Print

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

[JacaByte]

Yeah, that's right, I'm looking for an aquifer, normally a large pain in the dwarven rump, but in this case I actually have a priority for finding it.

You see, I'm new to this game, and got absolutely murdered by a goblin seige (should have let that bleeding markdwarf die outside...) in my first fortress of 88. So I decided to embark on a volcano, where there's plenty of magma and nobody to disturb me. Plenty of strange and new materials to work with too. It's just that the lay of the map is weird, it's like the sedimentary layers got chopped up and stitched back together in lumps. The embark map said there was an aquifer in the layer with black sand, and there's easily 10 layers with black sand in them. So what do I dig to? This volcano is pretty steep, you have to go down about 22 Z-levels in order to go completely underground. It's fairly confusing to me.

Have I not dug down deep enough yet? My dwarves are getting tired of drinking from murky pools, and I can't scale farming up very well when using murky pools for irrigation. At least it rains often...

[Hans Lemurson]

I myself have had a similar experience.  I embarked on a volcano that claimed it had an aquifer, but was apparently nowhere to be found.  By the time I found it, I was halfway through constructing a 100z pump-stack to bring fresh water into my fort.

Look for aquifers in flat ground near the base of the mountain where the soil is the thickest.  That's where mine was.

[slothen]

In the meantime, try surface farming.  I'm too lazy to set up temporary farms while I design my food production area, so I often spend the first few years farming on the surface exclusively.

as for your aquifer search, make sure you're digging horizontally or down, never pierce an aquifer from below (as far as I know)

[Odalrick]

In my experience, aquifers tend to "dry up" near magma. I don't know if magma actually destroys aquifers, but I never seem to find them near natural magma. In other words, try digging far from the magma.

[Illanair]

If you're desperate enough, and don't mind cheating, dfreveal will do the trick. Turn it on to have it reveal all tiles.
(Don't unpause or shut down the revealer!)
Go into dig mode and go up and down the layers. The blinking blue overlay that implies a wet tile is an aquifer (unless there's a murky pool above/below). Good hunting.

When you're done press any key in the reveal application to have it darken the map again and then and only then unpause (You'll uncover lots of hidden !!FUN!! otherwise.)

[Hans Lemurson]

Or dig through large amounts of soil to train-up your miners.

[JacaByte]

Thanks for the replies!

Heh, I already have 1 legendary miner. And there is no flat ground on this map BTW, except at the peaks where the magma vent is. I'm thinking my choices are mining down at the lowest level of the map that's still part of the surface or picking a spot at the peak that's as far from the vent as possible and drilling straight down.

That, or I can go searching for a cavern. Nah, not yet.

[Hans Lemurson]

Caverns can be useful for getting a well going just to make sure that no wounded die of thirst, but given that you're probably just starting out, you shouldn't have any wounded yet.

My experience has been that aquifers hang out where the most soil is.

[Lagslayer]

I embarked on a volcano recently that supposedly had an aquifer. I ran out of murky pools and needed to make some wells, so I cheated and used dfreveal. When I finally found it, it was miniscule and tucked away at the side of the map. It was in stone layers, though. I've found that most of my caverns don't have standing water in them, though.

[JacaByte]

I embarked on a volcano recently that supposedly had an aquifer. I ran out of murky pools and needed to make some wells, so I cheated and used dfreveal. When I finally found it, it was miniscule and tucked away at the side of the map. It was in stone layers, though. I've found that most of my caverns don't have standing water in them, though.

Heh, I bet you had fun with that watering project. If a small, infinite drain/source of water doesn't sound like a mega-project to you, then you're not a dwarf.

[JacaByte]

Fudge. I can't find that aquifer to save my hide. At least I got plenty of booze from the traders, because the murky pools all just froze over. I guess my next megadwarf project is building a rain catchment and water tower system...