Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[cephalo]

I just learned accidently that water will flow downstairs, but not upstairs. You can fill an open space with water from above, and the pressure will cause the level to rise up to the water source. But, if there are only stairs in the hole you intend to fill, it will never fill up. I guess you can use that property to drain a large body of water into... nothing! I wonder if I can drain the ocean?

[Untelligent]

Hold on, lemme clear this up.


If you mean that water cannot traverse upward past stairs, you're wrong. I have a fountain that disproves this.

If you mean that water will not fill a space comprised entirely of stairs... you have discovered something very interesting.



And do you mean that the water just isn't flowing, or is flowing in one direction but not coming out of the other, like an aquifer?

If it's the latter, do you have an aquifer on your map? That might be the real culprit here.

[Kanddak]

I've had a couple of odd anomalies where water wouldn't flow with its usual pressure rule up a staircase topped with an open hatch. I'd love to see more research into this.

[cephalo]

I am making a fountain with the pump up high, and the canal going down below the fountainhead. So, the canal is like a 'U' shape. The vertical spans are one tile up/down stairs (the 'X') that I made for easy access/repairs. Water is flowing into the bottom of the U, but it will not raise up to exit by my fountainhead, nor will it back up toward the pump side. The depth of the water flowing down the stairs never gets past 2, even though the bottom of the U is up to depth 7.

Also, I'm nowhere near the aquifer.

[Untelligent]

That's still hard to understand, can you make a little text diagram? If you put it in Code tags the characters will line up.

I think I know what's going on here.

[cephalo]

Ok, I will have to make a vertical diagram

Code: [Select]

PPj
  X      -> Fountain exit
  X     X
  X     X
  u_____u
PP = pump
j = down stair
u = up stair
X = up down stair
_= regular plain corridor

[AtomicPaperclip]

I have had multiple occasions where water would vanish in to stairs when the water was going DOWN. I can't figure it out.

[Quietust]

I just dug a tunnel like that in a test embark such that the "fountain exit" was an down-stair under 10 Z-levels of ocean. The water most definitely did not disappear.

[cephalo]

So you saw the water travel up through stairs?

[Quietust]

Yes - it flooded the entire tunnel (and drowned the miner in the process), all the way back to the shore where I started it. A few small ripples appeared on the ocean surface, but those eventually went away.

[cephalo]

Ok, for a new experiment, I cleared the fountain side pipe of stairs, and I still get no water climbing up the spout. Next I'll try clearing all the stairs, and if that doesn't work I'll be very confused.

Code: [Select]

PPj 
  X      -> Fountain exit
  X     _
  X     _
  u______
PP = pump
j = down stair
u = up stair
X = up down stair
_= regular plain corridor

[DeathOfRats]

Hmm... you did channel the floors off the places where the stairs used to be, right?

Because somehow water in DF hasn't yet developed the ability to seep past floors (thank Armok) 

[cephalo]

Ok, I cleared out all of the stairs and my fountain is still not working.

I think this has something to do with the aquifer after all. My fountain is in a giant obsidian cast that goes through the aquifer. The aquifer surounding my cast is lower than the lowest level of my pipe, but there are some differing levels of aquifers across other parts of the map. It might be when your water hits any aquifer level on the map, all the pressure is lost. This will require an ugly redesign.

[Gergination]

It might be similar to salt turned fresh water becoming salt water again if it exists on the same z-level as a salt water aquifer.

I'm not mistaken about this, am I?

[zecro]

IIRC there are U-bend bugs that create infinite water.

The wiki's talk page on water notes a V-bend bug that makes water disappear.

This is probably useless, but maybe it'll jog someone's memory?