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[dropzonetoe]

I have a problem and I just cannot figure it out.  I was busy elsewhere and didn't notice I was out of booze.  But I have a well inside by fort.  I am playing in a cold climate and the river keeps freezing but my little water hallway the well is over does not.  It fluctuates between 6 and 7 in depth.  Now my brewer will go over and get water but all of my dwarfs are thirsty and some are starting to dye from dehydration.  Why will they not go get a drink of water from the well?

I keep getting the message no water source... but there is water under the well.

[Garath]

only one dwarf at a time can get a drink at a single well, so if you have a lot of dwarfs, they'll die waiting for their turn

[FuzzyZergling]

Only one dwarf can use a well at a time. If you have lots of thirsty dwarves they may die before the bucket gets passed around.

[dropzonetoe]

I have 54 of them right now so that is probably the problem. 

[Sphalerite]

If the 'little water hallway' still has liquid water in it, you can designate the floor tiles next to it as a water source.  Use the activity zone tool and set the tiles to be a water source.  Remember that you need to set this on the tiles next to the water, not on the water itself.  If the water isn't salty, this will let your dwarves drink directly from the water without using a well.  Ultimately, you should build more wells, but this is an immediate thing you can do to let more than one dwarf drink at a time.

[Nan]

I say that ultimately you should have no wells. The unhappy thought is not a particularly severe one, and they don't get it at all if the booze production is in order. The advantage of no wells, is unlimited dwarves can use the tile at once and collecting buckets of water for sick dwarves or pond zones, is instant, instead of taking time (and to boot, dwarves go up and down stairs faster than the well's bucket can). Not having a well makes water both a more effective emergency drink source, and improves fortress efficiency. Also, they *only* get the unhappy thought "complained about the lack of a well" if they drink water directly, if they are collecting buckets of water they don't get the unhappy thought at all. So the correct response to the unhappy thought is actually to produce booze, rather than build a well - makes the unhappy thought go away, and also negates the other penalties of drinking water.

The only real use for a well is to trick dwarves into taking salt water... but a pump for desalination is actually cheaper and quicker to set up, since all 3 parts can simply be built at the carpenters workshop vs the diversity of parts for a well.

At least at the moment, wells are firmly in the negative utility category, having multiple wells reduces the negative utility somewhat, but never makes it better than zero wells.

[Garath]

they can get huge happy bonuses from well designed wells, the water is less likely to be laced with mud and there is no chance of a dwarf accidentally falling in and drowning. And yes, that does happen quite regularly, especially if pets also crowd the area

[Nan]

Actually, not having a well, and building a grate or bars, provides a more secure barrier than a well does. I've also not observed any *actual* benefit in filtering out impurities. A well will never provide more pure water than simply taking water directly from the same tile. Muddy water is quite obscure, you need to go to a lot of effort to produce it artificially, I'll be honest that I've not succeeded (I made a tile really quite muddy, up to "pile of mud" level, but it still wasn't muddy enough to make the water drawn from it "laced with mud", I gave up because muddifying tiles is quite time-consuming), this means the only muddy water you'll find in practice is in in the caverns, and the only time a well will draw non-muddy water is when it's built over 2z deep cavern water, which itself is fairly rare and highly unlikely to be a convenient to have a well built directly over top of it, most likely you'll want to move the water to a more convenient location which gets rid of the mud anyway (any method of moving water, including fill pond, will filter out mud).

And while it's true that a single well can have extremely high value, you can also get extremely high value out of other things - for example a screw pump also enjoys architecture bonus and you can use enormous silver or steel corkscrews, which provide absolutely massive value - almost certainly more than a well's components can, probably even more per tile. In any case, there's no particular shortage of things good at sitting around and looking pretty which don't reduce the efficiency of the fortress.

[Triaxx2]

The only time and place I put a well for sure is in the hospital. Why? Because when I have injured dwarves, Urist McDoctor, Urist McNurse, and Urist McChiefMedical Dwarf are all Burrowed into the hospital, and aren't allowed to leave until the patient is better/dead.

So the Hospital has it's own well-cistern system, and while there's always a small stockpile of booze, it's inaccessible to anyone other than the hospital staff. Since the well is the only other water source, not only is there some for the patient, but that's all the doctors and nurse get to drink while the patient is in the hospital. Thus they have incentive to A) heal the patient or B) kill the patient. I've had both happen.

Food gets dropped in from a quantuum stockpile and so are all the other things necessary for healing. Or killing...

So yeah, that's about the only reason to have a well that I can see.

[i2amroy]

Well's do have one bonus, however, and that is that when dwarves drink from them only 1 out of every 10 dwarves needs to lower the bucket to drink. This is because the rest of them just drink the water out of the bucket which nigh-instantly satisfies their thirst, where if they are instead drinking from a river or other such source then they take much longer to actually take a drink. Even so I still only have it set up for emergency/patient use only.