Print

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

[T600]

ok, so I have decided that I am going to fool around with water in my next fortress. I feel in all the fortresses I have created, I have never once did anything dorfy, like make a drowning chamber or a magma death trap, Heck the only time i have actually seen magma is during that arena mode you can select from the beginning of the 2010 version.

So I guess what I am asking is.. how would I make a water drowning trap? Water and pumps and all that other mechanical jazz seems very.. confusing and if you mess up you may flood your fort etc.

All my forts have been so bland and not dorfy.. So any ideas, A fort based primarily on using water for cool stuff is what I am after. Also how would I make a good bath house?

[nekoexmachina]

>if you mess up you may flood your fort etc.

Isn't that pretty good result? At least if you will save your fortress from flooding.

[Intelligent Shade of Blue]

Well, safety first: make sure you compartmentalize your fortress with doors. That will limit accidental flooding.

You might want to read the wiki articles on pumps and mechanics in general. Definitely the part about pump stacks. You'll need to first find a good place to start pumping, then figure out how to get power there. I like to look at other people's maps to see examples on how pumping systems are set up.

I think a dwarven bath house would be easy to set up. Have a (small!) cistern of water above a small room, with a hatch between the room and the cistern. Have a lever in the room, and have grates for floors (leading to a pipe, that hopefull leads back to a source of water). When a dwarf pulls the lever, the hatch opens and dumps the water on the dwarf. The water then goes through the grates and into the pipes. You'll need a pump system to refill the cistern of course.

[Lord Darkstar]

You won't necessarily need pumps. I built a drowning chamber in 40d, using nothing but gravity, as that map had a bottomless chasm and a nice brook nearby.

You will definately need mechanisms (for levers and linking mechanisms). You will need floodgates (although you can use doors if you prefer) operated remotely by levers.

If you have caverns that go off the edge of the map, you can drain your water into that cavern, and let it flow off map.

You'll want to set it up your water feed lines (tunnels) with floodgates/doors with their controlling levers far removed from them (and in a safe area). The water feed should go into drowning chamber. If the drowning chamber is multi-level, you need the water to feed in at the highest level.

You will need a drain passage. If it is gravity controlled only, you won't need pumps. If it isn't, you may need one or more "pump stacks" to move the water back up to a place you can drain the water out.

To drown attackers, you need to be able to seal them into your drowning chamber (so you'll need floodgates or doors that are linked to a lever) and then fill the chamber. Once they've drowned (can take a while), you can then drain the water out, and recover whatever is left.

Just a matter of dwarf plumbing and remote operated floodgates or doors. Consult the dwarf fortress wiki for the individual bits. I'd suggest experimenting with small works and tests away from your fortress if you haven't done any of it before, just so you won't destroy an otherwise nice fortress.

[Tale]

Registered just to chime in.  My current fort taps into a river.  So I don't have to bother with pumps.  I use it to irrigate two farm plots and to completely drown my entrance.

My fort entrance starts in the top of the hill.  Goes down 3 levels to an area where my trade depot is.  I can flood this entire area thing.  And I have an outlet set up so that, if I do, I can drain it quickly.

Mistakes were made in the implementation.  I originally flooded one of my farms.  But thanks to a lucky seasonal freeze, I was able to fix the problem.  This produces new problems.  My tips.

1) Build your entrance down, not sideways.  Sideways can let all your water flow right out.  Down will hold it longer.  For added safety, have the trap entrance lower than the following fort entrance.  I don't have this, but if someone breaches my main doors, I'll have some flooding.
2) Lots of doors in your fort.  Important.  If you accidentally flood or if you can't close a door/floodgate, this can minimize damage.
3) Have a way to cut off your water near the source for later adjustments, not just at your trap tigger.  This was my big problem and what lucky freeze allowed me to fix.  Making it seperate from your trap tigger provides a redundancy.
4) Be wary about seasonal freezing of your water source.  A freeze can shut down your entire trap.  You may want to make a reservoir to get around this.

[darkrider2]

my tip: diffusion takes forever. even if its on the same zlevel you should use a pump.

[Lord Darkstar]

My first drowning fort was in 28.40d. My embark area had a brook that ran on top of a rock mesa, and the mesa also had a bottomless pit.

I originally build straight down. Built a starting "entrance" chamber, fairly down from the surface (took it down to the first layer of the mesa that had soil on the side near my starting spot). The starting chamber was just somewhere to keep my idle dwarves underground, and my starting stockpile area. Then I got to work digging out my fortress, setting up farms, workshops, bigger stockpiles and moving out of the entrance chamber.

Originally, I was thinking about filling the entrance with weapon and cage traps and setting up fortifications that could shoot across the chamber, so I could just have my marksdwarves pincushion attackers. Then I noticed that the bottomless chasm was a short distance away from my entrance chamber, and the brook wasn't that far away either, just several z-levels up. I got to thinking about setting the chamber up so I can just flush attackers away into the chasm ("THE COMMODE OF DOOM!"), but I ended up just digging out a gravity fed plumbing system so I could shut the entrance off from the rest of my fort, and then drown anyone in the entrance chamber. A few floodgates, a few levers to control them, and I had myself a nifty drowning system which could be drained into the chasm at will.

I even chained up some animals in the chamber, setting them just a bit off from the stairs so they wouldn't get immediately shot up by the attackers, and I put in floodgates to keep them from drowning so I wouldn't have to keep replacing them whenever I drowned attackers.

The first six waves of goblin siegers died in the chamber, as did over a dozen "ambushing" goblin forces, with all members lost in the chamber. Finally, one goblin got out of the drowning death trap, by holding his breath FOR A MONTH, getting to the up/down entrance stairs, and swimming/climbing up to the surface. After that, none of my goblin attackers ever came down into the flooding chamber, even if I activated a sacrificial dwarf and stationed him or her at the bottom of the stairs. Seriously. They would only come down by CHASING a sacrificial dwarf from the surface. One level down on the stairs, they'd still ignore. Funniest thing. I decided it was due to the horror stories of that original surviver, spreading through the goblins.

I also constructed massive cisterns that I could use to drown attackers, just in case I ever got a deep winter attack. The brook froze up for part of the winter. Right after I finished my cisterns, I got a winter siege. The timing was quite fortunate for me that it took that long, rather than before, when the brook would have been unavailable.

[Raphite1]

Here's a diagram for a water trap that causes water to rise up through grates in the floor and drown undesirables:

http://i943.photobucket.com/albums/ad274/kmcdunn/Drown.jpg

[BigD145]

I made one with integrated pumps spread along the cistern directly above a long 4 wide path. It does take some time to drain, but it works with minimal power. Lots of floodgates were used.

One tip: water will carry bodies and items that can clog your floodgates if they stop on the same tile. The floodgate will not close if stuff shares its tile. At least, that's what happened in 40d. I ended up making multiple floodgates to give me access to the main drowning chamber floodgates so I could clear out bodies while still under siege.

[PsyberianHusky]

Hey I wanna make a high pressure cannon,
how do I do this?

[Zanthra]

Make sure all master levers related to the main liquid source are ABOVE the highest level the liquid will reach, and make sure they are labeled properly!  Pulling the wrong level is bad, but so is having your levers flooded.

[Whitestar60]

Hey I wanna make a high pressure cannon,
how do I do this?

I'd suggest either a brace of pumps feeding from a large reservoir or a simple gravity feed from an overhead reservoir. Latter is simpler, former is more flexible design wise.

[Djohaal]

I once had a fort which had a entrance path that was connected to a 20-z level cistern. I'd push the lever and oops, there go the gobos outside.

[T600]

ok so my problem is.. What exactly is a cistern and how does it differ from a reservoir? Also getting power where I need it always seems difficult and cumbersome, does it pay off once mastered?

Also, My fortress designs are almost all the time, for example, I usually dig in to the side of w/e mountain/hill/w/e is nearby and dig out the first floor which is where I put the trade depot and barracks, and then I make a grand stairwell down like 10 z levels and then make the floors into w/e I need.

Pretty much if you have seen those captain duck videos, thats the way I make all my forts, but thats out of habit, I really don't know any other way.

[Djohaal]

Then get out of the habit. Be creative. it doesn't hurt. 

And cistern = reservoir for all purposes in DF.