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[10terrapin01]

So my fort has been running for quite a while and the main path through snakes over a river.  Unfortunately some dwarves have decided that life isn't worth living and have decided to leap off some of the bridges.  While I have engraved slabs to stave off ghosts, dwarves are getting upset seeing a river filled with their drowned brethren.  The river does not freeze during winter.  Any tips for how to remove the bodies?

(There are 12 dwarf-corpses in the river in 8 locations.  Bodies.  Everywhere.)

[Immortal-D]

There are 2 solutions to this problem that I employ with pretty good results.

1. Pave over the bodies.  Build floor tiles over the offending corpses, and they should be hidden from your Dwarve's view.

2. Use pumps to drain small sections of the river, then build walls.  This will allow you to safely dig your way into the river bed and retrieve the corpses.

[PatrikLundell]

Pumping in open water is tricky because the pumped out water generate waves that can sweep the pumper into the water, so additional walls are needed to avoid that. You could also send the pumped water off the map to avoid waves.
Another alternative is to use magma to obsidianize the water around each body, then pump the water out to retrieve the body (but I think you need two tile holes, as I don't think you can build stairs on top of the body. This goes for the pure pumping approach as well).

I'd guess the dead dorfs tried to dodge something that attacked them. If so, building walls on the bridges could reduce the frequency (there is still quantum mechanical dodge tunneling, but a thickness of 3 is probably sufficient to stave off all of them). You could also try to eliminate the cause of the dodges.

[miauw62]

I don't think he actually needs the bodies, so just obsidianizing them would probably work.

[vanatteveldt]

I think the easiest way to dam a river is by using water wheels to drive pumps that pump the water upstream (back into the river).

I'll try to setup a working example, one minute

Edit: three lessons learned: (1) pumps need to be 5 tiles from edge; (2) you should wall off the upstream section with bridges; (3) the water wheels should not be downstream from the pumps (all pretty obvious, I guess)
Edit: more lessons: (1) it's easier to build walls than to build a bridge (2) manual pumping goes well until the dwarves decide it's bedtime - causing the people building the dam to be drowned

OK, I figured it out, and since there didn't seem to be a good wiki article I made one: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Damming

[taptap]

1) With a few additional works (walls to guide the pumped out water away) pumps from above should work well. With powered pumps (windmill should work fine as well for only a few pumps) no pumper risks being washed away, still guiding away the water is probably a good idea.

2) There is also the option to drain by channeling from below. (Digging an upramp standing on grates protecting the miners from being washed away into the prepared drainage. Leave area through door from the side.) This does work, but is risky when anything might punch through the few roof-only tiles (trees, other cave in potential).

3) Obsidianification with magma can be used not only to destroy corpses, but to directly build a dam and drain the whole river downstream. Once you mastered moving magma with minecarts this might be the way that leaves the least scars in the landscape.

[omega_dwarf]

Just going to throw it out there that there should really be river floods during rainy seasons and/or spring runoff from snow. And underground rivers that flood, like the old days. Preferably, underground rivers that fill completely and create pressure that can turn your fort into a dwarven geyser.

There also really should be drought years when the water is low enough for your dwarves to walk through, or completely gone, which is more on the topic of this thread.

Either way, basically right now, things stay put at the bottom of a river. Is that realistic?

[vanatteveldt]

Yeah I sometimes really don't understand Toady's priority either, but I guess it's his decision to make. I'm sure it's more intellectually satisfying to have a dynamic world going on, but there are so many little things that would improve fortress mode so much more... I've never played the 2d mode but I'm not even convinced that I really like a lot of the 3d aspects that much, and the way that the sliced 2d interface works I usually take flat embarks with flat caverns because I just can't be bothered.

It's a shame that DF is not an open source project with so many geeks hanging around this side... and given the donation-based "business model" it might as well be

[Bearskie]

*shrug* It is what it is.

If you're going to have bodies in your river on a regular basis, I'd suggest something more... permanent. Sewers, for example.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Darn thing saved my drowning dwarves countless of times.

[Uggh]

You could also dig under the river upstream from the bodies and bulld an unlimited drain into an aquifer cave or off the map. Then build floors above the river and have them cave in to pierce the river floor.
Don't forget the necessary safety measures so you can stop the water flow wherever and whenever necessary...

[qorthos]

I find the inability to get things out of a body of water to be a missing feature, and feel no guilt using autodump to move the items to the shoreline.

[Avin]

Pumping out a lake isn't usually a problem but in the case where you've got a river to deal with pumping isn't always an option. Pumping may work but often times the corpse gets washed farther down the river. You could divert the river but more often than not you may find yourself encountering FPS death. Auto dumping to the shore is likely the best option in this case.