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Author Topic: river drainage (the dwarven way)  (Read 365 times)

blainemono

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river drainage (the dwarven way)
« on: April 06, 2011, 07:10:40 am »

I've decided to build a small fort in the middle of a big river. Since the river is on the ege of the map, I couldn't dam it, so I've decided to drain a small area of the river bed to build a fort foundation on.

I built a pumping scaffolding like this:

Code: [Select]

      /\
      |
  ###@@@##
  #  @@@ #          # - wall
  @@.... #          @@ - pumps
<-@@.  .@@          . - pump intake square
  @@.  .@@->
  # ....@@ 
  # @@@ #
  ##@@@##
     |
     \/

(not up to scale, I've decided that making it 4 times bigger is a dwarfly thing to do).

It works almost as planned with a small hitch that it doesnt work at all - water level inside the pumped-out square never falls below 7/7. Well, sometimes it goes to 2-3, but fills up to 7 almost instantly.

What's the problem with my design and how do I fix it?
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ahonek

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Re: river drainage (the dwarven way)
« Reply #1 on: April 06, 2011, 07:32:35 am »

I've built a staircase straight down into an underground lake by using a similar technique. In my case I wanted a 1x1 staircase, surrounded by walls to keep out the water:

Code: [Select]
WWW
WXW
WWW

All I had to do is make sure there is at least one pump drawing water from each of the squares that need a wall on them. Then I built the staircase down, and built the corner wall tiles, then the orthogonal wall tiles.

The only hitch is that you constantly have to be un-suspending the wall construction jobs, as they get interrupted by water.

So, long story short, it is possible, and if you notice 7/7 water in the problem tiles all the time, you might need to add more pumps. For example, you could put another pump in each of your corners to increase suction.
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blainemono

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Re: river drainage (the dwarven way)
« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2011, 07:43:39 am »

Hmm, building inside the pump intake area never occured to me, I wanted to drain the whole square of the riverbed and then build comfortably. Worth a shot, thanks.
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