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[Urist McLongbeard]

So, I've read about some methods of damming a river on DF wiki, but all of 3 them seem a little bit to complicated:

1. Using magma is cool, but if you don't have a volcano on you map - finding magma and pumping it to the surface takes some time and effort.
2. Waiting a river to freeze is cool too, but potentially dangerous (river thawing unexpectedly, killing dwarves/flooding stuff/etc.) and if you're playing in a warm biome - it just won't ever freeze.
3. Drying river into an underground water source probably kills FPS. Drying it into channel probably does the same. Unless you have an aquifier.

I've tried to find an alternative, simple and universal method to dam a river, so here it is:

1. The initial setup: basically, that's a small room with some screw pumps and a hole in the floor some tiles upstream. Pumps pump from the north to the south. The river is 4 tiles wide, so there are 4 screw pumps and 4-tiles wide hole in the floor.


2. This image shows this setup working:


3. That's what happens one level below: water is moved back upstream from above.


4. That's one level above: there are two windmills powering screw pumps through the holes in the ceiling.


Well, that's it, pretty much.
Now you can build a wall to dam the river permanently. Or build some cages in a dried river bed and flood it to capture some live carps. Or something else. You'll figure on your own, I guess.

[rephikul]

good job, that look very easy... and exploity

[GaxkangtheUnbound]

You might want to place gear assemblies under the windmills to shut off the damming sequence if necessary.

[Dude_Jebawe]

I thought this was the standard method? If I'd known this wasn't widely known, I'd have shared it quite some time ago.

[Urist McLongbeard]

You might want to place gear assemblies under the windmills to shut off the damming sequence if necessary.

Yeah. Well, that was just a proof of concept; started a new fort to try this idea - the design of that thing can be improved.

[Urist McLongbeard]

I thought this was the standard method? If I'd known this wasn't widely known, I'd have shared it quite some time ago.

Dunno. Nothing is written in the wiki about it, so I figured it's not the standart method.

[Dude_Jebawe]

Well, I used this method a long time ago, and I'm reasonably sure I didn't just invent it myself. I must have read about it somewhere. Not that that is particularly important...

EDIT: thinking back, I'm pretty sure I saw this method used in a community fortress to drain an ocean, and decided to apply it to a river. It never occured to me that others hadn't thought to do the same.

[rephikul]

It relies on the less widely known fact that pumps drain water faster then water can naturally flow itself, regardless of pressure present. Not everyone used to common sense can realize that easily.

[Urist McLongbeard]

It relies on the less widely known fact that pumps drain water faster then water can naturally flow itself, regardless of pressure present. Not everyone used to common sense can realize that easily.

It rather relies on a fact that water that is pumped one level above gets back into the river before all the water upstream (uuh, not sure if it made any sense).
How fast a pump drains water is not important, because all the water downstream will eventually disappear on the side of the map.

[twilightdusk]

The only flaw in this design is that wind power isn't always reliable, windmills don't produce power on some maps due to not having enough wind.

[Dude_Jebawe]

Hand power works fine, for a short while. If you want a more permanent solution, well, the river is right there.

[Mechanist]

Not only the water is right there, you could build a lot of windmills, even with embark cheap materials

[Zrk2]

This is great. If I ever decide to dam a river, I will do it this way.

[Bordellimies]

If you can't have windmills, make fed waterwheels. Not a big problem.