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[ccc]

Having set up a decent fortress in a river canyon, I'm a little disappointed with the natural waterfall being permanently frozen; due to the climate, outside water remains frozen all year round. (It also means I can't drain off any indoor water to outside, if I want to run plumbing down from an aquifer.)

Is there any way to a) melt the river, b) edit the save from frozen to cold climate, or c) edit the climates so frozen allows water to melt in summer?

[Eita]

You could turn temperature off. Although, if you have magma, then it's worthless without temperature.

[martinuzz]

I believe that if you turn off temperature while the water is frozen, it will not unfreeze.

[ccc]

Yeah, I already tried temperature. I used it to drain water from a flooded section of fortress. Alternatively I could have removed the water by mining the ice as it ran outside. That would probably have taken a few decades, though. 

[loser]

You could turn temperature off. Although, if you have magma, then it's worthless without temperature.

Magma will power magma furnaces even if the temperature is off.

I turned it off for play on a larger map.  I'm sure it was off because a dwarf that fell into the magma pool died of drowning.  I'm sure it worked because my economy depended on those magma smelters.


(edit: fixt, for the moment.  I'm not one to leave the barn open just because the cattle are gone.)

[Danaru]

You could turn temperature off. Although, if you have magma, then it's worthless without temperature.

Manga will power magma furnaces even if the temperature is off.

Woah, you can power Magma Furnaces with Japanese comic books?! This solves my magma problem!

[Kagus]

Throw more books on the fire, lads!  We'll need all the steel armor we can get, 'ere the tentacle demons get hungry!

[Makrond]

Manga and tentacle demons are usually a bad mix...

You could always recruit the local dragon to help you out...

[Nonanonymous]

Just dig, dig like you've never dug before, and hope that you find a cave river and some place for it to go.  That's the only thing I can think of.  Or mine the ice and instruct the dwarves to build things out of/haul the 'water' rocks that result in a pit somewhere until you have an artificial lake.

[grelphy]

'water' stone doesn't melt into useful water. It turns into a puddle akin to blood, mud and vomit and must be cleaned up.

Hoping for a cave river or lake is a long shot. It is possible to get liquid water out of ice in a frozen climate, but it's difficult and tricky and you'll need at least two z-levels of frozen water. If you do a search for glacier starts on the map archive you can probably find videos which will be clearer than this, but here goes.

When you cavein ice, it turns into water. The difficulty with a frozen climate, of course, is that immediately thereafter, the water freezes and you've accomplished nothing. If you cavein two z-levels, only the upper level will freeze and you'll be left with an "underground" cistern of liquid (though no doubt extremely cold) water between the floor of your cavein and the ice above it. On glaciers, it is possible to cavein multiple z-levels and get a fair amount of water at once, but it sounds like you'll have to experiment with the waterfall to get any useful water.

Other ways of getting liquid water on frozen maps include tapping aquifers and careful routing of magma. The wiki has more details.