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[Blomquistador]

Hey All!
I've been using this technique to drain water for years now and was surprised to find that it's seldom mentioned in the wiki/forums
so I thought I'd share.

The basic technique is to put a minecart on a minecart stop in a 1x1 hole.
The stop needs to be set to dump to any direction.
Then simply open up that 1x1 hole to any amount of water and it will drain extremely quickly.

The exploit is that once the minecart gets 7/7 filled with water it will dump its contents. But since it faces a wall, it will simply delete the water.

I like this much better than using the edge of the map for drains. For 1, it's more convenient and doesn't require you to dig tunnels.
And it also doesn't mess with adventure mode as much. I've had forts flood in adventure mode when I use the map edge trick.

I like to set up one of these under the very bottom layer of my fortress as a sort of sump drain in case of flooding.

Let me know your thoughts!

Also, here's a video I made where I intentionally flood a fortress and then rescue it using this technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE1c0O5RbUk&t=9s&ab_channel=AdaptiveDeep

Take Good Care of Your Dwarves!

[Magnus]

By Armok! And just as I had finished slowly, painfully digging out channels for my screw pump in the hematite vein flooded by a 20-Z thick aquifer.

Dwarven particle physics never cease to astonish me.

[Blomquistador]

...hematite vein flooded by a 20-Z thick aquifer.

That's probably the thickest aquifer I've ever seen. My previous fort had an 8-layer thick and I thought that was hell.

My next experiment is to embark on the edge of a lake and see if I can drain the water quickly enough to build a below-lake fort.
Then let it fill back up.

[da_nang]

Conglomerate aquifers et al. are a menace. Even worse on sloped terrain: the aquifer elevation changes with surface elevation.

My current fort has one that runs into the first cavern layer. And I refuse to settle for a mudstone fortress above it.

[Magnus]

Yes it is conglomerate, and yes the terrain is mountainous. Life sucks, the wet stuff begins just one Z below the brook and goes on forever.

There's two biomes, they don't differ much in stats, but I'm wondering if I might have better luck digging on the other side of the brook. Sure it's only a light aquifer, but I now need two screw pumps just so the miners can dig without getting smashed into walls by a 3/7. If I had thought of the minecart drain I could have built one, but by now there's too much water.

However, I have also finished channeling out a large room down there, walled it off so water can't gush in from the sides, topped it with constructed floors so water can't drip down from above, and screw pumped out all the water below. And it is wonderfully, blissfully dry!

The plan is to channel further down inside it, then immediately smooth the walls. With plenty of space for the water to diffuse, the walls should be smoothable before they leak too much. Then wait for it to evaporate, rinse and repeat.

[sniper_231996]

This would be a pictorial description of the portable drain.
Just adding more info in pictorial form to the post.
Thank you, have a nice day

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2924657714

[dikbutdagrate]

Hey All!
I've been using this technique to drain water for years now and was surprised to find that it's seldom mentioned in the wiki/forums
so I thought I'd share.

The basic technique is to put a minecart on a minecart stop in a 1x1 hole.
The stop needs to be set to dump to any direction.
Then simply open up that 1x1 hole to any amount of water and it will drain extremely quickly.

The exploit is that once the minecart gets 7/7 filled with water it will dump its contents. But since it faces a wall, it will simply delete the water.

I like this much better than using the edge of the map for drains. For 1, it's more convenient and doesn't require you to dig tunnels.
And it also doesn't mess with adventure mode as much. I've had forts flood in adventure mode when I use the map edge trick.

I like to set up one of these under the very bottom layer of my fortress as a sort of sump drain in case of flooding.

Let me know your thoughts!

Also, here's a video I made where I intentionally flood a fortress and then rescue it using this technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE1c0O5RbUk&t=9s&ab_channel=AdaptiveDeep

Take Good Care of Your Dwarves!

So people are aware of this quirk, but I don't think are any well known examples of people intentionally using it for destroying water.

They mostly rely on it for constructing hyper compact river-less internal fort power generators. Water level is self monitoring, so critically timed player micro isn't required to stop the dumping process, which makes them easier to construct than one might expect.

From the wiki:
"Channel two adjacent tiles to create a trench, remove the ramp from one trench tile and build a track stop dumping into the other trench tile. Optionally link a lever to the track stop (to disable and enable the reactor later). Add a minecart to the track stop, build a waterwheel over the trench, and use a pond zone to fill the ramp tile. The reactor requires 11 units of water for continuous operation; any excess will simply disappear. Once filled, the minecart will dump water into the ramp tile. The water will then flow back to the minecart tile, refilling the minecart and repeating the process endlessly. It's best to use a metal minecart for this, as wooden ones may be pushed from the track stop by the moving water."

Although such an expedient way to drain bodies of water is interesting. 

[Drakonis]

How about using it as a !MAGMA! drain?