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[rodgort]

I put a cleaning trench at the entrance to my fortress outside, and filled it up with 3/7 water. Makes sure that soldiers coming in from goblin-fighting duty get cleaned up before they track blood all over the place.

This worked fine until winter came. The water froze, thawed, and was filled up to 7/7. No problem, I thought! I just designated it as a water source and had a bucket brigade empty everything back down to the 3 level. Deleted the water source zone and figured everything was done. But now nobody will cross it! It's become an impassable barrier, so far as the dwarfs are concerned.

Does anybody know what's up? I guess I can probably drain it all the way down and floor it over. But I liked having a cleaning trench.

It occurred to me that it might have something to do with burrows. I have all of my dwarfs set by default to a burrow that does not include the trench, because I want them staying inside. But the problem became obvious when I removed some military dwarfs from the burrow and told them to go outside - they wouldn't budge (although they were perfectly cooperative when being marched around elsewhere, and when I opened my OTHER gate, they happily walked out of it). What's more, it seemed as though an elven caravan was also unwilling to cross the deadly 3/7 water trench. They got slaughtered by goblins. No tears for the idiot elves.

[Blackdutchie]

I'm not sure what's keeping your dorfs from leaving, but you could fill in the trench and rebuild it to fix the problem temporarily, and then build a roof over it to fix the problem for good. IIRC water should not freeze if it's inside.

[thegoatgod_pan]

There is absolutely no way to convert a square marked surface into a square marked underground, the water will still freeze with a roof.

[Blackdutchie]

In that case it's the more dwarfly solution of putting a tile of magma below the tile of water so the temperature remains high.
I have no clue how you're gonna do it but it should work against the freezing.

[Crashmaster]

won't a cast obsidian roof turn a tile to underground?

does not magma have to be flowing to melt ice on the tile above it?

[nil]

I've seen the freezing process destroy downramps--the up-ramps will still be there, so anything that falls in can get out, but going down--or crossing a trench--becomes impossible.  My money says that's what's happening here.

[rodgort]

An update, which reflects more messing around. I built floors over the 3/7 tiles. My dwarfs happily walked over those. Then, just to see what would happen, I removed the floors. The dwarfs decided that ONE of the three tiles was still ok to walk over, but not all 3. They're identical so far as I can tell. The geometry is below:

WtttW
WtttW
WtttW
WPPPW
WbbbW
 bbb
 bbb
 bbb

"W" is a wall
"P" denotes the pond tiles in question
"t" is a trap
"b" is the drawbridge that seals the entrance.

The leftmost "P" is the tile that my dwarfs have for some reason decided to tolerate.

Mystified.

[slothen]

I've seen this happen before, it takes a little fiddling but it will work.  I think the problem is that the squares get marked as unpassable when they are full of water.  If you continue to remove water so that one tile at least is at 2/7, they will begin to path through it again.

[Merkuri]

I've seen the freezing process destroy downramps--the up-ramps will still be there, so anything that falls in can get out, but going down--or crossing a trench--becomes impossible.  My money says that's what's happening here.

This.  It happened to me as well.  The down-pointing ramps are gone, but the up-pointing ramps are still there.  I made the area passable again by building artificial ramps.  I also tried to cover it with a ceiling, but it froze again the next year.  At that point I gave up on it, floored it off, and built a new bath just inside the entrance instead.

[wuphonsreach]

I've seen this happen before, it takes a little fiddling but it will work.  I think the problem is that the squares get marked as unpassable when they are full of water.  If you continue to remove water so that one tile at least is at 2/7, they will begin to path through it again.

More or less.  If you have a trench filled with 3/7 water and the dwarves won't cross it, you will indeed have to make one of the tiles only have 2/7.  Whenever I build a dwarf bathtub I always leave some method for either expanding it, bucket brigading the excess or draining off the excess.  (And expanding it a tile or two into the wall is usually fastest.)