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[Deus Machina]

Four years of a fort cut off from magma!

I've done well so far with clear-cutting the surrounding forests for charcoal, but the siege moves in and, look at that, I'm in one of the stages where I was using what was going to be a wood stockpile for bedding, and my dorfs have been ignoring the more permanent indoor one.

So, pump time! The problem: the magma sea is 170 floors down, trying to build a wind farm would leave my dwarves vulnerable and would be useless with these darn trolls breaking everything, and my underground 'river'--which I'm not really sure is a river, instead of just a HUGE lake--is halfway to the sea.

So, I'm left with the option of waiting it out--which will suck, but is possible as long as these trolls don't break down the depot bridge and rush it all at once--which is possible but boring, or figuring out how to power these pumps.

Can I hook a waterwheel to them from the side? Or do they only power to the top?

And, errr... the light (passable) square, right?

[Trickysticks]

Channel a straight line from the lake, the water will "flow" and you can make (a) waterwheel(s). At least, that what I did :3. Then use WATAH POWAH to pump the magma up.

[Lectorog]

IIRC, you can channel out tiles from below, using certain methods. This means that you can safely get your dwarves onto a secluded area of land. From there, just build walls if they have archers, and otherwise make the wind farm.

If that wouldn't work, try dwarf power; meaning, try getting dwarves to manually pump. After that, use gear boxes and axles to reroute the power you have in a convoluted manner to get the power to the pumps where you need it.

If all else fails, Fun-rush the enemy. Were I you, I would've already gotten dozens of recruits smashed, bled out, or drowned by this point.
I guess you could wait it out, but where's the Fun in that?

[Frelock]

Through a wonderful quirk of dwarven physics, screw pumps use far less power than the waterwheels used to power them.  This can lead to perpetual motion machines which have no inputs, and a net output of power.  This page on the wiki has some great examples at the bottom. To get them started, you can simply designate a pond wherever you need water; your dwarves will fill it to capacity so long as you have a water source and buckets.  Then, you can start the pump manually.  As soon as it gets power, it'll start working on its own, so your dwarf can go on to better things.  And there you have it, as much power as you could possibly need.

When connecting power to a screw pump, (afaik) any direction will do; up, down, on any side.  The top is usually preferable because there's going to be fluid everywhere else.  And remember, screw pumps can get power from other powered screw pumps (though this means that whenever one is going the other one is too; partial shutdowns are impossible).  Everything on the grid shares power with everything else on the grid.

[Reelyanoob]

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Water_wheel#Perpetual_motion
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Water_wheel#Mini_Water_Reactor

You'd need logs for the above though. I'm certain they can be linked horiziontally to your machine. They produce 170 power, so I guess you'd need at least 10 of these to power a 170 level stack. I'm not an expert though.

[Passive Fist]

Careful though. Water reactors are murder on game performance. Start them up as the very last thing you do so all that's left is to wait for the magma to reach its destination.

[JmzLost]

A magma piston may be a better alternative than pumping up 170 z-levels.  No pumps, no power requirement.  Also, to lift magma 170 z-levels, you'll need 170 magma safe pumps, which means glass or iron for the screw and pipe.  The block for the pump can be made out of any magma safe stone.  Iron and glass need fuel, which you don't have enough of, which is why you need magma.

If that wouldn't work, try dwarf power; meaning, try getting dwarves to manually pump. After that, use gear boxes and axles to reroute the power you have in a convoluted manner to get the power to the pumps where you need it.

The problem: the magma sea is 170 floors down,

  You're gonna need more dorfs!  Manually operated pumps only power themselves, you can't transmit "extra" power anywhere, because there is no extra power.  You'd need 170 dwarves pumping at the same time to move a reasonable amount of magma.

JMZ

EDIT:  Another alternative is to create a mini fort down by the magma sea.  Smelters and forges, some stockpiles, bedrooms for metal workers, and a small dining room/meeting area.  Possibly with a burrow restriction to keep the metal workers from running all the way up to the main fort.

[Deus Machina]

I had a large percentage of the pumps done before the siege took place.

Also now I'm not worried about the siege. The gobbos packed them and their giant cave swollows and elk birds to cover every inch of my moat bridge, and allowed me to dump about forty gobbos into the water.

Now I'm berating myself over the choice to leave slopes on the side away from the fort, and debating digging out enough pumps to get rid of those.

[Starver]

If you are worried about building destroyers, the following diagram should help show my way of protecting external structures.  (Rarely needed, often done.)

Code: [Select]

# = undug, raw rock/soil
O = Wall/other structure
/ = Ramp

:( O    <-vulnerable
#######

:) O    <-not vulnerable
#### /#
#######

It's actually an overkill solution, given the current state of play f building-destroyers, but even without the wall it protects against non-ranged attackers and is easily something you can lay out within a season, even around a very large area.

In my current fort (just started off a .25, yesterday although I've still got a .21 I want to 'finish') I isolated an area of roughly 96 tiles square within the first couple of seasons[1] with my starting pair of miners.  The method I used for that should work well for smaller circumstances, and much more quickly.

Simply, set out a single channel 1-removed from the inner side of the intended dyke, then set to tunnel the inner side out.  You may already have disconnected access between the two sides by that act alone (so if you still want access between inside and outside, at least temporarily before you create bridges/other access, you should a strategic temporary ramp, instead), but my cut-the-grass[4] final stage is to channel out over the tunnelled inner part.  The alternative is to just make a double ramp and remove the inner ramps.

You then go ahead and extend the outer edge with more channelling, when safe to do so, as well as deepen the channel further.  As is my eventual plan (see below).

Of course, this design has the same issue of "slopes on the other side of the slope", but in another thread, elsewhere, I mentioned a way for a deep-pit inward access that similarly BD-proof, for material collection.



[1] While also digging in, getting 40Z-deep wells[2] created, removing some extended space over which a quartet of full length drawbridges were then dropped[3] and, by the Dwarven caravan, I'd even made a start on making a similar defence right on the penultimate/ultrapenultimate edge tiles to help protect me from archer overview when I want to bring down all non-fort surface tiles down many Z-levels.

[2] Only just found out that I had managed to dig straight through the first cavern, in a worldgen where I'd set 15 Z-levels as the default for all the intra-cavern spacings.  I thought the RNG had given me a worst-case scenario when a number of exploratory stairwells went that far before finding cavern.  I only found actual cavern 1 when my experimental "spiral staircase" of ramps, which is a rather a departure of design for me, dug into the top of the first cavern.

[3] One raising, one retracting (19-tiles of gap), a two-tile intermediate pillar for support and then two retracting (20 tiles) before hitting the 'first edge' from which I will eventually make a small bridge over the external dyke.  Bridges/pillar four tiles wide (I'm building centre-symmetrical), thus six tiles wide.

[4] "coup-de-gras", geddit?

[Triaxx2]

In this situation, it's spelled Dike.

[Starver]

In this situation, it's spelled Dike.

After I posted, I was worried someone would think that.

Spoiler: Derailing (click to show/hide)

It's a valid spelling, around these parts, though.  As well as elsewhere on this little island of mine.  "Dike" is generally used in geology for natural formations, so I tend to use the alternative "Dyke" for a man-madeartificial construction so as to differentiate.  As long as I use it in context, I've got no problem.  (Although, just like I'd not be able to use the N-word, I'll let those who identify with the term use it in that context unless explicitly invited to.)

Although see the (to some, amusingly named) Hag Dyke hostel where the latter spelling is used for a natural geography and Scout Dike outwards-bounds place where I think (though I can't currently find proper references) it was named for a man-made construction.  Literacy has settled such things so relatively recently, compared with the age of both the natural and man-made features involved.  See also "Offa's Dyke" and "Wat's Dyke", among others, but "Scots' Dike" that seems to have been named comparatively recently, after rejecting the more 'fluid' or Dutch-inspired spellings such as "Dyik".


Interestingly, there was a Greek goddess known as "Dike", but that's just the accepted anglo-Latinesque spelling of the Greek original, and pronounced "Dikey" (just like "Nikey" is for the shoe brand), and as far as I can see has no reason to be connection, at least in relation to the more probably and more vulgar (or, indeed 'vulva') connotations towards the ditch version, directly or indirectly.

But, anyway, apologies if there was any offence.  On the other hand, if it has caused no furore and I am not to be condemned to gaol due to its connexion with the arse-end of the English language, I'm happy if you're just bemused by all the colourfully Anglicised spellings that I can jemmy into the centre of my speech, as behoves my brand of speciality writing.

(See what I did there!  And I'm gratified to find that my spill-chucker only complains about one of the above words, and that was the word "arse". )

edit: Corrected an honest typo.

[Wurgel]

or you make it with a dwarfen powered partial pumping.

with excess to sand, you can build a magma-glasfurnance on the managmalake for the pumps. then build the normal pumpstack, but make bigger cisterns/flooding areas every few level, based on the number of pumping dwarfs you wanna use.

this way, for example, you fill a cistern/floodingarea 20 lvl above the lake with 20 dwarfs. Then you let this dwarfs pump it the next 20 lvls and so on, until you reached the top.

you will need the cisterns/floodingareas to be able to pump enought magma to the survace.

[Triaxx2]

You know, since you don't tend to have flying building destroyers, putting windmills up on blocks works well.

Code: [Select]

WWW
WAW
WWW

W=Wall
A=Axle

[flieroflight]

i would have built a wall so that the river passes through so you can keep it self contained.

[Starver]

You know, since you don't tend to have flying building destroyers, putting windmills up on blocks works well.

Code: [Select]

WWW
WAW
WWW

W=Wall
A=Axle

I actually tend to do similar, but with the integrated gear-mechanism switch being sealed in.

Code: [Select]

Z+1  Z=0  Z-1
+|+  WWW  ###
+o+  WGW  ###
+|+  WGW  #o#
+++  WWW  ###

+ Wall-top
| Windmill blade (on top of wall/floor)
o Windmill base (over gap)
W Wall
G Gears (lower one lever-connected, over channel)
# Natural ground
o Verticle axle to further down (if not directly over the top pump)

This, in itself, makes it (ground-hugging) BD-proof, but I'm planning for the time that comes when this is no longer sufficient.

(At which point, I'll start to build 'cavity wall' natural soil/rock d[iy]ke protected barriers on Z-1 filled with !!MAGMA!!, ready for the time when sappers start to bore holes into my beautiful structures, no doubt. )