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[slothen]

I once built a fort on a waterfall and made it so my dwarves would path through the waterfall to get to the fort.  Water would splash the dwarves and they would get happy thoughts, and then pools of blood and muck would litter the floor tiles surrounding the grates.  Using a statue to designate a room, this muck would get cleaned.  Things went swimmingly until a siege camped out above the waterfall and my dwarves couldn't get in or out of the fort without getting scared.

I saw a design for a mist generator that used falling water to clean dwarves walking through a 2-wide hallway, and thought it was brilliant.  Please excuse the tileset, hopefully the mspaint stuff i did makes the design clearer.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

water is pumped up 2 levels, then falls through grates onto the path on level Z where dwarves walk.  After getting it running, I've noticed 2 things.  Its good at giving dwarves happy thoughts, however if you k-look at the grates on level z, the contaminants that wash off of the dwarves are left on level z on the 'open space' that has the grates.  Dwarves reliably get jobs to clean this, but those jobs are canceled due to dangerous terrain.  Furthermore, dwarves and animals can path onto the walkable tile of the pump, evading the cleansing deluge of water.  The only way I've found to clean the contaminants is to turn off the pumps, at which point they are cleaned properly, but as soon as I turn them on again, another pile shows up, and I'm spammed with canceled cleaning jobs.  If somehow the tile just north of the grates got grime on it, then the dwarves would clean that with no problems, and since clean jobs clean 9 tiles at once, the grates with the falling water would get cleaned as well.

The walkable tile of the pump can be solved by widening the design somewhat and putting more water in the system.  The real problem is getting something that knocks grime off and will be cleaned automatically.  I believe this can be done by making a separate mist generator and having dwarves path through a little ditch with 3/7 water, but what I really want is a compact design that uses pumps and falling water to reliably clean.

[omniclasm]

Bars?

[slothen]

Bars?

floor bars instead of grates?  easy suggestion to try out, testing it now.  I've never used floor bars for anything before.

[Acperience]

Will someone have a solution within 6 hours? I wonder. If that bar thing didn't already work.

[celem]

The other shower design I've seen involved a mist generator setup with a ring of pumps above a meeting room.  You 'daisy-chain' a series of pumps, the output water drops from the pump into the dining hall and the next catches it out of midair and moves it along the chain.

From what I remember of my one attempt at this setup the falling water not only misted my dining room but also meant everything fell off my dwarves as they passed under the showers and was then cleaned off the floor.

Probably fairly effective at removing the gunk, but high contact for extracts/deadly shit I guess.
Im currently experimenting with the same setup, only the floor of the dining hall will be a constant 2/7 flow

[Acperience]

I always include one of those in my forts, but I don't recall if the mist itself actually decontaminates.

[Komus]

please let us know how you got on! Im obsessed with efficiency and this (maybe coupled with pressure plates ) looks perfect as a water feature

[Acperience]

The mist genny design celem was talking about was probably this, in case anyone wants to know.

[slothen]

bars have no apparent effect, contaminants pile up on them over the open space the same with grates, and generate the cancelation spam.  Because the conaminants are in a bad place, clean dwarves will walk through and pick the contaminants right back up.  I did discover that bulls and cats are happy in 6/7 water without drowning.

[slothen]

I have another idea, but would require a significant redesign of my current setup, so I can't be sure at the moment.

Right now, the pumps are dropping basically cubes of 6/7 or 7/7 of water through the grates to the bottom every step.  I want to redesign this so at the top level, the water spreads out and flows a bit before falling down.  perhaps by using a diagonal bend to kill pressure, I can get only 1/7  or 2/7 to drop every step, and then this might not cancel the cleaning jobs, but would still generate enough mist and water to clean dwarves.

To do this, move the pumps back from the path a square or two, and after the output square of the top pump, put a diagonal bend, so the water flows out continuously and slowly to the grate that drops it back down.

[AngleWyrm]

What if instead of dropping onto grates that the dwarves walk across, it drops onto regular floor tiles -- could those be cleaned? The grates would then be moved north and south to collect the water, but maybe the gunk would remain on the floor tiles to be cleaned up.

[Nameless Archon]

The cancellation is caused by dwarves being immersed in 4/7 or greater water. Your shower should still work if you can get it to cycle 2/7 or 3/7 instead. The problem, as I see it, is that you're moving water over three z-levels, and so keeping the water balanced at 2/7 will likely be pretty difficult. As you've already seen, 'contaminants' do not pass through grates, bars (or fortifications, I think).

Why not a simple trench 'bath' filled to 2/7?

[celem]

The mist genny design celem was talking about was probably this, in case anyone wants to know.

yup thanks, i'll let you know how my experiment turns out

[slothen]

Why not a simple trench 'bath' filled to 2/7?

that's my resort if this doesn't work out.  I suppose its just a design challenge to get the functionality of a mist generator and a bath in one setup.

As for the difficulty of getting smaller blocks of water to fall, I think I've hit upon the answer, but I haven't tested it yet.  Basically I would move the pumps back from the path a bit, and use a quick diagonal bend before letting the water freefall down.  The pumps will ensure the water behind the bend is at 7/7, then it should slowly diffuse out and fall.  The one downside to this is now you have a few squares with water floating around below 7/7 at the bottom of the pump, which is going to take a small amount of processor power every step.  The fps hit will probably be negligible, but mist generators (including mine) and trench baths have no flowing water at all by themselves.

I will post the results once I modify my setup.

[slothen]

IT WORKS.  When water slowly diffuses toward the drop 1 and 2 units drop at a time.  Dwarves get happy mist thoughts AND get clean, and because the volume of water is small and the system is part of a meeting hall, contaminants are usually instantly cleaned up by idle dwarves.

As I suspected, you need to give the water on the top level some time to diffuse so only 1 or 2 units fall at a time.  The easiest way to do this is to put a diagonal bend after the pump.  My current design actually only uses one pump, with 3 squares being the distance the water has after the diagonal bend to diffuse out to a 2-wide flow.  Since the path the water takes is about 4 times as long as the setup in the original post, the reservoir at the bottom needs to be significantly expanded before starting the system up.  The result is a larger and more complicated system, with more water flow.