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[Pilsu]

Considering a slew of plants can grow underground in DF, it seems only possible explanation is that they can extract energy from the ambient heat. Ground would probably be pretty warm

[Belteshazzar]

Seeing as only Russia so far has had the problem with digging into our Earth and hitting occasional pockets of HELL!!! I must conclude that Dwarf Fortress Geology may be rather different than ours and as such may subscribe to radically differing landmass, tectonic, and cthonic layouts than to be expected in our purely terrestrial ventures.

[Draco18s]

Good luck building a 230 story tower into the air.  You can only go 15 above the highest point on the map.

It's not that hard to manipulate the worldgen parameters to give you rather large differences in height between a few local map tiles, as my 104-story tower can attest. I think some other guy had a mountain that measured at least 200 z-levels.

Yes, but your 104 story tower isn't any colder at the top than 15 zlevels below at the mountain's peak.  Which, realistically, shouldn't be too far colder than the valley you started the tower in (unless you abuse world gen and have max height mountains embarkable next to an ocean tile).

[Dakk]

Another thing it'd be interesting to see in DF, but rather game breaking, would be air.

Seriously, i wonder how 70 dwarves can breathe perfecly 5 z levels below the earth without any kind of air shaft or something similar.

[Luke_Prowler]

'cause they're dwarfs. They're build for underground

[Deimos56]

They breathe the rock around them.

[Pilsu]

How do goblin and human invaders breathe in the fort?

Handwaving it with excuses doesn't really fit the theme of the game. Then again, is proper ventilation with the era tech even possible?

[Sordid]

If you can pump MOLTEN BOILING ROCK, then I see no reason why you couldn't pump air.

[Derakon]

...if you're pumping boiling rock, then you've done something very strange to the raws.

Pumping liquids is entirely different from pumping gases, though, since the former don't require an airtight seal; surface tension helps keep liquids from slipping through small gaps. No such luck with air.

[Granite26]

There's a low cost of leakage though...

RUN!!!! The pipes have sprung a leak!!! The whole tunnel could fill with AIR

[Derakon]

The cost of leakage is that you won't be pumping the air to where it needs to go, so your lower tunnels don't get oxygenated and anyone who goes down there dies.

[Silverionmox]

"Exile: escape from the pit" rationalized the existence of underground civilizations by the existence of a magical fungus on the ceiling that provides light and oxygen. There ought to be a lot of vegetation in the lower caves that fulfills that function, or maybe the cave rivers could deliver it..
When carving out a new fortress, without caves, the dwarves could have to import it. I'd rather favour an organism that is not magical, but instead lives on warmth instead of light as primary energy source. A kind of hypothetical fungus is good enough. That would give another option: instead of ventilation, providing sufficient warmth would also work with that fungus to provide oxygen.

[Pilsu]

If you make it that easy, might as well not have the feature at all. Not to mention it'd make people even more reliant on magma than they already are

How fast would a fan need to go to provide ventilation? Is animal power an option?

[Silverionmox]

It's another option. I imagine there could be similar fungi who do the same with soil nutrients, so you would have oxygen farms, potted mushrooms in crowded halls, etc. And those fungi would need to be imported if they weren't available in the locale itself. Waterfalls and cave rivers are still another option to bring oxygen underground. Bottomless pits (when they're back) conceivably could bring in fresh air, together with pit creatures.

[BlckKnght]

The best way to provide ventilation without high tech fans is probably to use a fire set under one vertical shaft (which acts as a chimney) to pull fresh air down another shaft or horizontally from another opening. I suspect the development of that sort of thing will have to wait for the Fire and Lighting arc though.