Print

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

[1chris]

I'd test this first, But getting a dwarf to throw themselves down a well is not easy.

I'm wanting to make a drowning-proof well system - Thinking a pressure plate right underneath the well should get triggered if someone falls in. Drain floodgate dumps the water with another water-depth triggered pressure plate under that to keep it open until empty.

Sounds okay, But I really don't know how fast dwarves can drown. The time delay in the floodgate opening and the water level dropping might be too long for the system to do any good. Or it might be fine. Anyone have any info on this?

[A_Curious_Cat]

I’m not sure it can be done without the water in the aquifer ending up laced with mud…

[anewaname]

I don't know how to drown-proof them, but recently went through this problem and learned how to mitigate them (it has been 3 years without a drowning, compared to a couple in the four years previous).

Besides the insane dwarfs that fall into the well or actual combat at the location, it looks like the problem is that a well's tile can be dodged into even if it cannot be walked into, and when there are multiple dwarfs moving through a tile and something unplanned happens, a dwarf may dodge into the well. Moving water is one of those unplanned things.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you have a lot of traffic walking adjacent to your well and/or that well is located in a tunnel niche in the wall, then open up additional tiles adjacent to the well. Kids are always stopping to play at the well and are easy to trip on, but dwarfs will maneuver around them to a different tile if there is a tile to move to.

I suspect water can also cause problems, since 1/7 water on the floors adjacent to your well means that sometimes it is 2/7 and that flows outward, possibly pushing dwarfs into the path of other dwarfs and/or into the well.

This design caused dwarfs to drown:
AWxWA     x=staircase, W=Wall, A=aquifer wall, g=grate over water, w=well, f=Floor
AAgAA
AAwAA
AAAAA

This design did not:
WWxWW
WfgfW
WfwfW
AWWWA

[1chris]

Looks like forcing them to path around it with a wall, and maybe a traffic zone will mostly avoid the problem.

[gchristopher]

Umm, could you put the well over water that is <=6 deep over a grate, with the grate over deeper water that accumulates mud?

i.e. something like (side view)

__x_wW     x=staircase, W=Wall, A=aquifer wall, g=grate, w=well, _=Floor
 Wxggggg PUMP
 A___________A

The idea is that the upper floor beneath the well is at most 6/7, so the dwarf can eventually swim to the stairs, and the lower level is kept at 7/7, and muddy, but the well should draw clean water from the upper level. The challenge then is to keep the upper level with some water but never 7/7. Maybe you could set up a timer to run the pump briefly to pull water up from below, then immediately toggle a bridge or floodgate to reduce the water in the upper level?

[DerpFortress]

(I feel like I'm misunderstanding the problem here, but...) You could pump the water into a room connected to the cistern by a linked floodgate, then once the room fills with water, open the floodgate to fill the cistern to 6/7 or lower. Once your cistern reaches your desired depth, close floodgate. Refill when water levels get low.