip to get buckets from the well, but dwarfs should leave them in the hospital filled with water, which means you'll get 10 drinks.  Also if you dig out a layer underneath the frozen ice and then fill that layer with magma, so that only a floor separates the magma from the ice, then the ice should melt and be drinkable.

[Spatulor]

hm. the idea of only partially draining the pool sounds interesting, but I've currently got the pool hooked directly a a cistern much larger than itself - and I'm not very adept with water pressure, pressure plates and such. as soon as urist gets off his ass and hooks the lever to the floodgate, I'll open it up. hopefully I can close it in time so the pool isn't too empty - refilling the pool every time it freezes would be convenient, and probably much faster than waiting for rain.

Maybe I can channel some magma underneath one of the pools and keep it thawed all winter. I don't need much water, so a small pool should do the trick.

edit: as for caverns, either there's only one cavern layer just above the magma sea, of I've managed to miss the other layers. I'm doing some exploratory mining, but nothing yet, so surface water is all I have at the moment.

[slothen]

shouldn't have to bother with pressure or floodgates when draining a pool.  dig a 1 tile wide hole to where you want the water, make sure the hole is large enough and 2 levels deep (count the squares). Then dig in well room above.

[Deathworks]

Dear Spatulor,

My usual strategy when using ponds for filling my cisterns is to use a segmented draining system. That is, besides the flood gate at the pool and a safety flood gate at the top of the cistern, I also placed flood gates regularly in between them, so that each segment is smaller than the pond. Then, I simply open the pond gate while the others are all closed. The first segment takes in part of the pond water, but can't empty it. Close the pond flood gate, and then, depending on the design, you may immediately open the following gate(s) to pass the water on. If your design does not allow for that, you can wait for the pool to refill, open the pool gate and the first internal gate and have two sections of the pipe flooded while the pool remains stable.

Yours,
Deathworks

[Spatulor]

I've basically set up a very simple segmented system, like the one you've described. two floodgates let water flow into a small reservoir, which closes itself off before opening to the main cistern. It'll take several loads - by which i mean years - to fill the cistern I've got dug out, but that's fine, I don't use much water.

[Brilliand]

I remember spending quite a bit of time in previous fortresses expanding murky pools to double the water supply every year.  After expanding a murky pool (in a sometimes-frozen biome) to a sufficiently large square, I could channel out a water conduit during the winter that would then fill up my cistern the next summer - no need for floodgates or mechanisms, so long as the cistern isn't large enough to completely drain the pool (I would often connect most of the pool in my embark together underground to safeguard against this).

Note that smoothing the top of a frozen pool will cause it to melt into 8/7 water instead of 7/7 (okay, make that 1/7 water on the next z-level up), which is good both for training engravers and multiplying water faster.