Print

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

[ledgekindred]

I have a really long underground channel leading from the river to my cistern for the well.  It's ... long.  The river is far away.  And it's only 1 tile wide.  It's been filling up slowly, but I think surely.  Right now, the floor of the cistern barely has any water in it, but is covered with "Piles of mud" that seem to be building up and building up without much water flowing in over it.  Is the water flow going to be at all impeded by this?  When I noticed it wasn't filling up very quickly, I realized don't have any idea if water flow can actually be interrupted by having rocks or mud in the way.  Should I have made it wider?  Should I even worry about it or just wait for the water to trickle in?

[shibdib]

as long as the source is unlimited, or isnt going to empty out and evaporate youll b fine

[G-Flex]

Nothing at all really impedes flow unless it blocks it entirely, as far as I know. So the piles of mud (or loose stone, or whatever else) lying on a tile won't change anything.

[piesquared]

There is nothing that only partly impedes flow. Walls, doors, and similar completely stop water, while mud and rocks do nothing to slow it.

What will slow (and even halt) the flow of water is a large cistern. 1/1 water evaporates, and if this happens at the same rate as the flow in, progress will stop. As far as I know distance alone isn't enough to cause this, but you did say you had a cistern at the end.

One near-perfect way to stop this kind of thing is to use a pump. The pressurized water from a pump will fill your cistern much more quickly then simple flowing water. Just remember that it will also fill the level the pump is on, if you're not careful. I always fill my moats and lava channels via pump for exactly this reason, especially when they branch or have large cisterns.

[ledgekindred]

Ok, that answers the question.  There's just a lot of mud in the cistern and I guess I will have to wait for the water to flow in and cover it.  It's coming from a river, so it is sourced, so it's not going to run out or anything.  I didn't really bother with pumps because I had a straight cut across to the river.  I just didn't expect it to fill so slowly.

[rodya_mirov]

I've never seen it fill slowly - that's really odd.

[Dewar]

Is the hole in the river where the water starts draining into your long hallway a diagonal? If I understand my DF water rules, diagonal cracks reduce pressure which would cause the tunnel and cistern to fill up slower.

[unknwnsoljer]

I have noticed that trying to dig a long river extension may take forever to fill up, due to the evaporation. I recommend you do what a previous poster suggested, and use a pump to fill your extension almost instantly.
In this case, if his river extension is on the same level as the river, there will be no 'pressure', aka no water teleportation. Thus it fills slowly and is slowed by evaporation. So a diagonal path from the original river to his extension is irrelevant, if he's not using 'pressure' in the first place. But you are correct, in that 'pressure' does not operate across diagonals.

[bobbens]

From my experience with fluids in DF in general, the best idea is to create "mini-reservoirs" along the way. It's also a good idea to have the channel as wide as you can. Otherwise you can have issues with the water evaporating faster than it can pile up and it'll disappear.

The idea is that you fill up the first reservoir, once it's full, you open the floodgate and go to the next one and so on. Eventually you'll be able to fill up the place you want to fill. The reservoirs act as low-pass filters meaning that they "smooth out" any disturbances in the flow, like say filling up a chamber with water. The trick is to also put many floodgates (I like to put one on each wall of each reservoir) so in the future you can add more channels if needed.

Water tends to be fast enough so you can have longer channels with fewer reservoirs, but with magma you really need to use more, also because it flows very slowly. Experiment a bit and you'll get the hang of it.

[ledgekindred]

It's entirely possible that I've channeled into the river diagonally.  I've built plenty of these sorts of things, but nothing with such a long travel, which is why I was wondering if those mud piles would impede flow - I've never seen so much build up and even though it is filling up, it's going so slowly.  I'll have to double-check whether I'm fully channeled into the river.  I'll also probably have the miners go down and build another channel next to the other one.  Fortunately the fortress is well above water level so they can tunnel out above and build another channel next to the existing one.  I could also channel out extra reservoirs along the way.

Thanks for all the tips. 

[Double A]

Fortifications.

[ledgekindred]

Ah, will fortifications keep out mud as well as other debris?  I wonder if I'll get fish in it and can set it up as a fishing location...  That'd be worth building out a few more underground pools as fishing spots, if you could get fish in them. 

As it is I had the miners channel out a second tile next to the first and it seemed to help speed it up, just from having twice the volume of water moving through the channel to the cistern.

Usually I set up the fortress much closer to the water supply, but the magma on the opposite corner of the map was too tempting to avoid.  So I'm much further away from the water than I'm used to.  New stuff to learn, apparently.

[Double A]

No, fortifications slow down liquids. They block all creatures, but I'm not sure about vermin. Mud is where water was no matter what.

What's wrong with mud, exactly?

[bobbens]

I've had salmon spawn in a reservoir behind a grate leading to a river, not sure if they got in or spawned, but it was full of them. I believe vermin spawn randomly near the water source, so you can't filter them out. At least with magma you'll get fire snakes with any open area near the pipe.

[Syff]

Water tends to be fast enough so you can have longer channels with fewer reservoirs, but with magma you really need to use more, also because it flows very slowly. Experiment a bit and you'll get the hang of it.

Science has shown water and magma to flow at the same speed.  Which is very very slowly.  Using a pump is almost always preferable.
Of course, if it's connected to sourced water, it ought to be a different matter entirely, so I can't be certain what's going on without some kind of map upload.
Unless you are in fact using a diagonal somewhere.

In this case, if his river extension is on the same level as the river, there will be no 'pressure', aka no water teleportation. Thus it fills slowly and is slowed by evaporation. So a diagonal path from the original river to his extension is irrelevant, if he's not using 'pressure' in the first place. But you are correct, in that 'pressure' does not operate across diagonals.

Actually, rivers source water with a similar "pressure" pathfinding system as pumps.  So the use of a diagonal would matter, yes, as it would break any 7/7 connection with the river source.
This excellent thread (and in particular, this video) has more information.

No, fortifications slow down liquids.

Would you mind posting a video demonstrating this?  My own observations haven't seen fortifications make any notable difference.