Print

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

[lastofthelight]

I'm about to attempt my second megaproject. (My first was turning a super-small underground river/bottomless pit 16 z-levels up into an aboveground river/lake).

Anyways, my current (very odd) map is thus:

Its scorching hot in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter and autumn, spring. In the summer, its a desert, but once it ends  everything (including my river, but not my surface-exposed magma, for some reason) freezes over. (I messed with worldgen to produce a world with massive seasonal variations; I was intending to try and get mostly deserts and glaciers, and this is what I got) I have four magma-glass furnaces collecting sand for my 50 bags right now.

I need to know a few things.

1. If I put glass floors over the entire river, will it not freeze?
2. Would this be the easiest way to power a screw pump tower, ala http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Image:Pumpsnc4.png

See, I understand how to make a verticle screw pump, but I'm not sure how to power it. I've been reading and rereading the Screw Pump article in the wiki, but I use the Mayday graphics, so the sections with ascii pictures confuse me a bit - gear assembles and axels seem a bit confusing in ascii, somehow. Perhaps it could help if someone could explain the windmill a bit better to me - the windmill article has this for a picture:

b-M-m
   
X    X    X
X    X    X
X    X    X
   

I'm not really sure what that is, so I can't mentally plan out what I'd need to do in order to power a screw pump tower with one, let alone start to get my head around the axels and such.  On the other hand, the idea of an l-shaped tunnel with like 10 waterwheels transferring power to a gear assembly that goes into an axle that goes up 10 z levels is (If I'm imagining it right) easy to understand.

Anyways, what I'd like to do is this: Surround my volcano and my entrance in a massive wall. Easy enough. But once I've prevented the river from freezing over in every non-summer season, I'd like to create a series of walls and levels - basically, redirect the river vertically upwards several z-levels. I'd have several 'chambers' of walls inside the main walls of course, and though the top (few) would be mostly water, I'd like the
ability to run goblins through it like a rat-maze and selectively drown them at certain points...or just have the satisfaction of seeing a river flow around inside my castle year round.

Another question: Do screw pumps work on magma if I build everything out of glass?

[lastofthelight]

Ugh. Nevermind. Everyone in the fort is dead, and I'm going to have to gen a new world.
I was using modbase, and while I THOUGHT I had turned off anything which added in new civs, SOMETHING put a DRAGON CIVILIZATION in - and I didn't notice it during worldgen.

My fortress was /ambushed by a squad of dragons/, which killed the caravan and everyone in my fortress.

UGH.

The worst part is, according to modbase, I don't have anything installed which adds new civs.

[Foa]

yeah, that is the bear minimum for the tower, but I see people doing something like;



And to freeze proof a river, you need it to be heated.

So, if you diverted river is 3xy wide then you need to put a 5xy wide river of lava under it, but not in contact with the water.

The 'Warm' walls and floors counter the freezing effect of winter.