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[Brewster]

Short tutorial for newbies about collecting rain:

How to beat a drought in hot locations with no rivers.

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Above room is filled so about time to pull the lever and start filling this room.

[knutor]

Pic3:  I don't run 1x1 diagonal sewers.  Cannot remember what ever made me avoid running diagonal 1x1 sewers.  Oh, now I remember.  It was because I couldn't easily pave the floors of them with block.  I had to spend more rock in flooring diagonal floors.   To prevent weeds and trees from blocking the flow.

[Brewster]

Ya, if I hit cavern below then it could possibly grow a tree to block water. (I haven't yet on this map.)
When you have such low water (simply relying on rain water), you can't waste extra tiles to move the water. It would take double the rain water to move it to the containing room. You can always send a woodcutter to clear the sewer too if you do get a tree growing in there.

[Rude]

Caverns almost always have water. better to unleash elk birds and GCS than to die slowly and steadily of dehydration -- but then that's what booze is for.

I've done things similar to this before, but I don't strive to connect several ponds unless they are all tiny. I just breach 1 pond and siphon off about 3x3 - 5x5 water (plenty for a hospital etc. unless you anticipate zero rain for the entire fort's life.) Also, you don't need to go down, just underground-- building an expansion to an existing pond and separating it with a flood gate or door can do in a pinch.

And if you want to get really fancy, you can setup pressure plates that will open the hatch to the next "barrel" every time the one above it gets full. So you won't even have to keep an eye on progress.

Fyi, I think 2 water per tile is the maximum for evaporation (unless its outside in a murky pool). So if your "barrel" has any "2"'s then it will eventually dry up. And dwarves don't drink an entire 1 per drink, but it does add up eventually.

[Loud Whispers]

Ya, if I hit cavern below then it could possibly grow a tree to block water. (I haven't yet on this map.)

Put constructed floors in your pipes to avoid this.

[Nan]

One little thing is that you should purify water which has come from a murky pond by pumping it into a clean cistern, which should be set as the water source. Water which is sourced from a murky pond (even if it is moved by gravity or bucket brigade) is stagnant, causing a bad thought about nasty water, and apparently increasing infection rates if used in the hospital. Simply putting it through a pump - which can be operated by a dwarf from time to time to top up the cistern - will purify the water.

[Saladman]

I take the OP's point to be that "in a hot location" you do just want to dig and fill a cistern immediately.  Constructed floors, pressure plates and purifying by running through pumps are all good to know about but also kind of miss the point if they slow you down in the slightest.  You can breach it yourself and pump it into a constructed cistern later.

[Nan]

Well you get the water underground first, then build a screw pump to move it into the final cistern. No point pumping air.

A screw pump is one of the cheapest and most convenient things in the game. Block, pipe section and enormous corkscrew, all can be constructed from 1 log apiece at the carpenter's workshop which you need anyway. The cistern doesn't need to be constructed, it can just be dug out using a miner. In this kind of construction, it's just adding one little screw pump along the water line (i.e. you don't pump the water from one cistern into another, you pump it from the water line, into the cistern).

Although a player who doesn't know how to use screwpumps, should probably create a muck-around game and figure them out. They're actually almost as simple as they are cheap, it's just that stories of 72 level pump stacks and magma cannons powered by giant water reactors can make dwarvern mechanics sound threatening.

[Brewster]

Good job Nan, you are correct, screw pumps are easy.

This water was not for drinking/hospitals, but if you are using the water for drink/clean'ing then a screw pump would clean it like Nan said.

[knutor]

Ever chop a tree in a flooded diagonal?  I cannot remember the last time I did that, or even if its possible.  Bin playing 1868, needed a break from DF.  I do remember fondly losing dwarfs to suffocation who were linking floodgates.  They wanna do the job, and don't care from what side they work.  HA!

Why not avoid all those designs, and slip a change into DF's advanced world gen options for cavern water, minimum level, which defaults 0-100?  Change it to 10-100, so you never run the risk of embarking with three empty caverns with zero water levels.  Then run a well down to its deepest parts. 

That fix to world gen also guarantees the possibility of obsidian, on every embark, regardless of the biome description.  It just takes a little tunneling to get the drip to land on the magma pool.

Sincerely, Knutor