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[SquirrelWizard]

One of the things I was interested in doing was raising my dwarves skill up in swimming, both for the stat increase and the added benefit of my military dwarves wont drown should they fall into a river or something.

Well I rigged the barracks so i could flood it with water, and filled it with 3-4/7 water and now they dont seem to train. In fact, anybody walking on the 4/7 water part of the entrance goes, "eep dangerous terrain" and stops their jobs. Any suggestions on how to resolve this?

[bmaczero]

Make it 3/7 on all tiles, that's the deepest water dwarves can handle comfortably.

[Sphalerite]

Build a chamber above the barracks.  Floor the chamber with a retracting bridge.  Off to one side of the bridge place a pressure plate triggered by 7/7 water and link it to the retracting bridge.  Make the floor of the barracks itself out of grates with a good high-capacity drainage channel underneath.  Then set up a continuous water feed from a river or pump into the chamber over the barracks.

Your dwarfs will spar in the barracks while the chamber overhead fills with water.  When it fills to 7/7, the bridge will retract and dump water on the sparring dwarfs.  You'll get a spam of "Cancelled spar: dangerous terrain" messages, but then the bridge will close and the water will drain and they'll resume sparring.  The end result is training the swimming skill and making them all happy from waterfall mist.

[denito]

They learn swimming much faster if the water is flowing.  I made a barracks over a river and gave my dwarves hammers to spar with.  Unfortunately, most of them drowned.  However, a couple of them would get caught in the 5/7 "exit" tiles of the river where they got just enough air to survive while the high water flow built up their swimming skill very quickly.

For the purposes of determining flow, I believe the game considers channels off of a flowing stream to be flowing water too, even if it's a blind channel.  Combine that with the discovery I made which is that if you dig a blind alley channel close to the exit of a river and it will never completely fill to 7/7, and you can make a swimming area for them that has both flow and less than 7/7 water.  I think you want to dig about 6 to 8 tiles back from the edge of the map, that will give you 4-5 height water.  You'd need to experiment.  Contrary to what a previous poster said, you don't want level 3 water - true, the dwarves will stop cancelling all their jobs but they also won't swim in depth 3 water!  Depth 4 water is always safe though; iirc depth 5 water still allows them to breath as long as they aren't panicked.

[o_O[WTFace]]

I believe they can't really do anything* and swim at the same time, so you trade training time for swimming time.  Still a good idea though. 

* I once ordered a 4 wide moat dug on embark.  My 2 miners fell in soon after.  Despite assigning water source zones, dumping booze barrels on top of them and ordering them to dig out more space to drain the water, they eventually both died of dehydration

[Retro]

From my experience, 4/7 is both the minimum depth for gaining swimming experience as well as the depth that first begins to halt pathfinding and spam dangerous terrain cancellations. If you really want this to happen I don't think anything but a controlled flooding chamber will work out.

[bluea]

I like denito's plan.

Build  a 10x10 or so barracks -over- a river.

But I'd add extra drainage and grates.

The dwarves should path to the barracks fine, they should decide to spar fine, and hammers will knock them off into the water. You need more drainage to prevent drowning though - and grates prevent dwarf-sucked-into-drain.

[NW_Kohaku]

I thought flow would make creatures (including dwarves) go through objects like grates (since it only stops pathing, it doesn't physically prevent a creature from occupying that tile), meaning a dwarf caught in the flow would pass through a grate.

[Sphalerite]

Floor grates seem to be safe.  I've built the happy fun dwarven water park I described above and never had a dwarf pushed through grates.  You do have to be sure there are no wells, stairs, or other openings nearby since the water will push them around.

[Strangething]

Fill your moat to 4/7 full, then set a patrol route through it. Whenever the squad is on-duty, they'll swim laps.

It worked ok when I did it.  A few dwarves tried to walk alongside the moat rather than swim in it, but I think that could be fixed with a wider moat.

[Tally]

So, here's my idea. You could automate a swimming training routine with: Screw-pumps. Grates. Hatch. Conscription. Pressure plates.

Set up a hallway that would be your training area. Station a dwarf in it. At one end of the hallway, build a floor grate. At the floor below, pressure plates linked to screw pumps that would pump the water two levels up. When the pressure plates at the floor above the dwarf(s) senses a 7/7 water level, floor HATCH it's attached to opens, thus dumping all the water onto the dwarves below. The dwarves, along with the water, will flow to the grate. Water goes, dwarf stays, dwarf moves back to his stationed position on the other end of the hallway when the water clears. Process repeats.

It's the best I can come up with on a short notice, at the least.

[Malibu Stacey]

Fill your moat to 4/7 full, then set a patrol route through it. Whenever the squad is on-duty, they'll swim laps.

It worked ok when I did it.  A few dwarves tried to walk alongside the moat rather than swim in it, but I think that could be fixed with a wider moat.

This is probably the fastest & easiest way to train up dwarves in swimming. They won't spar in a swimming pool but they'll happily try to patrol through one until they get hungry/thirsty/tired.
You can also combine the 2 to train up any dwarves in swimming. Since 'on duty' dwarves won't spar, you can activate any of your dwarves, set them to patrol your swimming pool & leave them to it (just don't give them any weapons). Once they've trained up swimming to whatever you would like unactivate them from the military & since they don't have any weapon skills they should happily go back to their old jobs. Dwarves do get a bad thought from being drafted while they're still "Recruit" but there's plenty of ways to counter that. Also you can't train up "Armour User" or "Shield User" skills without sparring or fighting so don't bother assigning your normal dwarves any equipment.

[Redhades]

I made swimming pool a while back that safely trained my dwarfs with the skills.
Hope this helps: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1360-simpleandsafeswimmingpool