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[nomad_delta]

I'm curious, how do you guys go about designing and planning  "plumbing" for your forts?  I've noticed when I start a fort I'm really only thinking about placing rooms and stockpiles for efficiency but I never really consider things like where to route water for wells, or mist generators (I've never managed to build one but I'd like to try) and that sort of thing until later... and then I realize I haven't left any space for plumbing/aqueducts.  Or worse, I route the water in and end up severely limiting my design choices because now there's water in the way.

Also same question for magma plumbing -- I'd like to try to build a pump stack to pipe the magma up in my fort, but the only possible route to pump it up through the caverns is so far away from the river that I have no idea how I'd get power to the pump stack without building a 70-tile axle across the map.  I tried digging a huge tunnel from the river all the way across the map and completely circumnavigating my fortress and outputting back into a lower point in the river so it'd flow back off the map -- that worked, but then when I tried opening a hole above the tunnel to put waterwheel into the water burst up through the hole and flooded my entire fortress.  Guess I gotta re-read the wiki page on water pressure before I try that again. 

So... what sorts of things do you guys do in your fort building and planning stages to make sure you'll be able to add in all the fancy plumbing and such you'll want to build later?

I was considering leaving an empty Z-level between most of my upper floors so I'd be able to easily route water and power and such between the floors without it getting in the way.  Think that'd work?

--nomad_delta

[Acperience]

You can use on-site water reactors to power stacks if you don't feel like overdoing the axles.

I always dig at least 5 levels down from the surface before building anything important.
Other than that I pretty much already know what I want the layout to be before I start digging, and if I mess up (badly) I just scoop out a giant cavern where I dun screwed up and build everything as constructions.

Mist gennies are actually pretty easy. After you make 1 or 2, you'll know enough to snake them through entire levels.

[slothen]

for things that don't require massive amounts of water in short amounts of time, a single tall shaft pressurized with water from the surface will do the trick.  It doesn't need to be near the center of your fortress, and you can use diagonal pathways to neutralize water pressure.  for wells, you can use a hand operated pump into a constructed cistern to provide clean water.

[Aspgren]

Nothing like a good, controlled plumbing system!

I love to have water flowing freely, with designs to filter out contaminants, keep well water fresh and such ... although on my current fort water is so incredibly scarce (i have a tiny and slow-flowing underground lake that's hard to get any real quantities from) so I opted for a very simple design of a canal with a walkway on the side. I always put walkways and ramps and such everywhere with the plumbing in case someone falls in.. and make sure i have floodgates set up so i can shut off the water supply if i wanted to. I didn't do this one time and then tower caps sprung and clogged the canal, causing a flood

[celem]

Aquifer.

Seriously...  Learn to punch through them and they give you all the water you could want to play with.  I found a nice aquifer in rock and carved bedrooms above it so that every room has a well

Same thing a few levels up provided me with a waterfall in the dining room.

You dispose of water afterwards by just dumping it into another aquifer

[nomad_delta]

Aquifer.

Seriously...  Learn to punch through them and they give you all the water you could want to play with.  I found a nice aquifer in rock and carved bedrooms above it so that every room has a well

Same thing a few levels up provided me with a waterfall in the dining room.

You dispose of water afterwards by just dumping it into another aquifer

That was actually one of my biggest questions about plumbing was how to dispose of water after piping it around for power and waterfalls and all that.  If I dumped it into the caverns it'd eventually just fill the cavern and someday flood my fortress, probably killing my FPS in the process, right?

When you say "dump it into another aquifier" are you actually talking about playing on a map with aquifiers on multiple levels?  Most maps I've seen only have one aquifer layer reported on the embark screen -- sometimes I see maps with two or even three aquifier layers listed but they're almost always stuck right on top of eachother.  I thought that just meant one big multiple-Z layer aquifer, and I figured that would be near impossible to punch through.

Are there maps that have other aquifer layers not listed on the embark screen much deeper down?  Otherwise how do you dump back into an aquifer that's way up near the surface after piping the water deep underground for wells and waterfalls and mist generators and things?  Use pumps to bring the waste water back up to the surface I guess?  Sounds complicated. 

Is there any other way to dispose of waste water safely without having it accumulate other than dropping it back into an existing river/brook to flow off the map?  You can't create your own off-the-map disposal flow because you can't dig out the edge map tiles, right?

--nomad_delta

[jwest23]

You can, however, carve fortifications into the edge tiles.  Water or magma will disappear off the edge of the map through those fortifications.  It's terribly convenient.

[nomad_delta]

You can, however, carve fortifications into the edge tiles.  Water or magma will disappear off the edge of the map through those fortifications.  It's terribly convenient.

OMG.  You just opened up a whole new world of plumbing possibilities for me.  Most of my design problems have been due to drainage difficulties.  I'd been going through all sorts of crazy contortions trying to get the waste water right back up to (and usually an extra z-level above) the river it came from in most cases so get it to drain back out without flooding the world.

I imagine the water will flow much more slowly through the fortification tiles than it would through empty space so I'd need to create an output area with fortifications at least several times as wide as my input pipe to let it flow out at full speed, correct?

--nomad_delta