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[RedEthmoid]

I made a hospital that I think is equipped with everything it needs, except a fresh water source.  There is a river not too far from the hospital.  I was wondering if it would work to somehow channel the water from the river into a pool in the hospital.  I'm still learning the complexities of the game, and I'm not sure how I can do this, assuming its possible.  If anyone can show me I'd appreciate it.  I'll try to screen cap the hospital and river for reference.

http://postimg.org/image/ds7gnzmhz/

[Broseph Stalin]

Use c(h)annel to dig down one z and (d)ig a path directly under the river then use (r)amp to break through the bottom. The water will fill the path you dug and will be accessible from the hole you made in the hospital. Of course if you get an enemy that can swim your hospital is a security risk. That's assuming you want a direct connection. You could also get water by digging a hole and making a zone over top of it. If you designate the zone as a pond dwarves will automatically use buckets of water to fill it. 

[Skullsploder]

Ok, this may seem kinda complex but trust me it's really not that hard. The instructions I'm about to give you will result in a completely secure, automatically and instantly refilled well in your hospital.

What you need to do is a process with several steps. First, choose the location of the well in your hospital. Dig a channel on that tile. Next, from the bottom of the hole, dig one tile diagonally. Like this:

Code: [Select]

oooo
oRoo
oo+o
oooo

Where R is the ramp and + is the tile you've just dug out. From that tile, make a tunnel to the river. Here comes the trickier bit. What you needa do is make a building destroyer-proof u-bend. How you do that is you dig this under the river, without actually breaching the riverbed yet:

Code: [Select]

~~~~~
_GoXo
oX_Xo
ooooo

The hospital is to the left and the ~ represent the river. _ is a floor and X is a staircase. G is a floor grate over a down staircase. Link the grate to a lever with mechanisms and then open it. Then get your dwarf to dig a down staircase in the riverbed above the staircase on the right. Once he's done that, the water will slowly come down and he'll have plenty of time to escape. Once he's out, toggle the lever and close the grate. Building destroyers won't be able to destroy it from below, so your hospital will never have alligators come in through the well.

[RedEthmoid]

Thanks for the replies, I'll try these out

[Skullsploder]

oops sorry forgot to mention that in those diagrams the first is top view and the second is side view.

[NW_Kohaku]

For reference, the trick is that building destroyers have to be on the same floor as the target building to be destroyed.  A grate that is only accessible from below is impervious to building destroyers. If you dig another tile deeper, put the grate a further tile down, and make that diagonal (which "cuts the pressure", and prevents flooding further up than that point) on the river-side on the floor with the grate,  you should also be able to construct a well, instead of an ordinary water source. 

Also, for future embarks, you don't need a river for this.  You can also tap the caverns (but would likely need a pump stack or minecart setup to get water back up to where you want it), where you would want to be doubly sure of preventing building destroyers, tap a murky pool (you can easily just drain the water into a reservoir the same size as the pool, and then have a pump pull water up a floor to a well to de-stagnate the water,) two floors below the or you can tap an aquifer, which is my preferred method of infinite water from a 100% secure source.  If you don't like having two (or more) layers denied to you, embark on an "edge" embark where some of the biomes don't have aquifers, and you can just dig around the aquifer.  (Aquifers are really not nearly as scary as people make them out to be.  If something starts flooding, you can generally have your miner dig a drain faster than the water fills up. Not that keeping an emergency drain - with grate - to the caverns isn't a bad idea if you're starting out, though.)

[Montieth]

If you want clean water the most sure fire way is to route the water to a holding basin that you fill with a lever operated bridge. This eliminates any chances of unwelcome guests pathing into your fort that way. The holding basin has a manually operated pump that you use to fill your primary use cisterns that you locate under your main meeting hall and if you desire, under your hospital. Always leave a path out of the cisterns should your dwarves somehow manage to fall down the wells. Stairs to a dry area and a hatch iut of that.

The filling channel for the initial holding basin of dirty water is best build/dug then smoothed and then connected to the source so anything that does try to path has to be able to swim deeply. Ie connect it to the river via a 1-2 v level path. Digging a ramp up to the river works well.

 Do NOT put a well near a sparring location. I had two high level fighters dodge into the well and drown. That was annoying.

[angelious]

Use c(h)annel to dig down one z and (d)ig a path directly under the river then use (r)amp to break through the bottom. The water will fill the path you dug and will be accessible from the hole you made in the hospital. Of course if you get an enemy that can swim your hospital is a security risk. That's assuming you want a direct connection. You could also get water by digging a hole and making a zone over top of it. If you designate the zone as a pond dwarves will automatically use buckets of water to fill it.

build a floodgate and a large underground cavern where you will let the water flow. also if you just leave the river open like that it might flood your entire fort. so this eliminates two very annoying problems.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, remember that, topographically speaking, a well is actually just an empty tile with some perks for the people standing next to it.  I always put my wells in little alcoves where there is no reason to path except to get to the well.  Babies have an insane capacity to get themselves thrown down into wells.  (Natural selection at its finest!)

Also, keep in mind that water traveling downhill is pressurized (unless cut with a diagonal), so you can actually have a much safer tap into a river by only digging into it horizontally.  If you have a deep riverbed, this can be achieved easily while still underground. (Even on flat land, just digging one z below the surface is on water-level, you'll just need to either build the hospital 1 z above the water somewhere in a hill, or make a dip with a pressure cutter elsewhere.) In a tunnel to the river, link a drawbridge to a lever to have an impassible barrier inside the passage to stop 'gators or titans.  You might want to dig a drain with a hatch/bridge to the edge of the map (engrave fortifications on the edge to make a water outflow) to "flush" the system for emergencies.  You might also want to build stone roads along the cistern and drain to prevent tower cap growth.  Then, you have a lever for inflow, which can be closed into an impassible barrier, and a lever for outflow if you ever want to expand your cistern. 

By having non-pressurized water, your dwarf can generally out-WALK the water flow, negating danger.  (Just make sure they have some other job to do with a slightly lower priority so they run off to do it immediately after digging.) You can also still just channel the last tile from above/outside, which will make the breach tile an outside tile, so that mushrooms don't grow in that one last tile.

[Dampe]

I think water supply should work like vaguely the witch trials of old.
Flood the hospital with water.
Any dwarf who survives is healthy enough to go back to work.

[Albedo]

I would also STRONGLY suggest that you take the time to put a Floodgate in there somewhere, just in case!

(Construct Floodgate in Mason's shop, +3 Mechanisms in Mechanic's shop.  Place your Lever {b, T, l} somewhere near the floodgate but ABOVE any possible flooding level, and then add a task {q, a}  to that lever to "link to floodgate" - you'll get a list of all floodgates you have placed, just choose that one.

After you're done but BEFORE you add water, pull the lever and see if it works, then do it again. Make sure there are no loose stones upstream that can block it, then carve out your water access.

(Altho' a dwarf can outrun most water, if you want zero risk to your miner, dig a staircase up next to the river and, when all is ready, just Channel out a wet canal to the stairs. Good practice for later when working w/ magma.)

[Albedo]

Yeah, remember that, topographically speaking, a well is actually just an empty tile with some perks for the people standing next to it.  I always put my wells in little alcoves where there is no reason to path except to get to the well.  Babies have an insane capacity to get themselves thrown down into wells.  (Natural selection at its finest!)

Yeah, on this note, I always try to make my 3x3 cistern (holding pond for water) with Ramps around the center tile immediately below the well shaft, so anyone who does fall has 360^o of options to climb out.

(It's also reported that deeper water can reduce injuries, so I channel out that central tile an extra z-level down. Meh, can't hurt.)

Also, remember that water needs to be TWO z-levels below the well level.

See:
o http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Well
o http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Well_guide
o http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Pressure#Plumbing_Schemes "Safe Well" schematic

For advanced reading and creating your own disasters designs:
o http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Pressure

[NW_Kohaku]

Rather than a cumbersome floodgate, I actually prefer doors. 

Doors are water-(and even magma-)proof  when closed. They have the added advantage of being lockable and unlockable at your leisure, rather than requiring mechanisms and a dwarf actually getting around to pulling the lever.  Non-wooden ones will break to [BUILDING_DESTROYER:2], but so will floodgates. 

You can use doors as part of your clever "outrun the flood" methods by simply having the dwarf dig the breaching tile from a doorway, and then shut the door behind them when they leave.  You can wall the door in behind you, later. 

Doors and hatches also make excellent emergency flood control measures - doors in major hallways, and hatches in stairways turn fortress-ending floods into merely severely inconvenient floods of a small section of a single portion of your fort.  (And a watery tomb for 2-4 dwarves.)

There are aquifer breach methods that largely rely upon simply installing a hatch for this reason. 

[Skullsploder]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Rather than a cumbersome floodgate, I actually prefer doors. 

Doors are water-(and even magma-)proof  when closed. They have the added advantage of being lockable and unlockable at your leisure, rather than requiring mechanisms and a dwarf actually getting around to pulling the lever.  Non-wooden ones will break to [BUILDING_DESTROYER:2], but so will floodgates. 

You can use doors as part of your clever "outrun the flood" methods by simply having the dwarf dig the breaching tile from a doorway, and then shut the door behind them when they leave.  You can wall the door in behind you, later. 

Doors and hatches also make excellent emergency flood control measures - doors in major hallways, and hatches in stairways turn fortress-ending floods into merely severely inconvenient floods of a small section of a single portion of your fort.  (And a watery tomb for 2-4 dwarves.)

There are aquifer breach methods that largely rely upon simply installing a hatch for this reason. 

I would also STRONGLY suggest that you take the time to put a Floodgate in there somewhere, just in case!

(Construct Floodgate in Mason's shop, +3 Mechanisms in Mechanic's shop.  Place your Lever {b, T, l} somewhere near the floodgate but ABOVE any possible flooding level, and then add a task {q, a}  to that lever to "link to floodgate" - you'll get a list of all floodgates you have placed, just choose that one.

After you're done but BEFORE you add water, pull the lever and see if it works, then do it again. Make sure there are no loose stones upstream that can block it, then carve out your water access.

(Altho' a dwarf can outrun most water, if you want zero risk to your miner, dig a staircase up next to the river and, when all is ready, just Channel out a wet canal to the stairs. Good practice for later when working w/ magma.)

>using floodgates and doors
>furniture
>absolutely disgusting

Sorry I couldn't resist you can take the anon from the imageboards but you can't take the imageboards from the anon. But seriously, if you want the option to block off the water later, DO NOT USE A DOOR OR FLOODGATE. Use a raising bridge. That way, instead of your emergency shut off system being blocked by a dead turtle, it will pulverise any inanimate object in its way, and any animate object smaller than a giant moose too IIRC.

[Albedo]

Experience has spoken.

<bows to experience>