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[Lytha]

I am interested in magma and ocean water reactions.

The setting is a map with a deep ocean, the lowest parts have with those ooze layers. The solid ground is a small edge of a glacier with a magma pipe. The glacier is obviously freezing; some parts of the ocean are freezing as well, but the deep sea is just cold. It's a map that's 13 tiles long and 2 tiles wide. Magma proof rocks are in abundance, thanks to the Molten Rocks mod which  is part of the Dig Deeper that I installed. Sand is of course present in abundance, for the production of screwpump components.

I want to build an obsidian tower into the ocean. It shall grow out of the ooze and its top shall be a few z-levels over the ocean's top level.

This is my first experiment with magma + water at all, and I already have learned that I can't construct downways (i.e. attach any stair leading downwards to a constructed floor) - that destroyed my initial plan of screwpumping my way down to the ooze levels.


Will it be possible to build that obsidian tower all the way down into the depths of the ocean? Anything I should be aware of, like not building the aquaeduct out of ice or certain setups that only lead to cave-ins of the precious obsidian?

Does magma that falls into water form obsidian anyway?

[smokingwreckage]

magma will form obsidian as it falls into the water.

[beekay]

And it will keep falling in the form of cave-ins, unless it's connected to land.

I'll be honest, I have absolutely no idea how you'd get more than two layers of stone. I bet there is a way to do it, but you'll have to ask someone who's partially merged with the game.

[Lytha]

I think that I should be able to get a "floating" obsidian circle or rectangle in the ocean then (stuck to some constructed walls or floors), and maybe, if I channel this one out, I can descend to the next level.

Well, I guess I'll have to try. Wish me luck.

[beekay]

Heh. Good luck, but you should know that after the first couple of levels, water pressure will force the ocean up through any channelled holes. You might be able to do it with a whole lot of pump stacks.

[SquidgyB]

you're probably best off casting a block of obsidian level by level above the ocean, by constructing a cast using walls and floors, and using screw pumps to bring the water up above the obsidian cast and dropping it in.

If you drop water directly into a magma pool or magma directly into a water pool it will take ages as each tile of magma that solidifies will (as mentioned in a previous post) will be treated as a cave in and will pause the game. Tedious doesn't quite cover it...

[bmaczero]

If you don't mind having more of a mountain that a tower, you can just dump lots of magma in one place.  The obsidian will keep collapsing, but because it's "natural terrain" it will just pile up at the bottom of the ocean until the pile reaches the surface.

[Scruga]

If you don't mind having more of a mountain that a tower, you can just dump lots of magma in one place.  The obsidian will keep collapsing, but because it's "natural terrain" it will just pile up at the bottom of the ocean until the pile reaches the surface.

Captain! Iceberg!

[Lytha]

No no no, I want the obsidian tower to sit on the ooze so that I can have my farms at the bottom of the thing. Farming in ooze! That is so classy.

[Huggz]

Could you have a pillar of obsidian in the middle of the sea, reachable only by a narrow bridge? That would be awesome

[Lytha]

Well, my liaison died, and I noticed it one year later. His death is sort of fatal, because I need him to order tower caps, so I will reload an earlier save anyway. But I used this chance for some tests.

You may be interested in the following:

- waves don't turn magma into obsidian. They also don't put out red magma 1s; they just peacefully flow across these.

- if you construct a floor over the ocean (at that z-level where the waves sweep over your construction), and pour magma onto this constructed floor, then you'll end up with a circular blob of obsidian around the drop-off. It  will be attached to the floor and won't drop down; but of course, there will be several cave-in messages while the blob shapes itself.

- this obsidian blob is inside of the first ocean z-level, not on top of it. No, I have no idea how it is attached to the constructed floor in this manner, but it is.

- the waves are a bit confused by this new obstacle and won't really move across it, which is helpful.

- I channeled out some tiles of the blob to check the water pressure hypothesis that beekay mentioned, and to my utmost surprise and pleasure I found an obsidian floor below my channel. This means that I can build ramps and staircases down in peace and without any hassle.

- if I channel my way through this obsidian floor, then the water doesn't seem to raise through this hole. It's difficult to check this with this sample obsidian floating island blob, because it's far away from the deep sea area, a sand ground is nearby, and my blob is perforated by channels by now like a swiss cheese. This might be different on the open sea.


So, if I cast an obsidian blob far away, I can just fortify its sides against the waves with some constructed temporary walls. And then I can channel my way down and cast another obsidian blob below this one.

The length of the intended catwalk through the waves and the length of the aqueduct are a bit disencouraging though. I should probably drop off some obsidian blobs on the way and put booze stockpiles inside.

I think I need to put some bridges into this mega-aqueduct and that I will replace the catwalk with cast obsidian to (hopefully) save some fps.

[MMad]

This sounds like a really awesome project. Keep us updated!

[Skorpion]

Personally, I'd just dump magma into the ocean until I have a big enough tower, then just dig it out from the top.

[SquidgyB]

Personally, I'd just dump magma into the ocean until I have a big enough tower, then just dig it out from the top.

That'd be easy enough if there was a utility that turned off the pause on cave in like Just dig It Out does for warm/wet stone. Or you don't mind unpausing for each and every tile of magma that drops into the ocean...

[Lytha]

Yes, the cave-in messages are a pain, but the extra pillars of obsidian will probably make my life easier in the really deep sea. I did another experimental obsidian blob and deeper sea digging before reloading the (much) earlier save.

Water pressure of oceans is a strange thing.

I channeled out some tiles in z=97, and the water pressure ignored these, leading me to the wrong assumption that water pressure would not be any issue at all. These tiles just sat there with water below them, until more cave-ins happened, or some other things happened which I am not sure of. At that time, the game froze for 10 seconds, and the entire excavated area in z=97 filled with 7/7 water instantly.

But you can channel some 1/7 magma down one level and it will form a nice obsidian pillar there. This is how I will build this tower, or "upside down cone", as it will look like.


Children are a hazard, by the way. One of them opened the door behind which the magma-duct was filled with 4/7 magma. The magma poured out, incinerated his mother, who was trying to construct a bridge outside of the magma-duct at the time. Then the baby crawled to the closest magma pool and jumped in.

The evil child itself... escaped with his life.

I hope that he was the one that got buried in magma not much later, when the 2nd generation had their adulthood accelerated a lot so that I had miners again.

Anyway, I reloaded a much earlier save now, to avoid some of my mistakes. And I think I have a plan that should work.