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[Mickey Blue]

So a while back I was reading a thread about how much people hate aquifers and how to get rid of them.. In that thread somebody commented that they loved aquifers for their unlimited water that you can tap into anywhere on the map and use for whatever you want (traps, drinking, farming irrigation (though since .19 that has been fixed), and whatever else).. At the time I wrote it off as "Well they are right, but is it really worth the hassle?).

Since then I decided, given how pervasive aquifers are in DF, I'd learn to get through them effectively (I was able to get through them, but not reliably and it took a long time and would leave my fort looking ugly) so next time I found "The perfect spot... But it has an aquifer" I could still use it...

Well, I did, and now I actively look for the things, in fact I'd more say something is "the perfect spot.. But there is no aquifer..".  They are amazing, clean, drinkable water (no 'bad thoughts' from murk) anywhere you want it, no lag issues that you get from rivers, and they are incredibly easy to get through (after practice of course, using the cave in method).

There are only two drawbacks.. One is that they (so far as I assume) contain no fish/aquatic life for fishing (a useful food resource and means of obtaining shells) and I still suck at getting through multiple aquifers (I can handle one no prob, but when there are two or more I just cannot push through them, any tips that don't involve cheating/mods or freezing? I read one means on the wiki but I don't really understand what they mean).  The former cannot really be fixed (only mitigated by lakes/pools and eventually underground fish) though it would be nice to be able to create artificial ponds that get fish in them.. The latter I just have to figure out but multi-layers do seem to be more rare then others.

So anyways, who else loves aquifers? Not just tolerates them, but actively seeks them out?

-MB

[malroth]

The only method I know of to get past multiple aquifers is to first get through the first layer,  then dig into the second layer using pump stacks to drain the lower aquifer into the higher one, and then smooth or construct walls around the breach to stop the flow. if your aquifer is a 2 layer version its theroticaly possible to still get through with the cavein method  Using 2 seprate drops of concentric layers but I haven't pulled it off myself. 

[Girlinhat]

My basic understanding is that breaching an aquifer is like making a drill.  For every additional layer that you breach, you have to shrink it a little more, tapering as you get lower until you breach it or you run out of space.

Also note, that aquifers contain infinite water.  You can drain an ocean into one, or you can drain it into itself.  Invest in a few windmills to churn your pumps.

[Brandstone]

Alright, I'm tired of having this disability. Time to bash my brain against aquifers again. Hopefully the aquifer breaks first this time.

[gtmattz]

The trick to piercing multiple aquifers is using the 'collapsing ring' method which is described on the wiki.  If I can find the topic where I posted some screenshots of the process I will link it.

HA found it..


It helps alot to know exactly how many layers of aquifer you need to poke through beforehand so I suggest cheating a tiny bit and using dfreveal to find out how many layers there are (and maybe have a peek at what lies below while you are at it  ), just make sure not to unpause while revealed and to un-reveal when you are done scouting things.

[Triaxx2]

Windmills? For shame. Aquifers are a perfect source of infinite power. Breach. Rebreach from below, leading to a pumpstack, through waterwheels. Waterwheels to pump the water through the stack, back up above the aquifer to be dumped into it.

Over engineering? Nah, Dwarfineering.

[gtmattz]

Windmills? For shame. Aquifers are a perfect source of infinite power. Breach. Rebreach from below, leading to a pumpstack, through waterwheels. Waterwheels to pump the water through the stack, back up above the aquifer to be dumped into it.

Over engineering? Nah, Dwarfineering.

And above all FPS killing

[ext0l]

For me the biggest problem is determining the number of aquifer layers there are.
Sometimes I underestimate. 

[Mickey Blue]

Gottcha on multi-levels.. I don't generally like to cheat (which, IMO, using DFReveal or any other third party program is) so in the new version you cannot really tell going in how many levels there are.  I may have to practice a method for breaching two as one and two level ones are quite common, three and above are far more rare (at least assuming their frequency is about the same as in recent previous versions.

Alright, I'm tired of having this disability. Time to bash my brain against aquifers again. Hopefully the aquifer breaks first this time.

This is more or less what I decided to do after that past post I reference, and honestly ended up loving aquifers after I mastered them, to the point I actively look for them in a site because they are easy for me to breach and yield many positive rewards that either cannot be gained in other ways or can only be gained by taking drawbacks (I use the cave-in method outlined on the wiki as other methods (outside of cheating) are not nearly as reliable and can only be done in certain areas), I just need to practice breaching multi-layered ones.  Being able to breach one or two layers (even if three and beyond remain impossible or impractical for me) would open up the vast majority of the map.

-MB

[Vercingetorix]

Alright, that settles it.  Tonight, I'm playing DF and come hell or high water I am going to master aquifiers.  You're welcome to join me.

[Mickey Blue]

I'll join you, sorta, I'm going to master multi-layered aquifers (or at least master the method).  Set my speed up to 150fps (normally use 60*) and taking with me seven picks, a few axes, a lot of food and booze, and a pile of stone.. I'm gonna work this out, mastering the single layer totally changed how I play this game and opened up a huge amount of sites for me, mastering double layers will open up even more sites and since I cannot tell how many layers there are anymore in a site it will make fewer times where I finish all my work only to find out there is at least one more under it.

I'll keep ya'll posted of my success.

-MB

[Urist Da Vinci]

Sometimes at the boundary between biomes, you can sneak under an aquifer layer using non-cheaty normal mining. This often happens because there are different soil types in the biomes, and the aquifers in each layer don't line up.

On the z-level below an aquifer layer, water will leak from the ceiling unless the wall above is channeled out. The paper-thin floor tiles of an aquifer don't spawn water.

[AdirianSoan]

All hail the aquifer!

I prefer pumps.  They take longer, but they don't uglify the landscape with giant pits.

I find wood to be the superior option to stone, just because a top-notch carpenter is always a good thing to have around anyways; masons are cheaper to train.  Set a carpenter dwarf on embark, use your carpenter to construct the pump parts, set everybody else to pumping, have carpenter build the walls.  The better skilled your carpenter is, the faster the walls will go up, and the easier this process will be.

[Patchy]

Well I do have a few tips for determining how many aquifer layers you have. You might find them useful, so here they are.

The soil readout: Little Soil, Some Soil, Deep Soil, Very Deep Soil; as far as I can tell corrosponds to how many soil layers there are. 1 2 3 and 4 respectively. Soil aquifers will only appear in places with 3 or 4 soil layers. If you have a little soil or some soil embark and it reads aquifer, you have a conglomerate or sandstone aquifer waiting for you, and stone layer aquifers are almost always multiple z-levels in size.

If you have deep or very deep, it's not as easy to tell what you are gonna have. But if the readout says clay instead of shallow clay, you have a chance at it being a single layer aquifer provided the clay layer is in layer 3 or 4, since most clay layer types can't support aquifers.

Thats pretty much all the tips I have for telling what you have at the embark screen. My next one is for when you have embarked.

So look at all the pebbles around on your embark, are they conglomerate or sandstone? If so, guess what, you have one of them as an aquifer. If the pebbles are anything else, you only have soil aquifers. And if you combine that with knowlege you gleaned pre-embark, you can plan accordingly for your aquifer situation.

One other caveat, sand deserts still seem to give me false positives sometimes. So keep that in mind when embarking on those.

Edit: Grammar corrections

[agatharchides]

I personally like to embark on the border of two biomes where you can benefit from the aquifer without having to breach it.  I'll tackle one if that's not handy without too many qualms though. I've breached up to 3 layers with pumps, though more than that would be well into the department of the tedious. I prefer them, most since they are flexible and don't depend on having enough layers over them to use the cave-in method. That and I have bad memories of cave-ins gone wrong so I tend to avoid them if possible.