I was too busy at the time to try out the recent
Single Pick Challenge (but many thanks for the fun ☼movies☼). But more recently, a sig link led me to the horror-show that is
Edangzak Utharsanad Gedor...
Well, Thikut reasoned that this here embark may be swarming with horrible undead giant sparrows
now, but with all this fluff and feather wood in the vicinity some less-fatal wildlife should be wandering along any time now. So the dwarves struck the earth, walled themselves in, and made rudimentary preparations while they waited for the nightmares to stop. And stop they did, although this land sure did seem to spawn
rather a lot of flying zombies. Once Thikut's dwarven senses told him that naught walked the surface but a docile giant grasshopper or some such, the dwarves tore down the entrance wall, and ran out to chop and gather wood and plants. They even had the sense to do these things in small increments and only very close to the entrance ramp, but as none of them knew anything about woodcutting, herbalism, or carpentry, things proceeded rather slowly. Before long, a zombie giant owl was spotted coming from the east, and everyone hustled underground. Yield: two logs, one of which was used to replace the wall with a door to speed up the whole matter of getting in and out.
A second excursion a couple of months later yielded a little more wood and, prize of prizes, a prickle berry. Mouths watered at the prickle berry wine they would soon enjoy. Thanks to a hatch and an unsuccessful experiment with caving in trees, there was even a reasonably safe sunlit tile in which to plant the seed.
Even though the miner Kel was rapidly mastering the swing of the pick, she reported that she could not dig through the waterlogged layers of silt and sand on her own. Thikut dared not open a large skylight, and he knew that even the most conservative pump-based methods would require a good deal more wood. And who knows, maybe he hoped to find a sun berry.
The third foray onto the surface did not end well:
With only three dwarves left alive (and thankfully the battle took place in a serene setting, so their comrades at least
stayed dead), Kel determined that they would not perish in this shallow hole like vermin.
*****
So that's the setting for the following. In the Single Pick thread there was much talk of aquifer breaching methods, and eventually
Snaake demonstrated a cave-in method that didn't need any wood and didn't breach the surface. Here, Kel would like to present her approach, at most a slight refinement of the Snaake Chicken-run
TM. In particular, Kel achieved a 2x2 stairway through the aquifer while using a slightly smaller footprint of (in this case) scarce good biome soil.
Now this Overseer would like to admit that the starting jobs may not have been ideally assigned. Kel is downright clumsy, and cannot seem to move a tile in under 12 ticks. This meant that she had to dig her way clear up to Grand Master Miner before she could successfully manage a chicken-run shaft. Thus the grid of test shafts. In hindsight, those could have been done as part of the work area perimeter and saved more space. (Note: Z+0 is the lowest dry layer, Z+2 would be the zombie-blighted surface.)
The overseer would like to note that Kel needed a lot of handholding digging the perimeter stairs, as to her shock she kept revealing damp earth in her digging schedule. However, from her perspective it was quick and surprisingly dry work.
The remaining hard part was all on Z-1, and was decidedly not dry work. The next row inwards had to be first ramped up to clear the soil above, and then dug into downward stairs to drain more water. Snaake's method had an outer ring of ramps, but when I've tried that the miner kept getting swept into the flooded ramp and I worried the beard might drown and/or lose the pick. Here, Kel only ever stands on stairs, or mined out floor where she can only get swept back onto the dry-ish stairs. It helped to strategically designate just a few tiles at a time so she spent as much time as possible standing on a drained tile.
After that it was a bog-standard column collapse. Made sure she had somewhere else to be immediately after the final channel, so she and the pick walked directly away after the cave-in notice. I'm still looking for a geometry that keeps the miner properly safe, though.
And that's that. Quick work to make a 2-wide hallway on Z+0 to those stairs, a 2x2 stairwell, and set someone to work slabbing those ghosts. In-game, only six days elapsed between the first successful chicken-run and mining our first stone in the stairwell.
Final thoughts: I'm still puzzling over whether there's an easy way to extend this to deeper aquifers, though. With lots of floorspace you could probably make concentric rings. Although Kel got shoved around a lot digging out 4x4 of water producing tiles, and we're assuming no wood for pumps and no floors to support inner rings after the outer ones go. Has anyone tried chicken-running a 3+ deep aquifer?
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Topic: Architectural memo: safe aquifer piercing revisited (Read 1037 times)