Print

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

[joeclark77]

Mud in the cavern should mean there's water there, shouldn't it?

[wierd]

Not necessarily.  I have more than once encountered a bone-dry (but somehow still muddy) cavern system, even down through cavern layer 3.

Water isn't strictly speaking "necessary", as long as you have dirt or mud someplace. It just means that you have to play by .40d style for military triage, where you expect dwarves to die from injuries more frequently, and thus have to make more excessive use of traps and turtle tactics. --- You can keep your fortress perfectly hydrated with just straight up booze from plump helmets.

It is really unusual for there to be absolutely NO sources of water though, even if you are limited to just a tiny murky pool that only gets rain one day of the dwarven year.  Very careful management of that pool can help you fill a reservoir eventually.  (There used to be water-duplication bugs involving pumpstacks that could be invoked as well, as long as you had at least 4/7 water to pump from, but I think those were fixed.)

[GavJ]

You can still duplicate water in a biome that freezes some of the year, 1/7 I believe will form a full ice block that melts to 7/7.

To be safer (from evaporation), set it up so that huge pans are always full of 2/7, then seasonally, you can more than triple your water supply, in temperate or cold biomes.

Or if you harness magma for melting, you can duplicate your water supply very rapidly, by exposing to outdoors, then heating the floor, etc. etc.



I'm not aware of any way to trade for or otherwise externally acquire your first 1/7 of water, though, so this still requires at least one pathetic little murky pool.
(Edit: Actually, what happens if you import an ice boulder, put it in a minecart, then let it melt there? Will it act like real water again? Or still just a weird glob?)

[GiglameshDespair]

I'm not sure it would melt. It's probably just leave a puddle of water that you couldn't do anything with rather than 1/7 pool or anything.

[GavJ]

Yeah, that's what it does on the GROUND. But I'm saying in a MINECART. When minecarts dump or launch liquids, they start out as globs until they land. So it's quite possible that ice melting into a glob in the minecart will get counted as just business-as-usual-this-is-how-minecarts-always-store-liquids... and then when you dump it, VOILA! real water.

SImilar to how pumps magically produce clean, desalinated water.