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[Redman the Communist]

I am currently playing DF right now, and I had started a new fortress in an area that had no aquifer it said. I immediately got to work on mapping out my fortress' skeleton, but a minute into digging, I hit an aquifer, "That's odd" I thought, "There shouldn't be any aquifers down here... oh well, just change my plans." so I changed directions and begun digging, to make a long story short, I had a very successful fortress running, best I've had in a while. but I came across the problem of running low on stone and metal, so I decided it would be a good time to go digging down so I can arm my militia better in case of gobbos. Nope, have an aquifer. "Huh? I thought there were none? Whatever." I dig out a bit further, and try again, another one, dig out more, another one, another one, another one. I turned into DJ Khaled at this point, and this upset me greatly, so I begun digging tons of staircases, channels, and everything to try to find an opening, all I got was more water. I tried to do the double-slit method to go through it, but there were multiple layers, if you haven't figured it out or guessed by this point, I had an aquifer that took up the WHOLE area, and it had an unknown number of layers, I can't get stone or metals, I can't go further down, and I have to pray I can get a large import of metals and stone from the dorfs at other forts and traders. God has forsaken me, and what other options do I have other than suicide or cheating?

Edit: I started mining out the mountain next to my fortress, I'm getting a decent amount of stone, but no metals, and I'm sure this wont last long at all, but at least I got stone.

[PopTart]

Is it possible your embark site was on the boundary between biomes? And you didn't hit F2 to see if one of the biomes has an aquifer on 15 of the 16 squares?

[Redman the Communist]

Is it possible your embark site was on the boundary between biomes? And you didn't hit F2 to see if one of the biomes has an aquifer?

There wasn't another biome, and even if it was on the edge of another biome, the biome I saw that didn't have any aquifer still has the giant infinity aquifer under it.

[PatrikLundell]

The double-slit method is good for piercing arbitrarily deep aquifers. It's a fair bit of micro management, but fully doable (my record depth is 8, and I've seen a report of 17). All you need is a screw pump and building material (wood, stone, stone blocks, clay...) and two dorfs with at least one pick between them. Look up double-slit on the wiki and follow the instructions very carefully, or you're likely to screw up the last step. It's still possible to recover if you screw up the 3:rd section on the last level (the most likely error), but it's a bit additional work. Once you think you've got the hang of it you're probably going to screw up (as I did), but eventually you'll get it.

The second method is the cave-in one, where you cave in rings of soil with diminishing radius of the rings to pierce aquifers with a maximum depth dependent on the number of rings you design from the start. There are reports of the soil turning into an aquifer on cave-in. Although the soil transmuted when I experimented with it, it didn't turn into an aquifer.

The third method is probably not available, as it involved using magma to obsidianize the aquifer, and unless you have a volcano on the embark you need to pierce the aquifer to get at the magma.

The old "chicken run" method does no longer work. It was broken by the jobs rewrite.

You can use the "portable drain" method as an variation of the double-slit method, and that is definitely a useful method to recover from a last level screw up.

Stone -> mechanisms -> drawbridges -> ability to retreat into safety.

As far as I understand, the multi biome pre embark always shows the largest biome first, so if there had been a 15/16 aquifer biome is would have been the F1 one.

Aquifers do have the advantage of providing infinite amounts of safe water both for drinking and for obsidianization purposes, although it's annoying to get stuff you'd actively avoided.

[Redman the Communist]

Thanks for the tips, and before I read that I got lucky and found a ton of tetrahedrite in a mountain I had begun leveling, so I was able to arm my milita fairly quickly and set up defenses. I even had my mason get possessed, and he made a very valuable statue... although it depicts a bronze collosus massacring dwarves, it's great.

I'm also going to attempt to break through that aquifer pretty soon, once I get all these enormous amounts of migrants settled in.

[kingsableye]

I usually build a tower that has stairs that go alll the way down but with a sealed floor (and usually made of natural stone, so I can just carve stairs afterwards) suspended by a single support and then carve out a hole to drop it into. Similar to the magma pump idea.

[Tygroux]

Alright, so I did some research, and I found back the non-cancellation-spam, aka double-pump-stack method.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Pump-stack_method
It's a bit tricky to master, feel free to test it on a backup save before committing.

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks Tygroux, that's interesting, and was new to me. It looks like the Portable Drain is a perfect fit for this method, since you should be able to use dorf power and just two pumps (plus three mine carts and 3 track stops, and a few temporary walls), although you might want to use a powered hybrid instead.
A powered hybrid would rely on the fact that you can induce flow in an aquifer, and thus drive a water wheel completely without any moving water (I use that method a fair bit, using the justification that it's a fair bit of work to ensure induced flow compared to an actual flow to the map edge, and it should have no FPS impact (beyond the water wheel animation)).
I'll consider it for my next fortress (when that one is due).

Info:
A Portable Drain relies on the recent discovery that a mine cart on a track stop set to dump into a wall will make the water disappear, provided sideways flow is blocked, so a screw pump (or natural flow, as in the last step of the process, though that would have to be down a hole) will be able to just keep adding water that disappears. There will always be 5/7 of the fluid left, however, so only the water exceeding that is eliminated, hence the hole, relying on channeling and evaporation to get rid of the last bit of water.

[Redman the Communist]

So as an update, I had eventually found a small opening in the aquifer, with tons of metals for weapons and armor, and precious gems, so I got really lucky with that, and now the goblins won't steam roll me! On another note, I just decided to turn the giant aquifer into a fortress-wide well system, so it was pretty good after all.

[cochramd]

OP, I read the title and thought "someone wants to/has found a reliable way to generate worlds that consisted entirely of tiny islands in a vast ocean. Then I read the thread and was disappointed.

[sirdanilot]

I have only pierced 2 layer aquifers at best(variation of double slit method). Piercing a 17 layer aquifer... the HORROR that must be.

Piercing an aquifer is definitely not my hobby in any case. Yeah infinite water is nice but it's not worth the pain of piercing such a deep aquifer.

I have never seen such deep aquifers though (most I have seen is 3, and there were also spots on the map with only 2 layer so I pierced there). And I have certainly never seen an aquifer, then non-aquifer layers, then aquifer again.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

"Ye think tha's bad? Grahawhaha. Try mexavacavating - diggin' out an aquifer that goes all tha' way ta tha first cavern!!" - a doomed expedition leader

Yep, that was the deepest aquifer I ever found. Thank goodness it was a freezing biome, but... the freeze didn't quite last as long as I wanted it to.

[PatrikLundell]

In an ocean shore embark I had wet walls a fair bit down in the first cavern on the ocean part (I think I've had that a couple of times), and I think that was the time I had to go down 8 to pierce the shore part. It would have been easier if I'd known you could smooth stone walls to stop them from bleeding, since the aquifer was soil only the first two or so levels.

[Redman the Communist]

OP, I read the title and thought "someone wants to/has found a reliable way to generate worlds that consisted entirely of tiny islands in a vast ocean. Then I read the thread and was disappointed.

Yeah, sorry for the title. I actually have done something "similar" to that though. A while ago, don't remember the version, I had the bright idea, to see just how much pain the advanced world generator could take, so I maxed out a bunch of specific settings, and named it "Hell" and started generating. After about 1000 rejections, it finally picked one, and the whole entire map was a tundra, from the north to the south, this was very odd looking, and I set it for 2 years into the world, and the only civilzations left were goblins (this was before you could play as Goblins through adventure mode.) I thought it was just going to be a Legends only world, but no, I could play adventure mode (No fortress mode sadly.) The oddest thing was I could actually play a goblin, but it was a completely empty world, all the towers were crumbled, and the world was in eternal darkness as if I was in a cave with no light at all. At some point the goblin character (who was completely naked mind you) was suddenly covered in human blood, vomit, and tears for no reason at all! I only noticed that when I started crawling around from over-exertion. To make a very long horrible story short, it was a horrifying experience.

So that I can prove myself, I'll attempt to find the world save, and share it and the seed with you all, probably on the adventure forums though because it fits more to that area, probably not soon though.

Sorry for the long off-topic post, just made me remember.

[Kumquat]

I think my deepest aquifer went all the way through to second cavern. My 3x3 stairwell missed entirely the first cavern. I forget just how deep it was, 13 or 15. It turned out to be a very shallow embark, less than 50 layers to magma sea. It was also one of the few forts where organic designs digging between caverns were mandatory. And indeed smoothed walls were the key of piercing through it. Fortunately it only had one soil aquifer layer.

It was a moment of chagrin there. "Yay, got past the aquifer!" *You have found a cavern* "Oh carp. Wait what, those are goblin-caps and spore trees, this is the 2nd layer cavern!"

This was also the fort where my starting miners turned into engravers before I could dig proper quarters and all that.

Also no one has yet mentioned the ice method, which is mostly the same as obsidian method but much cooler.