Print

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

[Spacespinner]

Hi, gotten lots of advice on irritating problems on these forums so I figured someone might have an idea that will solve my problem (again). I want to use magma, but I had to go down 196 Z-levels in order to encounter it. I know you can use pump systems in order to bring the magma up, but a pump system down that far is just immense. Is there any easier way to transport it, or am I going to have to suck it up and build the pump system?

[Girlinhat]

Magma pistons work, for small amounts, but don't expect effective traps using the piston.  Check my sig for how these are performed.

Otherwise, gen a smaller world.  Advanced worldgen lets you make shallower worlds, and a 20 level pump is much easier.  A water reactor might suffice as well, there's a thread floating around for an over-under reactor that can produce immense power and can be scaled up for enormous pumpstack needs.

Sadly there are no magma buckets or magma pond zones yet...

[Spacespinner]

Oh well. I don't really want to have to restart, I'm quite a bit in and in a very good spot (150 dwarves all happy, 3.8k alcohol, etc). Bed rooms are a bit squashed (only a bed each, no furniture atm) but 90% of the flooring roughly is masterwork engraved. Shame he died to goblins =(

Guess I'm going to have to try out !!SCIENCE!! and see if there's anything interesting I can do. Maybe something with pressure.

[nanomage]

Scale adds to dwarfiness, so i'd say do the 200pump stack. Of course you should take care about your FPS, so i'd advise to use the caseless stack design. It doesn't hurt your fps that much. Sure it spatters magma all around itself when it's stopped, but magma everywhere adds to dwarfiness, too!

Or, as girlinhat said, just use a piston for a small amount of magma to power your industry.

[Spacespinner]

Caseless stack design?

[Quantumtroll]

I recently completed a 100-level pump stack.  Once it's over 20 levels, I think it's just a question of patience. I had to side-step a couple of caverns, too, so it's not perfectly straight, but it went really well.  If you use the smarter "3-wide reservoir" pump stack, the FPS drop doesn't really hurt too bad.  Power is mainly supplied by waterwheels in the fortress' waterfall drain and is (needlessly, it turned out) supplemented by a sea-to-aquifer canal capable of producing an order of magnitude more power than I need. 

I suggest cranking out metal or glass screws and pipes and magma-safe blocks, setting 10 or so miners to dig a 20-level section at a time starting at the bottom, and a bunch of architect/masons to build pumps. 

Good luck!

[moki]

Caseless stack design?

Basically a standard stack, but without walls and floors surrounding it. Just pumps and a little support. The magma gets pumped into open space, so it would drop, but the next pump sucks it up fast enough that none actually falls out of the pump stack, until you stop it. It's supposed to help greatly with FPS since there are very few temperature calculations. In a regular stack, the temperature of all the wall and floor tiles gets recalculated every single step, which is one of the worst FPS killers in the game. Temperature in air (open space) is not influenced by the magma nearby, so it frees up lots of processing power and makes the game run faster.
The only real disadvantage is the magma splatter when you turn the thing off. It is recommended to have a way to get any dwarves out and lock it reliably and a way for the magma to flow off at the bottom.

A green glass pump stack is probably the easiest way to build it, if you have sand on your embark. If you just need a little magma for powering workshops, a piston will do, but I always prefer to have lots of lava at the surface. It's Fun

Building pump stacks over more than 30z is somewhat annoying, that's why I usually generate very shallow worlds, where the magma is only 20-25 levels down.

[Monkeyfacedprickleback]

Another solution is to build a disconected mini fort for your forges down where it is easier to access magma. It may seem like a bitch (and it totaly is) but with extra wide hallways a crap load of haulers and a ore dumping chute you can get most of your forging done realitivly easily. Mind you won't be able to use magma for traps but there are alway's plenty of other options.

[Dorf3000]

If it's too difficult to bring the magma up, then take your dwarves down.  If you want to use it for traps, then have your invaders come down a long stairway to get into your fort.  Several of my forts have had the 'entrance' in cavern number 3, with surface access somewhere else.

[Spacespinner]

Great ideas guys, loving them. I agree, having the entrance for invaders going all the way down to the lava would make lava traps easier, and setting up shop down there could help with other uses.

[Spacespinner]

Well, there's my first magma related fuckup. Forgot liquids go diagonally for some reason, so one guy was burnt to death and the adamantine I mined out is buried under magma. Such is (dwarven) life.

[Kofthefens]

Well, there's my first magma related fuckup. Forgot liquids go diagonally for some reason, so one guy was burnt to death and the adamantine I mined out is buried under magma. Such is (dwarven) life death.

fixed