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[Girlinhat]

I do like me some tubes...  Mmm...

Designate a whole pump stack to be built, then suspend them all (macros will help with both actions), and then sit at the bottom level and un-suspend each pump.  Just follow the trail upwards as each is finished, and un-suspend it.  Bonus points if you've set up stockpiles right beside for the goods (again, macros).

[Xen0n]

As far as intertubes go, I know in the devlog Toady mentions:

"•Large pipe sections -- walk on them or crawl inside them, allow passage for fluids"

Although it's not clear if it's horizontal/vertical/both.

[Tevish Szat]

if you set up your power machinery at the top, you can build from both ends.  However, I've tended to avoid high-z pump-stacks (six at most for me), mostly due to the fact that my most advanced fort has no running water of any kind, meaning I would have to do MAJOR engineering in the FB-infested caverns or rely on windmills for power.  I don't even want to think how many windmills it would take to pump magma over 100z.  I guess I could put dwarves to work and run the pump stack manually, but it really, really seems more sensible to just build magma industries at the magma sea if I'm going to be having dwarves labor down there anyway.

[Girlinhat]

I suspect it would be virtually identical to how axles work, but with some extra limitations.  Really, thinking about it, the only -real- need is for a tile to block motion in 4 directions but allow motion in 2 (including N,S,E,W,Up,Down).  If a tile could selectively restrict movement, then pipes would become easy!

(100x10 = 1,000 Urists Power, ~80 windmills including power train.  3x3 windmills = 240x240 area, or a 6x6 embark 1/4 of an entire map region.)

[Tevish Szat]

I suspect it would be virtually identical to how axles work, but with some extra limitations.  Really, thinking about it, the only -real- need is for a tile to block motion in 4 directions but allow motion in 2 (including N,S,E,W,Up,Down).  If a tile could selectively restrict movement, then pipes would become easy!

(100x10 = 1,000 Urists Power, ~80 windmills including power train.  3x3 windmills = 240x240 area, or a 6x6 embark 1/4 of an entire map region.)

I'm not sure you'd even need that.  if the pipes simply became [fluid]-filled pipes, you could go with the same sort of abstraction as a gear-box assuming the "bend/branch" is hooked up to any pipes it touches.

(240x240?  did the math with 80 mills and came up with 240x3, or around 30x30 -- 100 windmills, a 10x10 block of windmill -- instead.  Is there something I'm missing in how windmills hook up?  I've done most of my work with waterwheels and rivers)

[Xen0n]

I suspect it would be virtually identical to how axles work, but with some extra limitations.  Really, thinking about it, the only -real- need is for a tile to block motion in 4 directions but allow motion in 2 (including N,S,E,W,Up,Down).  If a tile could selectively restrict movement, then pipes would become easy!

(100x10 = 1,000 Urists Power, ~80 windmills including power train.  3x3 windmills = 240x240 area, or a 6x6 embark 1/4 of an entire map region.)

Shouldn't be too hard, since don't fortifications already allow motion in 4 directions, but block fluid flow in Up/Down?

[Urist Imiknorris]

They allow fluids from above.

[Girlinhat]

If you carve a fortification, you're actually leaving the floor above it, hence a small misnomer.  There's already some support for up/down blocking in the way of floors, but currently tiles are either passable or not, they don't understand "slightly passable".

Although since pumps already work off a bit of abstract "water disappears here and appears there" it could be enlarged for pipes.  As long as there wasn't any splits, it would be relatively simple "water disappears here and appears further over there"

[Melissia]

To make it easier on yourself I recommend you lay out all the walls, ramps, channels, etc beforehand, as I've found out that dwarves love walling themselves in. 

Dunno if you do his already, but it should speed up the process a little bit.

[MonsteR]

I guess I could put dwarves to work and run the pump stack manually, but it really, really seems more sensible to just build magma industries at the magma sea if I'm going to be having dwarves labor down there anyway.

That's usually what I do, just move my fueled industries down to the magma level. I had enough problem making a 3 level stack and pipe a quarter of the way across the map just to pump water down into my trade depot when the Elves showed up.

[Greenbane]

To make it easier on yourself I recommend you lay out all the walls, ramps, channels, etc beforehand, as I've found out that dwarves love walling themselves in. 

Dunno if you do his already, but it should speed up the process a little bit.

Yeah, I do all the digging beforehand, but I only seal the pumps with walls (faster and less micromanagey than building 120 magma-safe rock doors) in the correct places once they're finished, obviously. Problem is that sometimes, indeed, the retardorfs wall themselves in. So I've to patrol all 60 levels periodically to make sure nobody's starving to death.

As for tubes, yes, they'd be rather handy. But they'd suffer from this same problem: you'd presumably have to channel a long shaft down to the magma, which means you wouldn't be able to build individual tube sections without the support of those below.

[Tevish Szat]

My observation is that dwarves prefer to work from the southwest corner of a wall/floor job when possible, and then as close to it as possible if that tile isn't open: for instance, when walling up some goblin cages for the 'Cask of Amontillado' treatment, I had to dig the niches on the eastern side of the north/south passage I was working off.  Every attempt to seal niches on the western side resulted in the mason building from the west of the wall and getting sealed in with the goblin cage.  those niches were eventually converted to tombs, with a door in the place where the wall could not be reasonably put.  I suppose with a little effort I might have taken out and rebuilt a corner, but it was easier to just built on the other side of the hall.

As such, in situations where you CAN'T use the suspended wall trick to prevent a wall-in (or at least it would be horribly inefficient, as with sealed pump-stacks), it's prudent to place the last wall and access to it in such a manner as the dwarf can reliably work from the southern side, western side, or southwestern corner: an east-west pump stack, for instance, would want to be accessed from the south while a north-south one could have its access shaft to the west.

I have only anecdotal evidence, of course, ‼Science‼ (or boring old Science, as the case may be -- we need to ‼‼ it up) has yet to be done on the topic as far as I am aware.

[Melissia]

Oh, I just built it like this.


E W W W
E W E W
S S R W
E W E W
E W W W

The R is a ramp which leads up to the next level, where the next pump takes from the last's reservoir. 

Dunno if this is an efficient way to do it, but it lets me not worry about dwarves starving themselves.

[AnimaRytak]

I feel your pain.  On my current fort I built a 117 z-level magma pump stack, plus a water reactor to power it.  After some mishaps (numerous parts of it deconstructed) i restricted myself to only planting down 10 or so pumps at a time.

Of course, a few mistakes were made.  A wall was missing, causing my pump to overflow and destroy the intake pump I built.  So that had to be rebuilt.  And also, one of the pumps deconstructed half way down.  Fortunately it was powered at the time, so the entire pump stack above it didn't deconstruct (well, it did when I was trying to figure out what broke, but i'll admit to some save scumming on this fort.)