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[SixOfSpades]

In general, aquifers should not be constant: The water table should rise & fall in accordance with recent local rainfall. (I think it's safe to assume that rain higher up in the watershed will correlate closely with rain in the immediate area.) The most noticeable effect of this would be that some tiles (those at higher elevations) will be aquifers only in the wet season, and be safe to dig while it's dry. (Which could potentially backfire and cause flooding if proper countermeasures are not taken before those tiles become wet in a few months.) On a more subtle level, aquifer output would be variable: A steady flow when groundwater is abundant, but only a mere trickle in more arid periods.

Some new constructions.
Gutter: Made from pretty much anything except wood or porous clay, a gutter tile functions exactly like a floor tile, except that it attracts water (rainwater becomes regular flowing water) from nearby* nonporous floor/ground tiles. Link many gutters together to collect rainwater from an area as large as you want.
* Collection radius = 5 tiles?

Standpipe: Requires a block, a mechanism, and a pipe section. Functions as a Wall that can also contain up to 5/7ths of liquid, and be opened & closed like a floodgate. Further pipe sections built directly atop it will drain their water into those below.

Sprinkler: Produced by a Metalcrafter or Mechanic, can be attached to a pipe section or standpipe. Scatters connected water-flow into a wide area (radius dependent on water pressure?). Applications in irrigation, cleaning, and more efficient distribution of weaponized magma. Possibly, masterwork sprinklers could generate mist, rather than "rain".

[KittyTac]

I think pipe sections do nothing except as a building component currently, so they would have to be able to be placed.

[Su]

these are all fantastic suggestions and I would love to see them implemented - especially the one about aquifers, which would go a long way to making them more interesting and less obnoxious.

does mist condense into water though? that could be an issue if you want to sprinkle one thing but the skill level of the creator means you're forced to sprinkle another.

also, slightly off-topic - why not wooden gutters?

[KittyTac]

also, slightly off-topic - why not wooden gutters?

Presumably rot.

[Dorsidwarf]

I think pipe sections do nothing except as a building component currently, so they would have to be able to be placed.

I seem to recall that they are already planned as being a structure that moves liquids by toady (eta: sometime, somewhen)

[Shonai_Dweller]

I think pipe sections do nothing except as a building component currently, so they would have to be able to be placed.

I seem to recall that they are already planned as being a structure that moves liquids by toady (eta: sometime, somewhen)

Devnotes (moving fortress parts, so several years yet) :
"Large pipe sections -- walk on them or crawl inside them, allow passage for fluids"

[SixOfSpades]

. . . especially the one about aquifers, which would go a long way to making them more interesting and less obnoxious.

Yeah, aquifers have some problems (the biggest being that they don't actually get their water from anywhere), but this at least should be a good step towards making them more realistic.

does mist condense into water though? that could be an issue if you want to sprinkle one thing but the skill level of the creator means you're forced to sprinkle another.

I forgot to include Stonecrafter as one of the skills that can make sprinklers--out of stone, obviously--while Metalcrafters & Mechanics would make them from metal. Either way, the issue should be largely negligible--if you wanted mist but got rain, that's no big loss, as the mist is just a mild happy thought anyway. If you wanted rain but got mist, just make another one--even Legendary crafters don't make masterworks all the time.

why not wooden gutters?

Because wood isn't impervious to water. A bare wooden gutter would be prone to getting clogged with moss, or would simply rot out in a few years, etc. Sure, you could argue that maybe the wood is protected with some sort of sealant, or if wooden gutters rot then wooden barrels should too, but given the choice between a) adding a system to track 'wear' on the gutters, as well as sealants like wax or tar or whatever (substances which must then be tracked in your fort's inventory), & using the Glazer labor to apply said sealants, or b) simply disallowing wood as a valid material for gutters, I think it's safe to assume that Toady's not going to choose a.
Although, by their very nature, stone types that can contain aquifers would also make for poor gutter materials.


I admit I'm a bit undecided on the exact implementation of gutters. On the one hand, I can see them working as a row of gutter tiles all connected in a line, like rain-gutters today, with water flowing smoothly (and largely without evaporation) from one into the next, until it finally reaches a drain. On the other hand, I can also see gutters working as drains themselves, with the player placing individual gutter tiles in a widely-spaced grid (or more efficient hex) pattern, with each gutter feeding into a pipe or reservoir below. Both systems seem realistic, so I left my first post largely nonspecific in this regard, allowing room for both interpretations.

[Ninjabread]

Wood is used for guttering IRL, and elm is seriously resistant to water, more so than some types of stone. I reckon it should use the same rules as pots and stuff, thus being subject to the same changes as pots and making the game more consistent, if you suddenly start needing to glaze/wax seal wooden pots, same for gutters, if more types of stone gain absorption values and thus need glazing to use as pots, the same goes for gutters, e.c.t.

[AceSV]

I feel like if wooden barrels or buckets can be made water-tight, a wooden gutter should be possible. 

I googled it:  https://www.finewoodworking.com/readerproject/2015/11/30/wooden-gutters-maintenance-is-it-as-hard-as-it-sounds

They point out that a wooden gutter isn't designed to hold water for a long time, just to direct it away from the foundations of your house.  So it shouldn't be any more prone to rotting than the rest of your wooden house. 

[voliol]

Wood is used for guttering IRL, and elm is seriously resistant to water, more so than some types of stone. I reckon it should use the same rules as pots and stuff, thus being subject to the same changes as pots and making the game more consistent, if you suddenly start needing to glaze/wax seal wooden pots, same for gutters, if more types of stone gain absorption values and thus need glazing to use as pots, the same goes for gutters, e.c.t.

I feel like we need a [WATER_RESISTANT] token that controls whether they are suitable materials for these. Stone could have by default and sometimes lack it, and vice versa with wood. Well, as AceSV said, maybe this wouldn’t be neccesary with gutters, but I think you’d at least want your pipes to be [WATER_RESISTANT].

[FantasticDorf]

Glazing for water-tightness in pots is already within the game, its a nessecity for clay pots especially.

I do back [WATER_RESISTANT] and or other tags for exceptions to typical material types and a opposing [WATER_POUROUS] in rocks that frequently leak and hold onto water in a aquifer sucking in like effect (also ideally found around aquifers) to make them damp, which can then be drawn upon with the pipes in the case of extracting rainwater etc in line with the OP as sort of a expansion i guess.

Connect pipes to a single tile hand-pump/furniture or machinery to give it a small flow of water from a adjacent pourous wall, not quite a dwarven shower but a sink basin might be possible plumbing wise for drinking from or washing yourself.

> Making them personally room assigned and or public would be even better so a fellow dwarf doesn't attempt to clean their fungally infected feet inside the sink basin you drink out of, with them being cleaned every so often.

[PlatinumSun]

I like the new the gutter, pipe and sprinkler. But I dont feel water should be changed.

[Azerty]

From the latest DevDiary:

Finally this week, I made a change to aquifers. Most of them will now run about 1/500th as slow as they used to, allowing you time to come up with a strategy to wall or channel or pump or whatever you like, while remaining a fairly immediate flooding danger. The old-style near-artesian aquifers are still in the game, but they make up about 5% of the total and are clearly marked on embark and in the site finder, so people can play around with the aquifer-busting methods that have been invented or just have an easy flowing water supply. The new slower aquifers can still be used for wells, but if overused, there is more danger now that they won't fill fast enough, in which case you just need to make an additional well or make the well excavation larger. All old forts loaded into the new version will have the old type of aquifer to avoid breaking existing fluid-mechanical setups, but the old worlds will have the new aquifer distribution for any future embarks.

With the changes in flows, we could go to a next step: making these flows depending of the rainfall, with some "fossil aquifer" non reneweable.

Another factor would be making other fluids be treateable by this system, so that oil and gas fields might be simulated.

[GoblinCookie]

A lot of this hinges on how complicated we want the game to get. 

[voliol]

A lot of this hinges on how complicated we want the game to get. 

Oh, very much so I imagine. Who wouldn’t like the aquifer drying out after a mayor draught/being denounced by the nature spirits of rainfall due to dwarven hijinks?

The oil parts being implemented at all would still require a fluid rewrite, but that will come sooner or later.