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[Hans Lemurson]

I embarked in the tundra along the southern coast of my main landmass.  I was hoping to have fun with ice and melting and re-freezing it, hopefully with enemies inside.

When I embarked, I was vaguely disturbed to see ocean waves crashing along the shore rather than the solid sheet of ice I was expecting.  Ok, no matter, I'll just give it time.  Nope, no ice.  I will pump water from the ocean onto land and see if that freezes!  Nope, but the whole pool IS imbued with small piles of snow.

Does ocean-water simply not freeze?  I even desalinated some, and that's still liquid too.

Maybe what I need to do is to pump water into the tundra biome and see if that freezes.  If I do that, will I have to make sure I use aquifer-water or cave-water, or should sea-water work fine?

The temperature IS low enough, since I get year-round snowstorms.

[lament]

Make sure tempurature is turned on in the d_init file.

[Quietust]

Ocean water probably won't freeze unless it gets really cold - it is saltwater, after all.

[Hans Lemurson]

I always play with temperature, and I know for a fact that it is being used:
Two barrels of milk I embarked with froze before I could get them into my food stockpile.  Since frozen milk is not considered food, I had to actually make a garbage zone in my fort and order them to be dumped.  Once inside my fort they thawed out and got moved to my food-stockpile.

My current theories are that either salt-water won't freeze, or you can't freeze water in an arctic-ocean biome.

[Proteus]

Well, the freezing temprature for milk is around -0.5°C...
that of salt water around -21°C...
so, even in RL the ocean will remain fluid at temperatures where your milk already is a solid blocvk of ice

[Hans Lemurson]

It's biome-specific, I think.

I pumped a bit of water up onto the tundra layer (which is a z-level above the beach) and it immediately froze into ice.  I am now going to see what happens if I try to channel water directly from the ocean into "tundra-zone".

Is there any way to get a view of what parts of the map are what temperature?

[Patchy]

Arctic oceans seem to be pretty random for me. Sometimes they are frozen sometimes not. Have you tried moving the water up to where the tundra biome of your embark is? The beach section is still considered the ocean. Pretty sure it should freeze once it hits the tundra.

[Hans Lemurson]

See above post.   The water froze as soon as it touched the tundra.

I am now going to see what effects altitude has, whether water will freeze in a place which was exposed and then re-roofed, and then dig a trench from the ocean to the tundra to highlight the exact point at which the ocean-water freezes.  I suspect it will be at the biome-boundary.

Alternately, my little beach may simply be "protected" somehow.  Science will reveal the truth!!!

[Hans Lemurson]

Ok, so I dug my little trench, and as SOON as the sea-water crossed the little boundary-line from Ocean to Tundra (as defined by the cliffs), it froze solid.

Lesson: Ocean Biomes do not freeze.

[Hans Lemurson]

Arg!!!

Future note: do not order your dwarves to mine large areas of ice which are next to water.  They will stand in the formerly ice-covered tile to work, and then when water flows in...Urist McFrostypants Miner has been encased in ice.

Well, at least now I know that ice WILL in fact be an effective siege-defense once I get things set up so that I can make it freeze and thaw at the pull of a lever.

Price of this lesson: My 4 legendary miners painstakingly trained up, two of whom were of the original 7 dwarves.

update: And now I have a tantrumming Axe-Lord in full steel plate.

[Urist McMick]

hehehe... That's gonna be a fun defence system.

[BaronBalloon]

i used an aquifer for this. i pumped the water out, and it looked something like this:

oooooooxooooooo
ooooooomooooooo
======m=======
xoooooooooooooox
=hhhhhhhhhhhhhh=
===============

where o is clear floor, x is channeled into the aquifer 1 layer below, m is screw pump, = is wall and h is clear floor below a previous channel from the surface, now refloored. yes i know i suck at ascii art.

[Proteus]

You can use the code-tag for this,
it uses a monospaced font

[morgoththegreat]

Lesson: Ocean Biomes do not freeze.

Ocean biomes can freeze, I have a fort right now on the beach in what the map called a temperate zone which freezes solid from late autumn to early spring. I was hoping to make it a big fishing fort (as in, catching whales and the like with huge earth-moving projects such as ocean draining) but with the water frozen half the year I don't get very many fish spawned, just land creatures.

It just seems to be pretty random about whether or not this stuff freezes.

[Hans Lemurson]

Maybe it's just arctic oceans then?  Some way to ensure that they are not permanently encased in ice?