Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dffun]

Hi there.

First of all, thanx for a really addicting game! I'm slave to it :-)

Besides there is a question, I could not really find an answer for, by using forum search/google/wiki:
In my world there are no water sources and no murky pools. I relied on finding water in an aquifer, but even by digging down many levels deep, I did not succeed.

- Is there anything (besides sandy clay loam etc.) which rises the chance of finding an aquifer? Maybe groundlevel?

Because I'm missing water, I get spammed with the message "* cancelled <whatever> * no watersource*".
This is due to either having no booze, no mugs to drink booze or a medican/doctor who tries to clean a dwarfs wound etc.
While mugs (dont sell them :-) and booze is no problem, dwarfs keep dying at the hospital - which is annoying (as usually not your peasants are struck badly...)

- Is there a way to make the doctor use booze instead? (rhetorical question: Ain't alcohol better anyway?)
- If dwarfs make booze and are capable of cooking, shouldn't they be able to collect steam? (destill :-)
- Use (stone) buckets or cisterns to collect small amounts of water from rain?

Or is there any other solution for the "doctor insists on water" problem?

Thanx 4 your help :-)

[taptap]

Aquifers are usually shown on embark screen. With no surface water and no aquifer caverns are your best option (often even replenishable water).

If you have ice (or limited water and temperate climate) there is still another chance. Without any water source at all hospitals are death traps, drink booze and don't get injured.

[PatrikLundell]

Running out of booze is really bad for your fortress as drinking water is bad for dwarven morale (or rather, not drinking booze is: an occasional sip of water won't hurt).
As stated, aquifer presence is reported on the pre embark screen. I don't know what happens if you turn aquifers off, since I've never done that (they obviously shouldn't be present, but I don't know if they're still displayed). Also note that aquifer presence is per biome, so if your embark has multiple biomes, an aquifer may exist in only one of them.
With no surface water and no aquifer you have to rely on cavern water, with its associated wildlife dangers (can be managed through engineering).
taptap is mostly right regarding the combination of hospitals and lack of water. However, it is actually possible to save a badly injured dorf by removing the hospital once the dorf gets thirsty (and deconstruct the traction rack if hooked up to one), wait until the dorf has drunk, and then reenable the hospital. That may have to be done multiple times, but I once managed to get one dorf too injured to be able to work back to working condition using this method.

Wasting booze to treat injury goes against dwarven ethics.
The only thing filled up by rain is murky pools. Nothing else fills up by rain.

[Montieth]

On my latest embark I was nearly without water save for a 4x4 murky pool. that was barely enough. I had to fast track a shaft to find the caves and then build a well down there fast with some level of risk of flyers coming up through the well. I always build exploration stairshafts behind a gate and defensive fortification.

Build the well and then build a 2 stage internal reservoir. 1 tile dug out for the pit. Then assign as many dwarves as reasonable to fill it with buckets from the cavern well. As they get it filled, dig out another tile. Now you have an indoor murky  reservoir that backstops some needs for water (did you get soap production started too?). Do this enough times and you can have that be fed by a pump to dump the 4-6 squares of water into your two level well's cistern. I like to build my well cisterns central to my fort with a 4x4 channel in the middle of a 8x8 room (smoothed of course). That way as water runs low, you have a 4x4 reserve that's at the bottom.

Once that was all done I had clean water for dealing with wounds. And I could expand a bit and then shift focus to getting a pump stack setup to pull water from the caverns over 17 layers down.