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[Gauteamus]

Wikipedia is your friend.

After reading an article about the Irani desert in some popular science magazine, I went to look at the wikipedia article onQanats.
The qanats are in short an old persian technology for supplying irrigation water to arid areas. In the (obligatory) hill range behind your settlement you dig a number of shafts from top of the hill, through the local aquifer and down to a gently sloping collecting tunnel leading to your very doorstep.

This sounds like alot of fun to construct in a z-axis fortress, and could also maybe solve the issue of riverless mountains. The water output, and thus the farmable area/drink rate, would be a function of local aridity (sp?), number of shafts, architect/miner skills of constructors &c, but even the driest of maps should probably produce at least a trickle flow of water for your alcohol production.

[JT]

Hm.  Since mountains are getting Z levels, they could get a water table as well.

Wells are assumed to dig into the water table, so perhaps this process could be removed from abstraction and converted to actual mechanics -- when a miner digs a well, for instance, an actual shaft goes down into negative Z levels until it reaches the water table, and dwarves can then go to the top of the well to get water at any time.

[Toady One]

Yeah, I've actually been reading on aquifers and wells intermittently for the past three or four days.  It's going in in some form or another, but it's a difficult problem, since the water table should line up with the outdoor rivers, mostly and that causes problems since it makes it too high.  So I'm not going to feel beholden to mirror reality here.  The fact that all of the games outdoor rivers are necessarily on the exact same Z level as each other and the ocean doesn't help matters, but it's very difficult to change that.

[grendel]

That seems like a really awesome word to drop in a scrabble game.

"Haha, I just used the last U on the board. What are you going to do with that Q now!?"

"Q A N A T, BITCH"

"Oh.   "

[Bas Cost Budde]

Looks Arabic to me   BUT! I didn't want to start an argument there If you want to scrabble it, please do!

[Draco18s]

There are a number of Q-no-U words in the English language.  Not all of them START with  Q either.

[Mylon]

Now that I think about it, the ground (and rivers) can be made to be different Z levels.   Say, the north where the river enters can be 3 z levels higher than the ground to the south.

For added convienance, an additional view mode can be added of "surface".  Basically the ground is displayed despite elevation differences, perhaps with lines inbetween tiles (using OpenGL) to denote elevation differences.  Thus the world map (and rivers, ect) can be made to be a bit more 3 dimensional and it won't necessarily be a chore to view.