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[Buttery_Mess]

I built a small moat around the outside wall of my fort mainly to keep enemies far enough away from the base of my wall that my dwarves on the ramparts could get a good shot in. However, dead bodies, stray bolts, arrows and the like quickly accumulated in the trough, which I found annoying. So, I built a pump to empty the moat somewhat, so that my dwarves could grab the junk.

I realised that this had the effect of slowly dragging the items towards the pump, and into the shallower water, which made it easier for my dwarves to pluck things out. It occurred to me that you could use networks of troughs and pumps to make a conveyor belt, in which items could be dumped into a 'canal' of sorts and floated down to where they are needed.

I can't think whether this really has much of a practical application, but can anyone think of a way to make it useful? I think it could be useful for logging, transporting ore and such in certain circumstances. Would there be a combination of garbage dumps and/or stockpiles that could be used to automate the process at all?

[Sphalerite]

There is a bug in fluid flow in DF such that objects pushed by flowing liquids will sometimes vanish from the map.  Those objects will still exist and will still be retrievable by a dwarf for stockpiling, but will no longer show up on the screen or interact with flowing liquids.  The bug occurs often enough that when trying to push objects with flowing liquid you won't get them to move more than a dozen or so tiles before they all vanish.

[Buttery_Mess]

Oh that's annoying. Still, if that bug gets fixed maybe this idea could work. Critters don't disappear, do they?

[squeakyReaper]

If you have a Floor Hatch near the tiles that the pump is pumping from, perhaps you could open the hatch in order to drop whatever items drifted close enough to the floor below?  You would still have to retrieve the bits that are farther off, but it would take care of a lot of collection.

[ral]

On a related note, is there any way to gather up all these damn bolts everywhere and actually have them get restacked? As it is they seem to do stupid stuff like place one bolt per ammo stockpile tile so I just leave them all forbidden.

[!!crundle!!]

On a related note, is there any way to gather up all these damn bolts everywhere and actually have them get restacked? As it is they seem to do stupid stuff like place one bolt per ammo stockpile tile so I just leave them all forbidden.

Yeah. Melt them back down into metal bars and forge another stack.

[ral]

I've been melting them but it seems very slow even with like 6 forges dedicated to melting. Seems kind of like melting a single bolt takes as long as melting a giant axe blade or something. oh well, guess I'll just keep doing it.

Note that melting is not exactly 100% efficient.....

[monk12]

A use for a liquid conveyor belt?

Have your moat run to an open space under your walls. Build a bridge in that space and raise it, so that if a building destroyer falls into the moat he can't get into the fortress. When your moat is full of crap, lower the bridge and activate the pumps to flush all of the junk into the fortress. Raise bridge and activate a different set of pumps that drain the collection area and pump the water back into the moat. Now your dwarves don't have to expose themselves to the outside world to collect siege related junk, and if you build in some additional safeguards the whole process could operate while the siege is ongoing.

[Buttery_Mess]

Yeah that does sound like a pretty good way to implement liquid conveyor belt technology. It's not really plausible with my current fort, but for my next one, I think I'm going to try something like that. I'm going to have a waterproof outer keep, that I can use to drown enemies, then drain the keep into some sort of cistern, into which all the bodies and junk will land, so that their junk can be harvested.

[malroth]

Actually I read somewhere that melting down bolts is greater than 100% efficient. Is this still true?

[TheyTarget]

Once I've used this. I made a system where dwarves dropped large amounts of refuse, and varied garbage (Nothing was rotting) into a channel. I then had a single lever set up that would lock off the channel fill it with water and push it all out into the middle of the ocean. The garbage waterfall was the most beautiful sight my dwarfs ever saw. Oh they all waited in joy for the day the garbage fall was to be turned on.

So yeah I used it to dump tons and tons of sewage into the ocean once a season for all my dwarfs to watch and get happy moods from.

[Sphalerite]

Back in my last 40d fortress, I built a mechanical conveyor belt using a gigantic, elaborate system of repeating retracting drawbridge in a carefully designed three-dimensional arrangement to fling debris from the killing pits adjacent to the main entrance bridges into a safe collection area under the fortress.  It worked, but cause a massive FPS hit when active, and took about a year to reliably transport everything from start to finish, which with sieges several times a year meant it always had lots of FPS-sucking objects being thrown around inside it.

[Buttery_Mess]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[j0nas]

On a related note, is there any way to gather up all these damn bolts everywhere and actually have them get restacked? As it is they seem to do stupid stuff like place one bolt per ammo stockpile tile so I just leave them all forbidden.

While reading this seemingly unrelated note to the topic at hand struck a cord with me.  This, a thousand times this.  Could Toady not at least take a few hours out of his busy schedule implementing pottery and beekeeping to at least make dwarves restack items in a reasonable manner, fixing at least one problem that has been outstanding since god said 'let there be light'.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also you sir, ought to be awarded some sort of prize for your awesomeness.  Perhaps a single diamond-encrusted elven bone bolt?

[monk12]

That picture is fantastic. +10 internets