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[Moogie]

...that you've made a terrible mistake.



What happened: Winter arrived. One river froze. The other didn't. My tunnel of mist-enabling fortifications is now an unpluggable array of fortress-flooding evil.

I welcome any and all suggestions for survival.

[Madventurer]

I suggest the only true solution to everything.

Magma.

[Vattic]

A careful cave-in may be able to plug the flood.

[Moogie]

No go. The full fury of an entire major river flooded everything in minutes. I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.

Lesson learnt: wait at least 1 full year before getting any bright ideas about river manipulation!

[Camulus]

Urist cancels give water: Drowning.

[taptap]

Look how much water you have to expect, how much keeps coming continuously and where it ends up. Plan from there. A few doors / hatches, emergency drainage etc. can do wonders in the short term, you can also plug (when no magma or cave-in material are available) by construction if / once flow is low enough.

Recovering a partly flooded fortress is actually fun, but you need to survive.

[Chief10]

Can you further explain how this happened? I don't understand how partial freezing punctured your fortress.

[Zac]

He punctered the fortress himself to allow the mist to enter his corridors. Then the bottom of the waterfall froze while water was still pouring from the top, raising the level and flooding the fort.

[Wheeljack]

That is a very nifty idea! Too bad mother nature decided to mess with you. If you still have dwarves, you could wait for the spring thaw. Some of that water should drain back out and then you'll have a better idea of how to unflood the rest.

[Moogie]

He punctered the fortress himself to allow the mist to enter his corridors. Then the bottom of the waterfall froze while water was still pouring from the top, raising the level and flooding the fort.

^ This. The adjoining river sections kept building new Z-levels of ice walls as the level of water rose, so there was literally no other place for it to flow but in.

[StagnantSoul]

Urist cancels give water: Drowning.

...Can I sig that? That made me laugh for six minutes straight.

[Calidovi]

Ah, the glorious chill of winter brings about the thawing of rivers.

Nature is wondrous.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

OP, get them doors ready. Sacrifice dwarves to Armok for a bountiful harvest and a fertile population after this ordeal is over.

[Naryar]

anything where you tap (willingly or unwillingly) a source of water above/at the same level as your fortress is a recipe for fun.

Also, confusing how you make water works with how you make magma works is equally fun. Had a fun reminder pressure exists in water.

[Callista]

Reestablish fort above river level. Burrow dwarves to enforce this. (You may have to become surface dwellers. Start periodic ear checks for your dwarves; pointy means elf in disguise. You can never be too sure.)

Plug the flooded area. Ever used the plug method to get through an aquifer? Same principle. Cave-in a plug to close the area.

If this doesn't work, or if you can't get a plug shaped the right way, try using a plug for most of the space and using screw pumps to clear out the rest so your masons can build walls to keep the rest of the water out.

If all else fails, abandon the flooded area for the long term, build a fort elsewhere, dig to expose your old fort to the outdoors, and dig away the ice when it freezes next winter.

Or just abandon the old fort entirely. To save on FPS, you may wish to use dfhack to get rid of what you would normally wall off--just fill it in with solid rock (tiletypes), dump and destroy (select the items, then autodump destroy) all the items in it, and hope someone managed to salvage a pick.

Yeah, I'm recommending dfhack. I have a slow computer, I love the ability to just delete excess items instead of forbidding and ignoring them, and I honestly don't care that it lowers my fortress value 'cause that goes to the ceiling anyway the second you discover candy.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I love flooding mechanics in DF. In one fort, I was using these massive vertical tubes to connect levels and I had part of a stream diverted to use as a well on the lowest level (the smithy), needless to say the smithy and related areas filled up quickly, turning a big part of my fort in to this crazy, flooded, tolkien-esque lost hall. It was pretty sweet.