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[StubbornAlcoholic]

Hey all, apologies to keep asking questions so much here, but this is my most ambitious engineering project so far and I definitely need veteran advice on it!

I'm trying to pump magma up from the magma sea in the caverns to the surface for the purpose of having a Boatmurdered style magma valve at the entrance of my fortress. Traps and the as-yet-unused-Ballista are fun, but I wanted a new flavour of lever-pulling-Goblin-burning-goodness

So far I think I've got a pump stack setup that should work (I melted a ton of Goblin gear and used the iron to build a load of pump components that seem to have the right orientation). I've also got power in the form of a couple of water wheels that I can link up.

However, I've just remembered that I have an aquifer layer that I breached when I first established the fort. Fortunately I remembered this right before I dug upwards stairs into it from below, so enormous fun was narrowly averted

Is there any way to get magma through this aquifer layer without flooding myself to death? I know water and magma can combine to make obsidian, but I can't see how that helps at all for the purpose of punching into it from below...

[fractalman]

If you have a really good computer and plenty of dwarf power, you can use an evaporation zone to deal with the water.  Or you can run the water into the caverns.  Or you can hunt for a way around it. 


or you can use one of the ways to punch through an aquifer from above. 

[i2amroy]

Use minecarts to collect magma by hand and haul it up to the surface. Then use channeling on the layer above the aquifer to create a square large enough to run all of your magma pipes (plus a border, so go 2 larger in each direction then you think you will need), through and use the magma to obsidianize it. Then dig out all of the obsidian except for the border. Repeat on the next layer down until you have made your way through the entire aquifer (note, each level will be 2 smaller on each dimension then the level above it, so if you have multiple levels be sure to plan accordingly).

[laularukyrumo]

If you drain the aquifer into the caverns, you can strip-mine the entire aquifer. I almost did this on one of my forts because of the wacky shape of the aquifer, but it happened to extend down ten Z-levels, so I said "fuck it".

[Lich180]

If you have a shallow aquifer and 2 levels or more of non-aquifer soil/stone, you can always use the old standby cave-in method to penetrate the aquifer. I did this on my magma bunker project, and it worked quite well.

[gchristopher]

Use minecarts to collect magma by hand and haul it up to the surface. Then use channeling on the layer above the aquifer to create a square large enough to run all of your magma pipes (plus a border, so go 2 larger in each direction then you think you will need), through and use the magma to obsidianize it. Then dig out all of the obsidian except for the border. Repeat on the next layer down until you have made your way through the entire aquifer (note, each level will be 2 smaller on each dimension then the level above it, so if you have multiple levels be sure to plan accordingly).

You don't need to have a shrinking border for a large aquifer piercing.

You can either use an approach like the 2-slit method for just about any shape, or dig out the entire shape as up/down staircases, then pour obsidian to cast the walls, one square at a time.

I'll post specifics, but first, StubbornAlcoholic, could you maybe post the exact shape you'd like your aquifer piercing to be? Pretty much any size and shape is possible.

[Sutremaine]

I honestly don't understand the problem here. You got through the aquifer once to get through the magma, so what's stopping you from repeating the process in the area with the pump stack?

[StubbornAlcoholic]

I honestly don't understand the problem here. You got through the aquifer once to get through the magma, so what's stopping you from repeating the process in the area with the pump stack?

Firstly, flooding! Turns out my cheeky miners still dug out a staircase into the acquifer I forgot I dedicated...one painstakingly boarded up storeroom later and I'm finally back to the drawing board.

I think you're correct though, I could indeed dig down separately from the surface and that'll be the first solution I try. I've never worked with pumps before though, plus my aquifer experience is limited, so I just wondered if there were any tricks I was missing. For example, I'd never have thought of minecarts to do the same sort of job, so I may experiment with that now

[Gigaz]

I assume that you have enough dwarfpower, because a magma pump stack is usually not the first thing a fortress needs. I've done what you are planning and I think the easiest way is to pierce the aquifer from above with pumps.