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[Domicrow]

Hey, I recently made a new fort in a "Cold" environment and the river is frozen, its the middle of summer and it's still frozen. How do i unfreeze it?

[Eotyrannus]

There are two things to do. These, as the forums may already have told you, are booze and magma.

One removes the need for water, the other melts it. Just make sure it isn't exposed to the sky once you've melted it.

[They Got Leader]

You will need magma to cause the water to reach melting temperatures. If it is still facing the sky or have the tag "above ground" it might freeze again. I am not sure as I haven't ever tried to melt surface ice with magma.

[Jarnis]

In practice "you don't". If it's frozen year around, you need to dig into caverns (or tap the aquifer, tho I assume you don't have one) to get water.

For Dwarfs, water is luckily optional. Just have enough booze. You want to get some eventually tho, since injured dwarfs need it, but you can easily put it off until you breach the caverns.

[fricy]

Make sure that temperature is turned ON in the init files, then I suppose you'd have to dig a magma tunnel under the river.

[A_S00]

Note that magma under a river melts the ice wall on the z-level above it, but not the ice floor that gets created on the river's surface (which, even if you channel it out manually, will just form again if the biome is cold enough to freeze the river).  So, it works if you just want a source of water for your fortress, but it won't make your surface-level water wheels work.

Learned this the hard way after pumping magma up 100+ z-levels from the magma sea :\ .

[They Got Leader]

If you need to use waterwheels, there are solutions to this problem. The biggest thing is getting the water from the river to flow again. Once that has been accomplished, then everything is a lot easier.

[A_S00]

If you need to use waterwheels, there are solutions to this problem. The biggest thing is getting the water from the river to flow again. Once that has been accomplished, then everything is a lot easier.

Are there solutions that don't involve diverting water someplace underground?  If I can get the surface to melt that'd be pretty cool.

[They Got Leader]

The solution you will be looking for will not be a fun one. Is there a problem with moving the water underground? You can stop water pressure from flooding your fortress.

[wierd]

Exploity and dangerous...

Magma below the river bed unfreezes the water below the surface. Make sure temp is on.
Save. Quit. Turn off temp.
Load, channel off the ice cap top.

Ice may still reform on surface.

[doublestrafe]

I've melted a surface river in its entirety. It's not worth it.

I created a magma river that duplicated the path of the entire river, one z-level down. It melted beautifully when I filled it with magma. Once it was full of magma...it instantly froze again.

Angrily I started draining the magma river. To my surprise, I found that everywhere the magma was moving, the ice melted, only to refreeze the instant it was still for a heartbeat. The only way to have even sort-of unfrozen water aboveground is to keep magma moving underneath it. And even then, it will be patchy and keep thawing and freezing (making it incredibly deadly, probably more so than magma, to fall in).

This, by the way, kills your fps.

[They Got Leader]

I've melted a surface river in its entirety. It's not worth it.

I created a magma river that duplicated the path of the entire river, one z-level down. It melted beautifully when I filled it with magma. Once it was full of magma...it instantly froze again.

Angrily I started draining the magma river. To my surprise, I found that everywhere the magma was moving, the ice melted, only to refreeze the instant it was still for a heartbeat. The only way to have even sort-of unfrozen water aboveground is to keep magma moving underneath it. And even then, it will be patchy and keep thawing and freezing (making it incredibly deadly, probably more so than magma, to fall in).

This, by the way, kills your fps.

This also sounds like one of the most dwarven traps I have ever heard of. It is now your duty to weaponize it.

[wierd]

Magma safe floodgates and mechanisms.
Drainage conduit back to the magma sea.
Magma pumpstack.
Lever for the floodgates.


You now have on/offable magma flow beneath the ice, resulting in on/offable freezing moat.

[A_S00]

The solution you will be looking for will not be a fun one. Is there a problem with moving the water underground? You can stop water pressure from flooding your fortress.

I've already got plenty of running water underground; that's not the issue.

I've got the brook that runs across my map diverted up a pump stack tower and aqueducted across the map so that it falls as a waterfall through my hilltop (for cave adaptation) meeting area.  I did the same thing doublestrafe describes to try and keep my brook from freezing over in the winter, but like he says, even if you melt it, it just refreezes.  In my case, my magma is constantly moving (it gets pumped up from the magma sea flows off through fortifications carved into the map edge), so the brook melts again almost instantly, but the momentary freeze is enough to make an ice floor that lasts all winter.  Which prevents me from pumping any water out of it, and also (since it locks up my water wheels) unpowers all my mechanical stuff.

So not only does my waterfall not work during the winter, my millstone and my obsidian farm are out of commission, too .

Turning off temperature and channeling is a little bit too exploit-y for this fort; I'm trying to run it mostly sans cheating.

[Berossus]

Silly question, whats with magma above the ice?
Like in an artificially created, magma-safe channel?