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[kenpoaj]

I've been thinking of making a waterfall shower around my main stairwell, but to avoid the fps hit of water draining out the side of the caverns, I was wondering if its possible to collapse some aquifer tiles down to the cavern level so they can absorb the falling water. Has anyone tried this? If not, Ill be trying it out this weekend.

The cheat solution would be to use dfhack to designate river source tiles down there but I'd like to do it in proper dwarven fashion; putting lives at risk during construction.

[wierd]

I dont understand... waterfalls eat up FPS worse than draining water off the map does...

[kenpoaj]

Part of it is that i just want to have zero waterflow on the bottom floor. But does the reason matter all that much? Dropping an aquifer to the cavern for science if no one has done it before seems like a necessity!

[evictedSaint]

Let's see...not only would you have to breach an aquifer, you would also have to cut out a chunk of aquifer and drop it into the cavern, with a wall to capture the flooding from the edges of the chunk.  Then, you'd have a waterfall from the hole you cut, and to top it off I'm not 100% sure an aquifer maintains its aquifer status when it drops.

[kenpoaj]

That last part is the only detail that concerns me at the moment. The bleeding edge problem is solvable.  The containment at the bottom is trivial. I'll do it this weekend and update or make a new post with the results.

[i2amroy]

IIRC aquifers lose their properties during cave-ins.

That said if you really plan to do this just designate a tunnel with edge width = to your outflowing aquifer tiles and use it as an exit drain. Assuming everything balances right the only tiles that require calculation should be the very edge tiles at the start of the waterfall and the edge of the map, so it shouldn't cause any more lag than an average river should. The key is that you will need to balance the outflow with the inflow just right so that everything fills up to 7/7 instead of either less than 7/7 which requires more processing or overflowing to fill up the whole cavern.

[milo christiansen]

Make your catch basin and drain more than one z-level tall with a one z tunnel connecting them, that way the tunnel will always be full and pressure will make any "overflow" drain out the upper level of the drain. If that makes any sense?

Water falls from above slightly faster than a single z-level of drain can take it away, when the second z-level starts to fill water will be teleported to the second z-level in the drain area, thereby giving a minimum of flow calculations. It would be a good idea to make your catch basin taller than you think you will need just in case...

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Side view:

<space> = open space
d = map edge drain
. = solid block

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