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[Hans Lemurson]

My fortress is on a glacier, and I decided I wanted to try to harness the power of the wind for the pumps on my ice-trap.  However, my windmill does not rotate and a (q)uery reveals that the machinery is "Frozen Here" as opposed to the gears underneath it which say "frozen elsewhere".

Is it impossible to catch the wind in a glacial biome?  Do cold temperatured freeze ALL machinery?  If I build my windmill atop constructed floors rather than on the bare glacial ice, will that protect it from the cold?  Will I have to resort to a water-reactor?

[Hans Lemurson]

Update:
Constructing floors on the ice and building the windmill on top of that did not work.  Still frozen.
Going up a level however did work.  I think the lesson here is that you can't build machinery on top of ice.

This jibes with another experience I had with ice floors.  Even if you construct a floor on top of the ice, if you let magma flow onto that floor, the ice melts, turning to water and solidifying the lava.  Also, if 1/7 water freezes, you get not an ice Wall, but an ice Floor.

The presence of any natural ice terrain in a square will cause ice-related problems.

[qoonpooka]

My understanding is that it's not the windmill that froze, it's the gears at the bottom (which are part of the building) that froze.  This would concurr with your findings that raising the building fixed it.  I suspect you can drive a shaft down through the ice if you tunnel it out and build walls around it?  Or do you not have a problem with a vertical axle transmitting power from your now unfrozen windmill?

[slothen]

Is it impossible to catch the wind in a glacial biome?  Do cold temperatured freeze ALL machinery?  If I build my windmill atop constructed floors rather than on the bare glacial ice, will that protect it from the cold?  Will I have to resort to a water-reactor?

windmills do not work at all on frozen maps.

[Hans Lemurson]

Is it impossible to catch the wind in a glacial biome?  Do cold temperatured freeze ALL machinery?  If I build my windmill atop constructed floors rather than on the bare glacial ice, will that protect it from the cold?  Will I have to resort to a water-reactor?

windmills do not work at all on frozen maps.

My elevated windmill is producing power just fine.  I believe it was contact with ice that was messing with it.  I'll have to investigate to see if all machinery is impaired on ice.