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[Kingsdragon]

Ive seen a fair few people complain that embarking with an aquifier is hard... now besides
the lack of iron, which can be brought, I feel that it makes the dorfs lives easier!

I have clean water and I can live underground forever if i wanted. Am I missing some difficulty here?

[Jacob/Lee]

Clean water is overrated. If you don't clean your wounds with muddy, vomit-laced stagnant water then you aren't a real dwarf.

[Friendstrange]

The main problem there is with aquifers is breaching them in time before something horrible apears and murders you.

Couple that with an evil biome, the prefered embark around here, and...yeah.

[PainRack]

Ive seen a fair few people complain that embarking with an aquifier is hard... now besides
the lack of iron, which can be brought, I feel that it makes the dorfs lives easier!

I have clean water and I can live underground forever if i wanted. Am I missing some difficulty here?

Playing around with 3 layers aquifiers, as well as different biomes that means accidental risk of flooding=fun!!!!!

[Rez]

Some people don't like piston penetrating aquifer and pump penetrating even a one layer aquifer is incredibly irritating.  And both methods are tedious, especially if it's not a single layer aquifer.

[NecroRebel]

Aquifers are extremely intimidating for newer players who haven't screwed around with any pumps or anything like that, and such players are fairly likely to embark on at least one aquifer territory during their newbie stage. They have no idea how to even begin approaching the obstacle, so they utterly fail to make any progress at overcoming it at all. They abandon and embark where they have no aquifer. Even as they become more experienced, they still remember aquifers as something that was completely impenetrable, both in concept and in practice, and they communicate that attitude to other newbies.

In addition, until relatively recently, the best aquifer-piercing methods known were complicated, difficult, dangerous, and resource-intensive. Particularly for multilayer aquifers, getting through them was quite impractical, would take months of dwarf-work and hours of player-time, so even the more experienced players who otherwise knew how to pierce aquifers avoided it because it wasn't worth the effort. With the development of the double-slit piercing method, the whole aquifer situation changed radically, as it is a simple, cheap, safe way of defeating them, but that was only discovered a bit over a year ago and, due to people avoiding aquifers in general, hasn't been disseminated as widely as several engineering developments in other fields have been.

[GoombaGeek]

haven't screwed around with any pumps

i see what you did there

Anyway, for me, aquifers are tedious. I haven't gotten to a point where clean water would be pivotal, since I always have lots of drink and my dorfs seem to heal perfectly or die painfully, with no non-lethal but serious wounds to be seen. Although embarking in an aquifer... in a volcano... on a tundra... in an evil biome was lots of (F)un.

[weenog]

Even the double-slit method can and will flop on its ass if you don't carefully micromanage the order of wall building.

You wanted a wall there? Sorry, that's a diagonal, you can't do that.  You deconstructed the wall that was in your way?  Now there's too much water coming and your pump operator can't keep up.

U MAD?

[i2amroy]

I'm fine dealing with aquifers, but what I don't like is spending 4 years in-game building some awesome underground device only to need to scrap it at the start of the fifth year because it turns out that a chunk of the design overlaps with an aquifer. So even though I can deal with them I prefer to not to. And as for fresh water, I always embark on either a river, brook, or place with adequate rainfall/pools to survive anyways, so it's not really a big deal to me.

[Panando]

Even the double-slit method can and will flop on its ass if you don't carefully micromanage the order of wall building.

You wanted a wall there? Sorry, that's a diagonal, you can't do that.  You deconstructed the wall that was in your way?  Now there's too much water coming and your pump operator can't keep up.

U MAD?

I've developed a variation on twin-slit which is far less micro-management intensive, you can do it blindfolded with a mild case of metal retardation. It's optimized for speed and sheer laziness, and there is basically two aspects which make it much faster and lazier:
1) QM's second method (for layers with aquifer below) is optimised to require no de-construction at all and far less construction.
2) To deal with the bottom layer, a cavern drain is installed as priority, since it's much much easier to work with aquifers with a drain below.

So far the only documentation is my video on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXQH9dliFZE

In the video, it only takes a little more than 5 minutes to get through the 2-layer aquifer. That's like, uh, 1/3rd of a season. I haven't timed QM's original method, but I know it's not nearly that fast.

It's possible to go through 1 layer aquifers in a couple of minutes on most maps. On cold maps, less than a minute. It's really all about knowing the techniques, then aquifers are a total pushover.

[Eric Blank]

I haven't had many problems with aquifers. Even when I knowingly embark on a map with an aquifer, I almost always just dig around it. Sometimes I have to actually search for it.

[krisslanza]

Aquifers are just too annoying for me. Until the day comes I can just dig through it normally, without worry, I'll probably just mod them out. I can never wrap my head around anything complex in this game. I just like building a big, sprawling town! Which never happens because I always die

[Guylock]

My first try with aquifiers was awesome, I took full advantage of it as a source of water, only problem was finding the right area to dig down for ore. XD

[Newbunkle]

Getting through them isn't hard, just tedious.

[Eric Blank]

I think I jinxed myself.

I just made a  new fort, and by autumn 5/7 of the starting seven are dead or insane, all because of the fucking aquifer water. Two of the dumbass miners and a migrant decided to fall in and drown, causing the rest to go bonkers about it. The farmer and a migrant marksdwarf got beaten to death by the woodsdwarf, who promptly went SRM, followed shortly by the craftsman going melancholy. So the only survivors are another miner and the smith/soldier. Gods forbid the soldier go berserk in the middle of the meeting hall full of migrants

I don't even know how they manage to do this... Except that maybe they fall in/walk down the ramp before it's filled with water and promptly decide that they must escape the water by returning to the meeting hall, meaning they try to take the shortest route to the hall, and the longest route out of the water.


Breaching the aquifer isn't hard. It isn't even normally dangerous. And if you use the cave-in/plug method, it's not even necessarily tedious.
The little bastards just insist on finding new ways to kill themselves in the least dangeorus situations.