If anybody is still reading this, when I turned power back on, the water immediately receded again. Is the screw pump supposed to be this powerful? or is there something else I'm missing?
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This is the best explanation of DF water I've ever read If you have the patience, you should totally read that post instead of mine)
Pressure works oddly. Water spreads out over a single z-level at a steady and intuitive rate, but if you have one layer of water on top of another, the top layer basically exerts infinite pressure on the lower ones.
You can try it yourself by draining a multi-level cistern into a large open area via floodgate. The top levels will drain almost too fast to follow, creating a perfect triangle of death as the water flows forward as fast as the game can process. Then everything instantly calms down as soon as there are no z-levels of water sitting on top of other z-levels of water. You can actually take advantage of this behavior to flood huge areas very quickly.
And yes, screw pumps are stupidly powerful and are only really limited by how fast you can feed water into them. And because of the above stuff, a pump at the bottom of a multi-z-level cistern will always be receiving water as fast as the game can put it there.
Water pressure is (mostly) stopped by diagonals. If you have a diagonal gap before your screw pump, that will cut the pressure down from "infinite" to "manageable".
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Topic: Mulit-Z level water (Read 1683 times)