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[Chase]

I like to create complex waterways for my fort.

I'm fairly new to df. I've been picking extremely safe embarks. sites with metals, away from towers, with a river, etc. I'm easing my way to crazier stuff. I don't want to get overwhelmed. Thanks for all the help!

[Robsoie]

The freezing method works nicely too, if you made sure to embark in a region in which winter are cold.
Just be prepared for dwarves getting unfortunate accidents, as it happened in my last DF frozen aquifer piercing operation
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=15096.msg6728490#msg6728490

[mikekchar]

Once you understand the logic of how things work, it's fairly easy to puzzle through aquifers I think.  Here are the main points:

- Aquifer tiles leak water in all directions except up and diagonal (do they leak water down?  I never actually tried to see -- for obvious reasons).
- Aquifer tiles absorb water in all directions except up and diagonal.
- Water will fall into a hole if there is space for it to go.  I.E. If the hole is empty, water will fall into it.  If the hole is full of water then the water in the hole can be pushed into an aquifer tile, allowing water above it to fall into the hole.
- A pump will pump water from one Z level below on the input side to the same level of the pump on the output side.  The output side of the pump reaches to the ceiling, so if there is a ceiling, it will make sure water doesn't flow back over the pump.
- A pump will pump water faster than an aquifer can fill a hole.  It also pumps faster than water will fall into a hole on the other side.  Make sure the water on the output side of the pump has nowhere to go but down.  If you follow that simple rule, you will pump water from the input side faster than it can fill up and force it into the aquifer on the output side with no spillage.
- Water sitting in a hole will flow at full force (i.e. as fast as you are pumping it in) in all directions except diagonal.  However, on the diagonal, water will go only as fast as it usually falls without being forced.  This means that if you make a mistake, you can allow water to flow out of a hole on a diagonal and pump it back into the hole faster than it comes out.  This is commonly known as a pressure regulator.

Using only these rules, you can pierce an aquifer in many creative ways.  The double slit method relies on one other trick.  If you are on a layer with an aquifer and the layer below is *also* an aquifer, you can dig a hole in the layer below.  This will allow water to fall from your current layer into the hole, effectively draining it.  However, be careful not to expose too many faces of aquifer tiles in your current layer because each one leaks water.  If you don't have enough holes to drain them, your layer will eventually fill up with water.

But basically, with enough pumps and a way to separate sections filled with water from sections not filled with water (with aquifer tiles in the middle), you can recover from almost any mistake.  The only mistake you can't recover from is flooding your entire fortress. Make sure that there is a door to block water coming out of your aquifer piercing experiments.

[PatrikLundell]

Aquifer tiles definitely leak down: that's why you can't use the level below the aquifer (I filled one of my first fortresses from not realizing a "damp tile" warning when digging a stair upwards towards an aquifer actually meant "water is now pouring down the stairs").

The two crucial double-slit tricks it took me some time to understand were:
- Aquifer tiles do NOT leak water diagonally (but if you channel such a tile away, the empty tile will).
- An isolated aquifer tile still produces infinite amounts of water and is capable of absorbing infinite amounts of water.

The typical double-slit mistake is to process the last aquifer level the same as the ones above, which means you remove the tile that should have acted as your aquifer drain in the third section. This is typically discovered when you start to pump from the forth section and the water fails to drain into the third one, and instead starts to flow back into the hole you pumped it from.
You can recover from that by turning the pump around again, drain the third section and remove a piece of wall to re-create a drain, turn the pump, process the fourth section as you should have done the third one (i.e. leaving an aquifer tile as a sink), turning the pump around again to drain the third section again and restore the piece of wall.

[Dunamisdeos]

I have deliberately pierced an aquifer from below in order to fill a reservoir.

So long as you do like, one tile, and make sure there is plenty of space for dwarves to escape, you'll be fine.

[PatrikLundell]

Ah yes, I regularly pierce aquifers from below to fill cisterns NOW, but at the time I definitely had no intention to fill the fortress...
"Damp stone? OK, back away and dig elsewhere. A fair while later: Why is my fortress rapidly filling up with water?"

[Dunamisdeos]

I managed to drown my entire fort by piercing a murky pool in my very first fort.