Everyone is overcomplicating this. You can gather sand from a floor or staircase. If you do standard twinslit to get through there should be a natural sand floor or staircase remaining. If you went around, then punch a staircase through from below and gather sand from the staircase.
Everyone is still overcomplicating things. […]
Actually, after being reminded that aquifers don't spawn water diagonally (I keep forgetting that because they make surrounding tiles damp, even diagonally, but not on level below, so there's a little lack of logic there) I found that even a less complicated thing would be removing these diagonal tiles. Like this:
Green tiles are safe to remove. I removed them, and all revealed aquifer tiles happened to be sand. So it created 14 sand-bearing tiles visible on picture, plus around the same number beyond. Also maybe I should have mentioned it earlier, but these two flooded up-staircases (blue 7s at picture) are also sand, so if not the stairs, the orange tile could also be removed safely.
As I mentioned in the first post, sand can be collected diagonally. And it's not important what's on the tile of collection zone - it can be grass, cave wheat, floor, grate, hatch, whatever. As long as the sand pillar stands it will give sand to the zone. The zone doesn't even have to cover the sand pillar/tile.
I have a simple method if you don't mind risking a miner or two.
I like this method because it takes almost no resources or time to do.
Thanks for this method and earlier ones! I don't mind risking miners, especially those who already fulfilled their duty and created artefacts
I'm going to make it anyway, somewhere near middle of the aquifer, to improve arsenal of my methods for future endeavours.