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[Haekel]

It's not easy to clean water of salt or contaminants, and not something people should be able to do with medieval technology.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. People have been extracting salt from water for thousands of years now. While the product here is salt, it is only a small step to distilled water, since the water has to go somewhere. Put a lid (or any other object, really) on a pan of boiling water. In a matter of seconds, you will have drops of water manifest.
Now you only need a reason to distill the water, which should be perfectly drinkable.

[Babylon]

Access to clean, potable water is meant to be one of the major factors in siting a fort. It's not easy to clean water of salt or contaminants, and not something people should be able to do with medieval technology.

Access to plentiful clean water is a good reason to site on an aquifer. You balance access to clean water against the difficulty of penetrating it.

The problem is that nothing less than evian-quality water is totally useless to dwarves for use in the hospital, which is the main reason to bother obtaining water. River water should be self-cleaning, like in reality, as new, clean water washes away decay. It should be possible to dilute dirty water with clean water to make a cistern clean again, too.

I don't think Dwarf Fortress is meant to be a negative homeopathy simulator.

It'd be a nice feature if dwarves could brew medicinal ethanol too, but that would partially negate the utility of the soap industry. It would be bloody funny though if the dwarves ran out of booze and resorted to drinking medicinal ethanol and poisoning themselves, though.

The poison in medical ethanol doesn't improve it in any way, it's purely for tax purposes.  Vodka is actually just as good for anything that medical ethanol gets used for, and without a tax on drinkable alcohol there would be no reason to denature the vodka to begin with.

[HiEv]

It'd be a nice feature if dwarves could brew medicinal ethanol too, but that would partially negate the utility of the soap industry. It would be bloody funny though if the dwarves ran out of booze and resorted to drinking medicinal ethanol and poisoning themselves, though.

The poison in medical ethanol doesn't improve it in any way, it's purely for tax purposes.  Vodka is actually just as good for anything that medical ethanol gets used for, and without a tax on drinkable alcohol there would be no reason to denature the vodka to begin with.

Huh...?  There isn't "poison in medical ethanol."  I think what we're actually talking about here is isopropyl alcohol (a.k.a. rubbing alcohol), not ethanol (a.k.a. drinking alcohol), and isopropyl alcohol is poisonous.  Taxes have nothing to do with it, there is no poison "added" to the rubbing alcohol, and isopropyl alcohol is not denatured vodka.  A small amount of acetone and methyl isobutyl ketone are added as solvents in the US due to BATF regulations, and sucrose octaacetate and denatonium benzoate are added to make the taste bitter so people won't drink it, but none of those are more toxic than isopropyl alcohol itself (at least not in the ratios they're given as far as I can tell).  Ethanol may sometimes be used for rubbing alcohol, but isopropyl alcohol is more common and I think that's what they were talking about above.

[Buttery_Mess]

Ethanol is poisonous, it's just a sort of mild poison that human beings can metabolise. It's not anywhere near as poisonous as methanol, though. Ironically, the treatment for methanol poisoning is imbibing ethanol.

It's not technologically impossible to derive clean water with medieval know-how from salty or contaminated water, but it can be energy intensive and I can't think of any examples from history where a large population (or even a small, but permanent one) was settled in a place without access to clean water but with access to brackish water, and where they desalinated the water.

It surely isn't above dwarven 'ingenuity' to develop a large, complicated method of desalinating water in large quantities, although the game doesn't support the mechanics for it at the moment, I think (I don't think steam can condense into water droplets, which can then rain into puddles of water atm). Nor is it unfeasible for dwarves to use a still to distill water in small quantities for medical purposes.

What I mean is that dwarves should not possess the technology to desalinate an ocean in five minutes by means of a single wooden pump powered by one untrained dwarf peasant. That is a bug. It's a bug I like, but that might be because it's impractical to run any fort without using a pump to clean the water used for the well.

EDIT:

Water has been collected from the air for at least 2,000 years using air wells in Middle Eastern deserts, and later in Europe. The Incas were able to sustain their culture above the rain line by collecting dew and channeling it to cisterns for later distribution. Historical records indicate the use of water-collecting fog fences. These traditional methods have usually been completely passive, requiring no external energy source other than naturally-occurring temperature variations.

Oh. It seems ancient peoples are quite capable of getting water, anywhere, if the need be.

[HiEv]

Ethanol is poisonous, it's just a sort of mild poison that human beings can metabolise. It's not anywhere near as poisonous as methanol, though. Ironically, the treatment for methanol poisoning is imbibing ethanol.

FYI - Isopropyl alcohol isn't the same as methanol.

On the topic of water, I wouldn't mind seeing a magma powered desalination plant that produces distilled water and salt.  Seems rather dwarfy to me.

[JackOSpades]

Ethanol is poisonous, it's just a sort of mild poison that human beings can metabolise.

well yes but isn't the same true for ALL alcohol anyway?

[HiEv]

Ethanol is poisonous, it's just a sort of mild poison that human beings can metabolise.

well yes but isn't the same true for ALL alcohol anyway?

No. There are lots of kinds of alcohols, and many are very poisonous and either can't be metabolized or metabolizing them produces toxic metabolites.

[Findulidas]

On the topic of water, I wouldn't mind seeing a magma powered desalination plant that produces distilled water and salt.  Seems rather dwarfy to me.

Perhaps heating the water and then letting it condensate, though that would mean having to get water to condesate beyond mist I think.

[Findulidas]

On the topic of water, I wouldn't mind seeing a magma powered desalination plant that produces distilled water and salt.  Seems rather dwarfy to me.

Perhaps heating the water and then letting it condensate, though that would mean having to get water to condesate beyond mist I think.

Actually you should be able to produce one desalinated bucket or bucket with unstangnant water on the kitchen/furnace I think. Boiling water and then letting it condensate in another container is something the ancients easily could do.

[greycat]

Actually you should be able to produce one desalinated bucket or bucket with unstangnant water on the kitchen/furnace I think. Boiling water and then letting it condensate in another container is something the ancients easily could do.

Yes.  Boiling the water in one vessel and letting it condense in another is called distilling, and the apparatus for doing this is called a still.  Our dwarves can make a still out of a rock.  They do it all the time, right now.  The game simply doesn't know how to use a still for this purpose.  It only knows how to use a still for making booze (which is the other common historical use of a still).

[Findulidas]

Maybe if you start out with the raws from 0.31 cheating at dwarf fortress wiki which makes water from booze:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[REACTION:PURIFY_WATER]
   [NAME:purify water from booze]
   [BUILDING:STILL:CUSTOM_P]

   [REAGENT:booze:150:DRINK:NONE:NONE:NONE]
   [REAGENT:container1:1:NONE:NONE:NONE:NONE]
      [CONTAINS:booze]
      [PRESERVE_REAGENT]
      [DOES_NOT_DETERMINE_PRODUCT_AMOUNT]

        [REAGENT:bucket:1:BUCKET:NONE:NONE:NONE]
      [EMPTY]
      [DOES_NOT_ABSORB]
      [PRESERVE_REAGENT]
      [DOES_NOT_DETERMINE_PRODUCT_AMOUNT]

        [PRODUCT:100:1:LIQUID_MISC:NONE:WATER:NONE]
      [PRODUCT_DIMENSION:75]
      [PRODUCT_TO_CONTAINER:bucket]
   [SKILL:BREW]

And then turn it to from water in a bucket to water in a bucket. Will the created water be clean? If so you could use that.

Unfortunately I dont know how to work with raws.

[guebstrike]

I'm not 100% sure about this, but brooks and the wells and cisterns attached to them, unlike rivers, don't get stagnant. This is odd since a brook is a small stream or a creek. Where I'm from, creeks are dry and stagnant most of the time while the rivers are less stagnant, if not less polluted. In any case, if you don't want a stagnant well, all you have to do is build near a brook.

I've gotten good at irrigating a farm and building a well by the summer of my first year. My current well has fresh water in year seven with no pumps, and no effort on my part, just one lever attached to the door to the farm, that I walled up as soon as I flooded the farmland to prevent the crazies from destroying.

[floundericiousWA]

Not true!

At least, not in my game.

I've got a fortress which has a completely stagnant brook running by it.  The brook was pure water when I started and, as my dwarves fished and drank from it, they had to keep going farther and farther upstream to find fresh until it was completely contaminated.

[guebstrike]

Not true!

At least, not in my game.

I've got a fortress which has a completely stagnant brook running by it.  The brook was pure water when I started and, as my dwarves fished and drank from it, they had to keep going farther and farther upstream to find fresh until it was completely contaminated.

Hmm, well nevermind my last post, but nevertheless I have a queen vampire living in a 34.05 fort with a well, with no mechanisms or pumps, but clean water. I've certainly had stagnant water in the past, but I have no idea what the difference is...except that this fort has had few sieges so maybe it's those dirty goblins.

[Findulidas]

I've certainly had stagnant water in the past, but I have no idea what the difference is...except that this fort has had few sieges so maybe it's those dirty goblins.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Water

What we are talking about is the strange issues and physics of dwarf fortress water. Ex:

1.A small murky pool with stagnant water connects with the river. Whole river permanently turns stagnant.

2.Murky pool and river shares a wall. Whole river permanently turns stagnant.

3.Pumping water manually using only a screw pump from stagnant source to clean source. 1/7 water around the pump for 1millisec due to the excessive flow and mists, which means clean water source connects with contaminated and permanently contaminates the whole pool the clean water was in. New pool has to be mined out for more clean water.