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[SlyStalker]

Hello all,
I'm having problems locating the magma sea and magma pools. How far down do I have to dig down to reach those?

[StagnantSoul]

As far down as your map goes, basically.

[SlyStalker]

So the magma sea is a guarantee find if I dig down enough? What about pools?

[StagnantSoul]

Pools aren't guaranteed, and vary wildly.

[SlyStalker]

So if I do find the magma sea, how would I go about using it? Is there a space between magma and the roof of the magma sea? If not, would using magma-safe pumps be a good idea?

[Acthrelion]

Depends.

If you can locate some magma pipes, you can tunnel from the side and you don't need a pump.
Most of the time the magma sea surface is not flat, means not in one z-lvl. Just find a suitable place for some workshops and dig in the sea from a side. And you don't need to pump it. It is also easier to seal it.


Do yourself a favor and don't ever forget to seal your way to the magma sea! Best done with bridges.

[SlyStalker]

What do you mean by seal? With water?

[PatrikLundell]

You CAN seal magma with water (turning magma into obsidian), but it's a lot of work.

To seal the way to anything (magma, water, caves, upper exterior environment, etc), you typically use raising drawbridges (for magma, all the material in the bridge has to be magma safe, i.e. all stones/metal/wood it's made of, as well as the mechanism(s) inside it use to control it).
To get at the magma, dig a suitable tunnel up to, but not into the magma source (i.e. one tile left). Then build a bridge to control the access to the magma once the source is breached (I usually use two bridges spaced to get an airlock type structure, but that's not necessary). Once the bridges are set up (and tested: it's far too easy to accidentally create a retracting bridge rather than a raising one!), breach the magma source. That can be done in two ways:
either have a miner just dig out the last tile, which carries the risk of the dwarf being ignited by magma, or have the miner channel the last tile from above. Note that after having channelled from above, you have access from the magma sea to that tunnel as well, so you want to draw bridge protect that access too.
If you use the first method, you should make as sure as you can that the miner immediately leaves the area, e.g. having another mining job elsewhere (and make sure no other miner hogs it, so digging out a strip rather than a 1 tile corridor is safer). You can cancel the job once the miner is clear (i.e. inside your sealing bridge, and, if any magma passed the bridge before it was raised, then out of the tunnel reserved for the magma). There is no guarantee though. Your miner might decide that after all that sweaty work close to the hot magma, it's time for a drink, cleaning, or just a quiet lie down. I would advice against trying to use burrows for this purpose, though, since dwarves seem to be very sluggish when it comes to responding to burrows (I think I've read somewhere that a burrow overhaul is next on Toady One's agenda).

Think of magma as extra dangerous water. The magma sea has a rock roof above it (if the sea is at varying depth, the roof is as well, leaving no gap), so to get at it from above you need to channel down to the magma layer.

[Col_Jessep]

I like to do some exploratory mining for caverns and the magma sea. Just dig a new staircase (2x2) a bit away from your fort and see what you find. You may have to dig down a fair bit to get to the magma sea. Prepare for 100 z-levels or more! A dormitory and a booze stockpile half way is sometimes a good idea.

If your military is not yet prepared to deal with forgotten beasts or really nasty subterranean creatures you want to wall off caverns ASAP.

One aspect I really enjoy is catching some of those creatures in cage traps. Then I try to tame them. I don't want to spoil anything so:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I caught 4 ruthereers! Beautiful, giant monsters with a thick gray fur, blue skin, a long tail and green eyes. The newly born babies are the size of donkeys and they will increase tenfold in size over the years!
They give birth to live offspring and don't graze, which makes getting offspring as easy as putting them into a save room after taming them. The babies can be fully tamed. I think they will make great pets for my important dwarfs. Imagine a cat the size of a small elephant with long, fluffy fur and large fangs as pet. I think they can stand up to almost any creature on the surface.
Unfortunately they can't be trained for war or shorn for wool. Got to keep the stupid sheep around for now...

[PatrikLundell]

You have to be very careful with stairs, though! I've been bitten twice by their ability to let enemies through diagonally.

First time: 3*3 staircase which struck the first cavern. The topmost row of staircases were over the open air of the cavern, so I masoned those up ASAP. That did not stop a flying FB from entering the mid row from diagonally underneath. Now I have masoned over the mid row as well, of course.

Second time, even sneakier:
A single tile staircase the building of which was interrupted by "hot stone". Yep. Hot stone beneath, and hot stone diagonally to the SW. OK, back off and try to get the hot stuff from above. I then struck the lowest caverns instead, so I backed out and sealed the tunnel. Later I happened to see some red thingies moving in that tunnel towards the cavern. It turned out I had "breached" the magma sea, but without getting any message about it, nor the associated revealing of it. Later "proper" detection of the magma sea showed what had happened: The sea had a magma tile below the hot tile to the SW, and the creatures apparently entered through that upwards diagonal diagonal. I believe you can get caught by that with the caverns as well, but in that case you won't be stopped by "hot stone", so you'd likely dig yet another level down, and detect the situation that way (open air to one side). However, you can probably get bitten by my magma situation with water containing hostiles.

Oh, and when digging exploratory tunnels, I start out by building at least one bridge to seal it with.