Print

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

[Konis]

So, I embarked in a mostly mountainous region, but one of the biomes said it had a black sand layer with an aquifer.  That whole biome wasn't included in my region, but took off north and east. 

I'm about a year in, and I've made a well from the underground pool as a temporary measure, but I haven't been able to find the aquifer anywhere.  I dug all around the black sand on the north / east sides of my map, but not a drop.  Is it possible that it's just not there, and the aquifer was somewhere in the biome, just not near me?  There's no other river, and I don't want to trust the pool forever.  Also, I'd like to be able to do some never-ending water tricks.

Thanks in advance.

[Derakon]

This is a known issue (at the very least, I reported a bug for it a few months back). It's rather common for desert aquifers to not actually exist - the embark screen will say that they're there, but when you arrive you'll find nary a drop of water in the entire place. Best advice I have for you is to try to arrange for a two-layer aquifer; I think those are harder to jigger up.

[Konis]

Hrmph.  Thanks for the reply.  I suppose I can get by w/o, I was just looking forward to it, having never used an aquifer for a water source before.  Oh . . . I was counting on the tower caps, too.  Hmm.  Guess that's a restart for me, then.

[The Doctor]

Before you restart, dig down DEEP.

[Derakon]

You won't get tower-caps from aquifers - they only can grow if you've discovered an underground lake or river in the area. Now, a combination of an underground lake and an aquifer provides you with convenient infinite water without dealing with the river -- but an aquifer alone won't cut it.

[Hyndis]

Its actually rather common to not get an aquifer even though the embark screen shows it, thus why I generally prefer at least 2 renewable water sources. Rivers, underground rivers, and aquifers all count. Get at least two of them in your embark area and you should be good just in case one is bugged.

[Konis]

Yeah, I've got the underground pool (and breached, for my temp well), but I was hoping for water / flooding / giant mushroom trees.  As to digging deep: is there any chance the aquifer's not in the layer it was supposed to be in?  Because the black sand is only 1 z-level deep across the whole area, and I've checked all that.

Maybe they can just drink magma.  Just gotta let it cool for a loooong time.

[The Doctor]

Dig freaking deep, and every so often, go out horizontally to check other parts of that level... though you shouldn't have to do the horizontal.

[Derakon]

Aquifers should only show up on the layer that the embark screen says they'll be on. I've never seen an aquifer be somewhere that I wasn't warned about by the embark screen, anyway, while I have seen aquifers not be where the embark screen said they would be. To my knowledge, if the embark screen says that a layer will have an aquifer, then the entire layer will have an aquifer, however deep and broad the layer is.

In other words, if you've made a few prospecting boreholes and found nothing, then I'd say you have no aquifer. Besides, with the new embark profiles, it's practically faster to generate a new (small) world and find a similar site than it is to keep digging.

[cecilkorik]

Hmm, I wonder if it's possible that in your map, only a few or even only one square of the entire region actually has an aquifer.

I know that once when I was embarking, expanding my embark area by one tile would cause me to have White Sand + some other soil, even though the whole area was the same biome (not just same biome type, there was only an "F1" on the screen). I did some investigating with a 2x2 embark area and it turned out that there actually was just that one tile with sand on it. Mind you, that's not the same thing as an aquifer, but perhaps they do work in a similar way.