Print

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

[ChristianWeiseth]

I embarked at a site without a river and there were also no lakes anywhere. I dug down to a cavern system and found a huge dried up underground lake (pile of mud layer). I'm in a hot badlands environment but I did not think underground lakes dries up.

Is it possible to survive without water with regards to hospital? Will be very boring to have my weapon lords die of dehydration in the hospital if they are injured which they surely will be.

If I turn off the temperature is it possible to find other underground lakes? I'm playing with no aquifer and I'm starting to think that was a bad idea which sucks because I really love the embark site despite having no water or trees.

[bloop_bleep]

1. There technically was never a lake down there, it just happens to be covered in mud. Though from a roleplaying perspective you could assume that.
2. Yeah, a hospital is essentially inoperable if you have no water source.
3. You could just keep digging down, trying to find another cavern layer. There are usually 3, BTW. If you don't find any water on the surface or in the caverns, you're out of luck.

Also I'm not sure why you mentioned turning off temperature... there are no more caverns beneath the magma sea, if that's what you're saying.

[Fleeting Frames]

You could perhaps have dwarves taken into hospital and sutured/splinted, but they won't be washed nor given anything to drink, so you'll risk infection and have to remember to remove it before they dehydrate I guess.

If your embark has no water, ice or water-generating features, then you could still create a cistern somewhere, embark adjacent to the fortress so that your water is diverted towards the cistern through map edge and then go into area between forts in adventure mode to let the water flow over the border.

Though go look for other caverns first.

[PatrikLundell]

Having no water on the embark is a PITA, but not a death sentence. Dwarves get booze from plants (and bees) without any need to add water, so their normal drinking is taken care of.
Hospitals is a bit worse: Some treatment is blocked at the washing stage, and immobilized dorfs eventually die of dehydration, but it's possible to deconstruct their traction benches and remove the hospital zone when they start to get thirsty, and at that stage they tend to crawl to the booze stockpile to drink. Once they've drunk you can reconstruct the traction benches and repaint the hospital zone. Each stint in the traction bench heals a bit, and eventually they're able to work. Obviously, no water means a big infection risk, but death is not automatic.

Edit: There are actually two underground biome types, Underground Chasm (which is "muddy caverns") and Underground Water (which is the normal one). They're not temperature dependent, but rather dependent on a "Water" parameter that can be influenced through an advanced world gen parameter.
Badlands can be completely without pools, in which case you're out of luck regarding surface water without special work arounds, but sometimes those pools are dried out most of the time but can fill up during rain fall, in which case they can be "harvested" into a cistern.

[Loci]

Badlands can be completely without pools, in which case you're out of luck regarding surface water without special work arounds, but sometimes those pools are dried out most of the time but can fill up during rain fall, in which case they can be "harvested" into a cistern.

Rainwater collection is an ancient technology that certainly qualifies for inclusion in Dwarf Fortress. To simulate it you can use DFHack to "paint" murky pool tiles to transform rain into usable water on maps that do not have natural pools. On hotter maps it will be necessary to concentrate and store this water (preferably underground) to reduce evaporation.

You can also "simulate" water trade by buying useless items (e.g. barrels of blood) and using DFHack to create an equivalent amount of water (e.g. 7 barrels = 7 units of water). Or just freely create water with DFHack if you'd rather focus on a different aspect of the game.

[Miuramir]

Edit: There are actually two underground biome types, Underground Chasm (which is "muddy caverns") and Underground Water (which is the normal one). They're not temperature dependent, but rather dependent on a "Water" parameter that can be influenced through an advanced world gen parameter.

In particular, this has a default range of 0% - 100%; this means a cavern can randomly be generated with no water at all, or be entirely water, or any value in between.  This is not generally what most players actually want. 
[CAVERN_LAYER_WATER_MIN:<number>]
[CAVERN_LAYER_WATER_MAX:<number>]

I usually set these to MIN 25 and MAX 75 for a generic embark; this means that the cavern should not be more than 3/4 water or 3/4 land, but still allows a lot of variability in between those.  If I'm expecting to do a "move into the caves" embark, I might set MIN to 10 and MAX to 50 to ensure more usable land down there, along with fiddling with the cavern openness and density parameters in more detail. 

[PatrikLundell]

@Miuramir: According to my investigations, your description is close, but not quite spot on. As far as I've seen an actual CAVERN_LAYER_WATER value of < 10 results in a Cavern Chasm, and 10+ gives you a Cavern Water biome. However, the value is not a straight "percentage of cavern covered by water" value, as an actual CAVERN_LAYER_WATER value of 25 still seems to result in a completely water less (but not muddy) cavern. I suspect there is some value at which water starts to appear to then grow linearly up to 100% (I've had a cavern completely covered by water once: that was a royal pain to deal with). However, I haven't investigated this in detail.
The two world gen parameters provide the boundaries of the range the actual value for each cavern biome may take, but as far as I've seen, there is only a single actual value for each cavern biome. It can also be mentioned that the CAVERN_LAYER_WATER parameter of the cavern biomes is an unidentified field in the latest DF Structures XML set.

[Miuramir]

As far as I've seen an actual CAVERN_LAYER_WATER value of < 10 results in a Cavern Chasm, and 10+ gives you a Cavern Water biome. However, the value is not a straight "percentage of cavern covered by water" value, as an actual CAVERN_LAYER_WATER value of 25 still seems to result in a completely water less (but not muddy) cavern. I suspect there is some value at which water starts to appear to then grow linearly up to 100% (I've had a cavern completely covered by water once: that was a royal pain to deal with). However, I haven't investigated this in detail.

Interesting!  Looks like there's an opportunity for Science! here, and updating the wiki.  In particular, with a new version coming up (and presumably a whole lot of people generating new worlds), it might be useful to figure out what the minimum value that guarantees actual water, since if I'm interpreting your post correctly 25 isn't high enough. 

[PatrikLundell]

I've done some more investigation since my last post. The gist of it is provided in an Issue at github https://github.com/DFHack/df-structures/issues.
Cavern water seems to be determined by three things:
1. The currently unnamed Cavern Water underground region parameter.
2. The RNG controlled region_details feature entry for the caverns.
3. The RNG controlled actual embark generation.

As far as I've seen there is NO value that guarantees cavern water. A Cavern Water value of 100 resulted in water in 98/95/97 % of all region tiles belonging to the investigated underground regions (about 170 mid level ("region") tiles), while a value of 9 resulted in water in 1.7/1.2/0.5% of the tiles, while 5 resulted in 0% throughout.
The cavern feature entries in the region_details contain a(n unnamed) boolean array and the first 4 elements seem to influence the amount of water in that tile, with probably for each bit 1/4 each. I suspect the actual cavern topography is involved as well, as you can't have water at a higher elevation than lower terrain without some walls to keep it in.
I've updated my regionmanipulator script to allow manipulation of the water controlling bits, and my brief test indicates it works, but probably only provided the Cavern Water value is sufficiently high.