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[mscantrell]

I liked this embark- it's the confluence of three rivers, which I've seen before, but this is my first embark where the rivers are separated by about 5 Z-levels each.

And it's just crawling with unicorns, which is delightful. My soldiers have unicorn leather shields and I'm confident before too long here I'll have a unicorn bone artifact.

v
But here's my problem. I have 18 dead dwarves and counting at the bottom of this waterfall. (Half my peafowl flock is down there too, but that's not as significant
.)


When I embarked, I thought to myself, "Self, you've got abundant rivers. You should divert the top river through your dining room and keep those dwarves giddy from the word go. In the past, you waited a while and then retrofitted. This time, why don't you do it first?"

So I did. I dug out the dining room.
Then I dug out a four-way split above it, because if you're going to make one waterfall you might as well make four.
I blocked it with a lever-activated door so I could turn off the water for both initial setup and later maintenance.
I placed four grates over the openings to keep out snapping turtles.
Here's the split above the dining room:


The dining room itself has four rock grates on the four holes in the floor so the water drains away. The whole place fills with mud and mist, and all my dwarves are ecstatic. Except the dead ones at the bottom of the waterfall.


Below the dining room, the water runs out the side of the cliff and rejoins the river.


For a while, I thought the dwarves must be jumping into the dangerous part of the river whenever enough water went down toward the dining room to leave the riverbed on the surface walkable. Then when it fluctuated back up to a high point, it must be sweeping them off.
So I built the bridge you see in the first photo.
Attrition continued, so I built the wall along the right side of the bridge.
The kids are still getting washed away, so I'm starting to think they must be getting forced through the grates by water pressure?
I thought that was only fortifications, under serious pressure? No? Are they washing out of the dining room? Am I flushing my dwarves down the drain?

If so, what's the solution?

(To add a little complexity, it seems that a tantruming dwarf destroyed the off lever, so stopping the water won't be the piece of cake I planned on.)

Thanks, guys!

                             **

[Starver]

To me, this (and all the others) say "Sorry, this person moved or deleted this message."  Not sure what the reason is (rights? case-sensitivity?) as I don't use photobucket (I tend to go for tinypic.com, which doesn't give as nice a URL but works nicely).

Not sure if it's the same for everyone else (or if it'll stay as broken for me even), but you might want to check that right now.

(edit: Corrected my own tag-typo, now that I see you've sorted your own params.)

[Seraphim342]

Images aren't displaying for me, either. 

[mscantrell]

Dag nabbit, photobucket links are case sensitive?

[TruePikachu]

No images over here. I checked, and the tags _are_ in the message. I don't know if it has to do with the fact that the MIME type of the "image" is Text/HTML (I had Firefox load the source for the page, and it is definitly HTML).

Here are the links:
http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w508/cantrelladjusting/df/surface.jpg
http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w508/cantrelladjusting/df/riverbottom.jpg
http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w508/cantrelladjusting/df/abovediningroom.jpg
http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w508/cantrelladjusting/df/diningroom.jpg
http://i1079.photobucket.com/albums/w508/cantrelladjusting/df/belowdiningroom.jpg

EDIT: Also, you wiped the original post now...

[Urist Da Vinci]

Water can't push things through floor grates. Fortifications and wall grates are fair game though.

EDIT: Image links provoke 404 errors

[TruePikachu]

Dag nabbit, photobucket links are case sensitive?

Apparently so, those links are all 404s

EDIT: I would recommend use of the Preview functionality that the forum has, rather than saving time and time again.

[slink]

The first image still has the word "was" inserted into the word "albums", and should be lowercase "surface".

I don't think they are washing out through the grates, but are they drinking from the river or crossing it to the NW?  Dwarves are notoriously bad at using the safer route across a bridge when they can't see any danger in running through the river somewhere else.

[mscantrell]

Ok finally got it,  sorry for the trouble.

They ought not be drinking from the river- there's plenty of booze and a well in the dining room too.

Oh, wait, are they falling down the well? Why the world would that happen?

[mal7690]

Very clumsy dorfs sometimes do fall down wells and usually get their fat but apparently porous behinds stuck halfway down, but not that many.  Best guess is they are crossing somewhere there is a hole into the river or by the waterfall, getting spooked by something random and dive into the water like little boozy lemmings.

[Starver]

If you (OP) either use the cursor to inspect the river or turn on "Show depths as values", you'll probably find out that there's fluctuating values of water which some dwarves will decide they can path through, only to be caught out by the current once they are actually in there.

With tapping away some of the water, like you did, you may have created another lull in the levels, apart from the usual smattering around the waterfall  (Toady put ramps in rivers in one release and then very quickly ensured that ramps did not for the three or four tiles closest to waterfalls because of the problem that arose.  Your bridges probably mitigate that (because even Toady's solution isn't perfect), but may not cover somewhere else that looks like a temptingly handy path, transiently.

[QuantumMenace]

Do you have any combat reports of dwarves or peafowl colliding with obstacles? If so, you should be able to zoom to wherever they hit the bottom of the river.

[pisskop]

If you (OP) either use the cursor to inspect the river or turn on "Show depths as values", you'll probably find out that there's fluctuating values of water which some dwarves will decide they can path through, only to be caught out by the current once they are actually in there.

With tapping away some of the water, like you did, you may have created another lull in the levels, apart from the usual smattering around the waterfall  (Toady put ramps in rivers in one release and then very quickly ensured that ramps did not for the three or four tiles closest to waterfalls because of the problem that arose.  Your bridges probably mitigate that (because even Toady's solution isn't perfect), but may not cover somewhere else that looks like a temptingly handy path, transiently.

This.  Try restricting access by the offending water.  Or try Walling off what you can.

[TheCoolSideofthePIllow]

Yeah. I have had the same problem, OP. I love those types of sites, but you need to be very mindful to be sure your dwarves (especially hunters and fishers) don't go near the rivers or falls. Even on a regular river, it can be perilous. I have a completely flat embark site currently with 2 rivers forming a sweet little island. I've lost 2 dwarves (well, one was an infant) because they fell off the drawbridge and couldn't (or wouldn't) swim out.

[Seraphim342]

If the water level around the bridge drops to less than 4/7, dwarves will try to path through it.  They can still be caught in the current and dragged into deeper water, though.  If your waterfall device is causing the branch of the river you're taking it from to do this, that's probably your problem.

Never had a dwarf pushed through a floor grate, myself, but I don't see it as impossible, given that they can be pushed through wall grates and fortifications which are a full tile rather than an insignificant (in terms of movement) floor.  It seems to me your waterfall has no pressure reduction, which could cause this.  Make the water flow through a diagonal before you have it drop down into your dining room, that'll neutralize the pressure.