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[Thorfinn]

I've been practicing the first couple months of an embark with the aim to improve it. Plopping down the mason and carpenter while still paused, and as soon as possible (a)dding wood screw, wood pipe and stone blocks lets me start constructing the pump by January 17. (I CAN start building it on the 16th, but that requires an additional carpenter and delaying of flooring over the entrance. Which is fine for most embarks, but I like to pretend I could be attacked at any time. I'm looking forward to builds where hostile embarks are not uncommon, and you sacrifice war dogs, livestock, anything in the wagon, and maybe a dwarf or two to be able to get the rest of the band dug in.)

My most recent few attempts have been using a burrow to keep the walling of the aquifer as continuous as possible. I thought it would be more deterministic, but there seems to be a huge random factor in cancellations because of water level. So I'm finding I'm getting through a single layer aquifer (full double-slit) and start digging down to magma around the first of March, plus or minus a week or so.

I'm not sure there's much of a way to speed it up consistent with having more than a single tile stairway. (If there is, I'd love to hear about it. I've tried doing a 3x4 and 4x4 pierce with double pumps, but so far they have not improved the speed.) But is there maybe a way to reduce the randomness?

I'm kind of at a loss. Do you just accept that you won't be to magma until the Ides of March or so, later if you have bad luck with caverns? Or is there a way of consistently beating that?

[Fleeting Frames]

The 3x4 and 4x4 pierces being the pump-stack method, right?

If you have single layer aquifer, you don't actually need to wall any part of it off before establishing drainage. Just have a hatch cover on top of downward stairs, get onto stairs via adjacent ramp and pump from top of strairs, then have miner descend to below to establish drainage while you lock the hatch.

Sometimes might be able to cave-in a truly massive section of soil as well, but not an option when there's giant undead kea on the surface and you have only usual 2 z of soil before aquifer.

PS: I think this goes into DF Fort mode discussion?

[Thorfinn]

Re: 3x4 & 4x4, I don't think so. I was just using them as parallel pumps. Or, in a recent case, the one pumping east in a 3x4 was waiting for the west-pumping to be done, then it would commence immediately instead of waiting for the pump to be deconstructed, then reconstructed pointing the other direction. I still think that might turn out a little faster, though it might be better described as a 2x4 with "horns".

Re: 1x aquifers, yeah, hatches work. As does replace the ramp/stair with a wall. That makes it maybe two weeks earlier. I still have mixed opinions about that. It feels a little like cheating, but I could be convinced. Please.

Sorry about the board choice. It's not obvious that things in this board apply to all modes, nor that things in Dwarf Mode apply only to Fortress. By that standard, there appear to be a lot of threads in the wrong place. But as I only play fortress, I'll restrain myself to the Dwarf Mode board in the future. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[EDIT]
For instance, most things in "Gameplay" are Fortress mode. I don't understand the reason for that board at all. Seems to me there should be only three gameplay-type boards -- Fortress Mode, Adventure Mode and Things That Apply to Both Modes. Yet there are four.
[/EDIT]

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, wiki page on pump stack method claims that it is much faster over multilayer aquifers with far less cancellation spam, at the cost of taking more resources.

Don't really understand how replacing the ramp/stair with a wall is different from walling it off, nor why would using a hatch feel like cheating - is it because you get a dwarf briefly below the aquifer before you wall it off?

PS: It's really that DFGD ("Here you can discuss Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress in any way you like.") is just less active than DFFMD or DFGQ. I prefer to keep my fort mode questions in the latter, but I know that some prefer the former. (The latter's fort mode predilection is more due popularity of the mode, though.)