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Author Topic: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning  (Read 4210 times)

PaleBlueHammer

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Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« on: August 08, 2013, 04:38:52 pm »

I've been on a DF hiatus for a while now waiting for the new version to drop, but that still seems a bit down the road so today I'm diving into a new fortress plan.  Before I begin, I'm hoping someone may have devised a coherent plan for efficiently removing syndrome-causing blood and debris.  I've lost more forts to syndrome than to any other catastrophe, and I'd love a dwarfy way of dealing with it.

The wiki has it right:  http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Cleaning  Bathtubs alone tend to make things worse, not better, because if they're positioned in a manner to clean all/most Urists then they're by default high traffic areas, and then you infect everyone and everything.  It's necessary to completely remove the syndrome-laced blood from the map (or at very least into a never-traveled area, perhaps into an atom smasher).

Failed attempt #1: a mister/waterfall flowing through floor grates, into a cistern that flows off the map through fortifications carved on the edge.  Problem: syndrome contaminants do not fall through grates like water does.  It piles up instead, and mist did not destroy the contaminants (for me, anyway, in 34.11).

Failed attempt #2: a bath with moving water in it, which will slowly wash the stuff away.  Problem: moving water washes lots of stuff away, including dwarves, pets, etc, and deposits them into the same pile of goo I wanted to avoid.  If allowed to escape, they are syndrome time bombs; if allowed to die, all sorts of bad things begin to pile up, what with corpse retrieval and so on.

I strongly suspect that wall grates and bars will act identically to floor grates, and disallow blood and goo from moving through them.

Who has a good solution to this problem?


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Tirion

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2013, 04:47:59 pm »

How about moving water but with pumps instead of flowing down? It might purify the water...
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PaleBlueHammer

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #2 on: August 08, 2013, 04:56:04 pm »

How about moving water but with pumps instead of flowing down? It might purify the water...

Hmm.  Will blood get sucked into a pump?  I suppose that's the question.
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itg

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #3 on: August 08, 2013, 05:09:47 pm »

In my experience, well-clothed dwarves don't need to worry too much about environmental contaminants. The problem seems to be changing clothes. When an idiot dwarf wants new shoes, he wants them NOW, and nothing less will do. He'd rather walk through two hundred yards of bloody vomit than grant his X=shoes=X the honor of protecting his feet, and that's when Fun happens. So, maybe you could try armoring all your dwarves?

wierd

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #4 on: August 08, 2013, 05:20:05 pm »

Slow current off edge of map, flowing through bathtub?

DON'T use grate. Use fortification.

Dwarf won't pass fortification, water current will, contaminant 'might'?

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Repseki

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #5 on: August 08, 2013, 06:10:16 pm »

You could probably have a closed system if you use a pump taking water away from a dipping channel, since it should clean the water that goes through it. I would think anything on the walls would eventually get washed away, but that might be completely wrong.

Figuring out the size/amount of water to keep things pumping without hindering movement might also take some tweaking.
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Lich180

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #6 on: August 08, 2013, 06:56:31 pm »

I think I saw someone who burrowed dwarves next to the bath, with all labors except cleaning off and their own personal dining and bedrooms so they were always active, and could only take the cleaning job. Don't remember much else though...
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Button

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #7 on: August 08, 2013, 07:26:41 pm »

This is a setup I've found works relatively well:

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I set the pressure plate to trigger when the water level is at 1 or below, and link it to the door just to the north of it. I set the area up on the top level around the water wheel as pond zones, and let my dwarves fill it by hand (though you could easily set up an automatic fill if you have an aquifer or something). Then whenever I want to clean the tub, I just queue a pump job on that screw pump there. It reduces the water level in the bath, which opens the door to the reservoir, which powers the water wheel, which powers the pump. The flowing water pulls the contaminants over to the no-reason-to-traverse-it grate - which I also Restrict - and out of the ramp area. Eventually enough water in the system is destroyed by  the door closing that the water wheel stops moving, so the pump stops pumping and the functional part of the bathtub settles down. Throughout the whole process the water level in the tub remains at a traversable level, so you don't need to shut down the hallway during a cleaning.

(The grate is just there to keep dwarves from pathing through the contaminant-filled part of the bath to get to the screw pump when I enable the job.)
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deepdowner

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #8 on: August 08, 2013, 07:43:09 pm »

If I understand correctly, the problem is that catching stuff will get spread with the dwarves running through the tub, and you can't flush it down properly because grates hold won't let the bad stuff pass through?

So why not a toilet-flush device?
3x3 or so squares with waterbath to wade through. The water flows, and after the passing area narrows down to a 1 square wide channel, maybe 10 deep into the stone. Every water tile has floor hatches, and on the edge to the dry area are draw bridges.

Once in a while Urist pulls lever F (flush) > drawbridges raise, water fills area up to 7/7, floor hatches open and drop all the dirtwater down a few z levels. Close the floor hatches, lower the drawbridges, profit?
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wierd

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #9 on: August 08, 2013, 07:52:13 pm »

Contaminants cling to surfaces. :(

I would really like for there to be a contaminant overhaul sometime, where high pressure water will not leave mud, and will instead blast contaminants off walls and floors.

I am going to see if contaminants get trapped by fortifications though. I haven't heard a definitive yes/no on those. Grates deffinately stop contaminants, but I don't know about fortification slits.

Toilet flush is an interesting idea, but I worry about "tidybowl dwarf" ending up where the US economy and moral conscience went. (Oops..political. sorry.)

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PaleBlueHammer

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #10 on: August 08, 2013, 09:28:19 pm »

@Button, that's a mighty dwarfy setup right there.

I wonder if I could get a constant SLOW stream of water moving that never rises above 4/7.  That way the contaminants will wash away on their own, albeit slowly.  Diagonals maybe, but the right flow would be hard to achieve.
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If adamantine is revealed for more then 2 years without being completely mined it all turns into galena. Useless, Useless Galena.

0cu

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #11 on: August 09, 2013, 12:27:30 am »

With the cleaning labor not functioning at all, I don't hesitate to use DFHack's "clean map". No chance I want to lose half of my fort because of a damn bug.

@topic: I've read somewhere, that a dwarven bathtub combined with a mist generator will clean your dwarves properly.
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Button

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #12 on: August 09, 2013, 08:49:44 am »

@Button, that's a mighty dwarfy setup right there.

I wonder if I could get a constant SLOW stream of water moving that never rises above 4/7.  That way the contaminants will wash away on their own, albeit slowly.  Diagonals maybe, but the right flow would be hard to achieve.

Thanks, but since it relies on haulers for refill I wouldn't quite say it's dwarfy :).

If you modified my setup to have the water intake come from an aquifer and the pump pump away into a drain, you could keep it going indefinitely and it would never rise above 4/7. (Whenever the water is flowing in, the pump is pumping out.) It would be a little fast but nothing the dwarves couldn't handle.

That said, flowing water can be a huge fps drain so exercise caution.
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Ravendarksky

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #13 on: August 09, 2013, 09:09:34 am »

May I suggest magma? Dwarf bath/obsidian generator seems pretty good to me.

:)
Or how about simply having a large bridge atom smash the water whenever you want to clean your tub?
Suggest you use a infinite water source so refilling isn't a pain
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Kaos

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Re: Revisiting my achilles heel: Baths and cleaning
« Reply #14 on: August 09, 2013, 10:09:09 am »

I don't get what the problem is here, last time (31.25) I tried a dwarven bathtub, I basically just dug a 1 tile wide channel on my main hallway, had it fill up to 3/7 with water using bucket brigade and it worked like a charm.

On the outside there was an evil rain, my dwarves would get covered in the muck, get inside, pass through the flooded channel and they would drop all the muck on the channel and get a coating of water all over, even when the water was already contaminated they would still leave with a water covering, so where's the problem here?
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