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[thelordberg]

Well, I just had my lovely 80 dwarf fort wiped out by not paying attention to my slowly flooding cistern... What happened was I attempted to make a well, and had the BRILLIANT idea of building a upward staircase to hit the channel I cut out for my brook, and thus have water some three z levels below the brook. Needless to say, my understanding of Fluid Dynamics is NOT what I thought it was, and EVERYBODY drowned. I may have helped the fun along by removing all doors.... and then a FB showed up...

Point being, how on Armoks red earth do I safely build a Well three z-levels below my original brook?

[ext0l]

Use a floodgate to limit the amount of water that can enter your resevoir or depressurize by forcing the water diagnally like this

Code: [Select]

##########
water->  #######
######### well->
        ########


[Justin In Oz]

Put a hatch between the top and the body of the cistern.
Put a floodgate at the entry of the cisitern
link them to different levers

Close the top one while filling.
Close the bottom one when full.
Open the top one and voila!

That is how I do it in my fort that is below the level of the river.

[thelordberg]

I should also mention, everyone died ECSTATICALLY due to the mist effect flowing down all my staircases and all... Seems dwarfy enough.

And thanks for the suggestion, I set up NO safety features (OSHA compliance? This is DWARF FORTRESS)

[CapnUrist]

You can depressurize water one of two ways.

One, you can run it though a filter of sorts, where the water must squeeze diagonally between walls. Such a setup might look like this:

Code: [Select]

-----------------
.....X.X.X.......
......X.X........
.....X.X.X.......
-----------------
where X stands for a wall. It need not be as wide or elaborate as that; a simple L bend with the corner left undug works.

The second method is using a screw pump. Pumps will pressurize water to their level, so any water leaving the pump will automatically rise to the level of the pump, if there is enough water. By putting the pump on the level you want the water, it will keep the water from rising any higher:

Code: [Select]

|   ||   |
|WWW||   |
|WWW||   |
|WWW||   |
|WWW@>WWW|
Keep in mind the pump must be powered to work this way.

[thelordberg]

Alright, so DE-PRESSURIZATION is key here.

This is off topic, but I feel I must tell the story of my fledgling militia fending off a elf ambush. I ordered every single member of my Six dwarf squad to station themselves behind the bridge system, preparing to split them up and cut them down. For WHATEVER dwarfy reason, one of them, one of my weakest members, equipped with a Birchen Shield, whatever bone and shell armor I had scrapped up, and a copper sword that my broker groveled in front of the Caravan for, this Dwarf sliced up 6 elves in no time at all, then proceeded to break that entire ambush.

Shame he had to drown like that, I had a full tomb filled with statues for him!

[Zahariel]

Alright, so DE-PRESSURIZATION is key here.

This is off topic, but I feel I must tell the story of my fledgling militia fending off a elf ambush. I ordered every single member of my Six dwarf squad to station themselves behind the bridge system, preparing to split them up and cut them down. For WHATEVER dwarfy reason, one of them, one of my weakest members, equipped with a Birchen Shield, whatever bone and shell armor I had scrapped up, and a copper sword that my broker groveled in front of the Caravan for, this Dwarf sliced up 6 elves in no time at all, then proceeded to break that entire ambush.

Elves always show up using the same crap wooden armor/weapons that their caravans always try to sell you. So elven melee fighters are simply not that dangerous. By which I mean, they are complete pussies, especially since elves have below-average strength as a race. So elven ambushes (and all elven attackers are ambushes) are pretty much nonscary as long as they're melee squads.

Unfortunately an elven ambush with more than one squad will usually have a squad of archers, who are... not exactly unscary.

As far as the well goes, yeah, depressurization is what you need. The diagonal-passageway trick is the easiest, although you may still want to have floodgates in case you screw it up somehow. I usually just use a split in the pipe for the well.

Code: [Select]

(side view)                     
#    ###                  0
#~~~~~~###     ####      -1
######~~~###   # W       -2
     ###~~~###### ##     -3
       ###~~%~X~~~~#     -4
         #######~~~#     -5
               #~~~#     -6
               #~~~#     -7
               #####     -8

(top view of -4)
           ### #####
         ###~###~~~#
       ###~~#~X~~~~#     
         ###~###~~~#
           ### #####

Here you see the 1-wide pipe splits with 2 diagonal transitions just before the safety floodgate. It then spills into the reservoir for your well. It's also important to make the reservoir a few levels deep or your dwarves will complain about yucky water.