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[Demonic Spoon]

Are there any methods other than the magma method, screw pump method, ice method, draining into chasm/aquifier or collapsing natural wall into river that I may have missed?

[elizar]

Someone recently was going on about creating a resevoir and channeling to the side of the riverbank to let it naturally flow into the resevoir.

[madrain]

Mine out a giant cavern beneath your dam spot, breach the river, and dam up the thing downstream before the cavern can fill completely?

Why?  Just looking for something new or is there a reason none of those work where you're at?  I'm curious.

[Demonic Spoon]

Yeah, none of these work for me, since there are some restriction placed on me. The magma is too far away, the water doesn't freeze on the winter, there is no aquifier or chasm, there is too little space to build a carvern of sufficient size, And I don't have the time too use the screw pump method.

[Albedo]

If you channel to the edge of the map, smooth the edge tiles and carve fortifications in them, that will drain.

If you channel out a wide enough break in the side of the river, you might be able to divert enough water to allow your masons to work.

If you have just 1 z-level below, it will certainly work, providing the drainage tunnel is wide enough. (Not sure how fortification drains flow vs natural end-of-river tiles.)

The magma is too far away

Time constraints? Because you can get magma to flow infinite distances.

[Demonic Spoon]

If you channel to the edge of the map, smooth the edge tiles and carve fortifications in them, that will drain.

If you channel out a wide enough break in the side of the river, you might be able to divert enough water to allow your masons to work.

If you have just 1 z-level below, it will certainly work, providing the drainage tunnel is wide enough. (Not sure how fortification drains flow vs natural end-of-river tiles.)

The magma is too far away

Time constraints? Because you can get magma to flow infinite distances.

Oh yeah! I had completely forgotten about fortifications! Thanks! Yeah, there are time contraints, this is for the Talltower sucsession game if that helps.

[Albedo]

A constraint is a constraint, just wanted to make clear the distance itself wasn't perceived as the problem. 

Good luck!

[Demonic Spoon]

After some consideration of the problem I've decided to leave it to someone else, damming the river would potentially flood a well room and as such be undesirable.

[Albedo]

Then allow me...

Dam you, river! Dam you!!!

[triato]

I have a very similar question so Ill post it here.

I wanted an underground chanell, so I channelled a river. However, I made a mistake and water started flowing in before the tunel was done, my dwarfs almost drowned. After I saved them, I wanted to dry the chanell so my dwarfs could finish the tunel. I made a bridge wanting to put a wall over and collapse it, but it didnīt worked becouse I could not build a wall over the bridge. Then I built a wall and another one one level up and one tile north (the river was north of the wall bellow) I donīt know how the wall can be there. I destroyed the wall bellow and the first wall fell, that only gave me a rock on the river. Then I told my dwarfs to dump all the rocks in the chanell but it didnīt worked either. The distance is to big to make a chanell that reaches a lower area in order to dry my first chanell (and maybe Ill not be able to use the first chanell again if I do that).

So, is there a way to collapse something other than naturall mountain rock in order to block a one tile chanell?

[Albedo]

No.

Such a collapse might momentarily destroy all the water in the channel, but it would not stop more water from immediately flowing on in - not enough time to get the job done.

Pumps are pro'ly your best option at this point. They're not hard to use. Try the wiki.

[kefkakrazy]

I had a fortress once where I COULD have dammed the river with great ease, had I chosen to do so.

This was, of course, the fortress where a low-grade cluster-tantrum had me fed up enough to simply seal the doors and windows and divert the river into the fortress. I was so irritated with these specific dwarves that I stayed up for two, three hours watching the fort drown, and the brook went dry past the part where I was draining it.

I think the star of that escapade was the farmer who got trapped in his room when the bedroom level flooded. Somehow he got trapped in there with like 5/7 water, and he seriously managed to survive and make it to something like Proficient swimmer before starving to death (or dying of thirst, which would have been amusing considering the circumstances). Made more epic by the fact that by the time he went belly-up the water level in the fort was two or three z-levels above that layer by then.

Bloop bloop.

Seriously, now, you could try an atomsmasher. I have been using a design where a 10x10 drawbridge linked to a lever set to repeat is surrounded utterly by fortifications, and the outcome is to allow me to drain unlimited amounts of water (or to NOT drain the water, if I want!). It may be a bit of an exploit, but a repeating atomsmasher of 10x10 size can destroy a lot of water real quick.

[bluea]

If you dig under the river's 'head' and do the fortifications-to-edge trick, you can drain things with astonishing quickness without exposing any dwarves to carp, sunshine or other foul things.

By having your entire drain dug prior to breaching the bottom of the river, you've kept your miners from playing in the river. However you wish to seal the drain can be implemented in the still-dry drainage area as well. "Breaching" the riverbed just requires digging ramps from your drainage area up to the riverbed. And a little running.

[Atarlost]

Couldn't you breach by dropping constructed floors to smash through the riverbed into the drainage channel?  No running needed. 

[bluea]

When I've done this before, I just made the drop from the riverbed to the drainage level two levels. Running wasn't really required there either.

The intermediate level just has downstaircases everywhere (except for the spots I'm going to dig into ramps eventually.) I prepared like there was going to be mass havoc - ten miners locked into the room to make sure all the digging happens ASAP. But I hardly needed it.

The way water flow works, the whole intermediate level stays pretty darn dry for me. (And, my intermediate level, I just mean a 5x10 room with five spaced out ramps up, lots of down staircases, and three airlock-style entrances.