You find aquifers almost everywhere.
Most players don't embark on them, however, so that's not a terribly good argument.
The fact that almost all caverns have infinite water so long as one of the cavern lakes touches a border is a better argument.
Beyond that, brooks are not hard to find, and easy to embark over. Evil biomes exist
specifically to make embarks harder, and people embark on glaciers for much the same reason - making a desert hard to survive in wouldn't be a bad thing in and of itself.
Taptap, I'm with you entirely. Water should be a requirement for beer, ale, and mead. Wine and other fermented juices don't require water, leaving early fortresses and desert fortresses with just a few less options.
I don't understand why this isn't a more popular suggestion. I've sent a question about it to Toady for the next Fortress Talk, we'll see if it comes up.
Farming requiring water is actually on the devpages, now, thanks to Improved Farming winning 10th place in the Eternal Suggestions poll. (It's just been there since 2010, and no real progress has been made...)
Farming Improvements
- Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
- Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
- Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
- Weeds
- More pests
In the revised thread, there's
a large section on water usage, as well.
(To give the short of it, the thread's idea also includes making currently infinite water sources have finite amounts per year so that a brook isn't more water than you will ever need.)
If there's anything keeping the concept from being "popular", it's just the sheer size of the threads. The original Improved Farming thread has the most posts of any thread in the Suggestions Forum. After I finally went and wrote the revised thread to collate all the ideas in the original thread into a single, cohesive idea, it was so large, few people were willing to read it.
As for the thread's original idea, realistically, wines made from fruit (or fruit-like magical things) would not require water to brew, while beers would. The fruits just have enough water already in them (usually) to perform the brewing process on their own.
This could be counter-balanced by simply making those fruits require more water to farm in the first place.
Provided we have above-ground farming where rain can naturally keep the soil moist, that introduces more problems for underground farming in general, which should help be a bit more of a challenge.
One thing I'd also like to see, however, is brewing that isn't instantaneous. You don't stand in front of a keg of whiskey doing something for a full two years of that aging process.