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[Eric Blank]

I never remove aquifers, although I make an effort to avoid interacting with them. I'm not afraid to tackle one if I decide a site is just that great. Often times they're incomplete or splotchy and don't cover the entire map, or you can find a quick bypass in a steep slope/that volcano you wanted so bad. They end up being a resource, as once you break through and have the hole you wanted, the work is over until you choose to dig another entrance. They were once an absolute necessity in desert and tundra biomes, and even now you may run out of luck and find you're lacking water in the caverns.

[Lytha]

Well, I personally love aquifers and refuse to embark without them these days.

Infinite source of water without the annoyance of freezing/thawing lags, and without the dangers that outdoors and the caverns do provide? Oh yes, please.

[noodle0117]

After reading these posts, I've realized how ignorant I've been all this time.
Thank you fellow dwarf forumers, I now have a great idea for how to build my next fort.

[Cespinarve]

I always, always remove them. I've never once needed drainage, and with sand i=I can quickly excavate large storage areas without having to worry about excess rock.

I'm one of those people who tries to be really efficient vis-a-vis needless dwarven labour. I've never used magma pumps or anything- in the time it take to pump magma to the surface, including all those resources of pumps and belike, I can have enough weapon traps to never worry about anything.

I do sometimes think that magma pumped upwards would help eliminate the travel time to the magma furnaces, but not enough to bother.

Aquifers I can think of NO useful purpose outside of deserts. 

[bumblepuppy]

On one of my first sites with an aquifer, I used it to make a flooding chamber without pumping water up from the caverns. That was pretty fun, though getting through the aquifer was not. I'd say they are easy enough to avoid and pose an interesting challenge to advanced players that their presence enriches the game further.

[IcarusOne]

I love aquifers. Especially the fact that they drain water.

Between my farm plots, there is always a 1x1 hole going down into the aquifer with a well above it for watering, one at my prison and one in the hospital.
When my cistern gets too full, or has a dead dwarf / goblin / delicious items rotting away in it, i just flush it all out into the aquifer, never to be seen again, and pick up the items and slowly fill it again.

My personal favorite however is putting 10 waterwheels next to eachother in aquifer channels (3x10 ofcourse) and connecting them to a single screw pump which pumps water from a tiny aquifer hole (about 2-3 tiles) into the waterwheels, creating flow, and infinite power with less fps drop than the standard dwarven water reactors.

If i'm planning something big, i can barely live without aquifers these days. Except when they are too much layers deep.

[Kestrel]

I've never used magma pumps or anything- in the time it take to pump magma to the surface, including all those resources of pumps and belike, I can have enough weapon traps to never worry about anything.

I do sometimes think that magma pumped upwards would help eliminate the travel time to the magma furnaces, but not enough to bother.

Exactly.  I've found it better to just isolate the magma to a safe area near the source and stick all my metalworkers down their with their bedrooms and dining halls.

[MasterMorality]

I avoid them at all costs.
I tried to pierce an aquifer once, but it was far too much effort for the amount of bother and I went back to non aquifers.
It did, however, teach me how to build and operate pumps and pumpstacks, not that it did any good. I had three dwarves pumping water away like mad and I couldn't channel any of it out.
The only interesting thing with aquifers is above ground ones. I had a lot of fun half flooding my entire embark before I got bored and abandoned.
I don't think I'd mind so much if the aquifers didn't have an unlimited water supply. The fact that I may or may not be able to pump them dry for long enough to have some guy dig through a single tile or something just isn't an incentive to bother with them. If I thought I could pump a few tiles completely dry and circumvent them that way, I wouldn't mind.

But yeah, not worth the hassel as far I'm concerned.

[Triaxx2]

Aquifers are a great source of FUN if you mess up, like accidentally digging down through them... *innocent whistle*

But consider that they provide both infinite water, and in a freezing biome, an infinite source of ice. They are Obscenely hard to pierce without magma, but once you get through, you've got the tool necessary to seal the entrance so that nothing can get through. I'm currently trying to pump through an aquifer to get to the precious, precious tetrahedrite beneath it. It's not working.

[lanceleoghauni]

I love aquifers. They're so handy, and make it the simplest thing to make a waterfall.

[imperium3]

I'm OK with aquifers, they're much better for your FPS than rivers and provide a lot of advantages too. Sure, it's annoying to get through them (my fort was nearly destroyed by tantrum spirals while trying to get through the 2Z level aquifer) but once you're through they're not really a problem again. The only thing you have to be careful with is digging upwards from below, as sometimes they are lower in some parts than in others. This is not at all related to the time I flooded my entire dining room...

[blue sam3]

Two words: Infinite power. Low-lag, infinite power at that. All you need is an aquifer with any degree of wobble in it. More than makes up for a little more effort in digging the initial entrance.

[Triaxx2]

I still have trouble punching through. I can't quite manage the plug method, and I don't understand the pump method. Unless I get aquifer and volcano, I can't get through without using multiple biomes.

[IronyOwl]

I too appreciate aquifers. Probably largely because I like glaciers.

[Lytha]

I still have trouble punching through. I can't quite manage the plug method, and I don't understand the pump method. Unless I get aquifer and volcano, I can't get through without using multiple biomes.

Dude...

Channel a hole into the aquifer. Install a screwpump which will pump from this tile; not after digging a neat little exit corridor with another channeled tile in the end of it, so that you will get rid of the water again. Assign the pumping duty to everyone except your miner, and depending on the nature of your specific case, the engravers OR the masons OR the carpenters.

Get to pumping.

If your aquifer is in rock, send the engraver downstairs to smooth the walls immediately to make the area secure immediately. If you're digging in soil, you need to construct walls though.

Now, make your miner expand the hole in the aquifer by one or two tiles.

Either smooth the walls immediately again; or start the construction of your walls. The cancel-spam is a pain in the arse, but in the end they will manage to build the wall.

Expand some more.

Once you've expanded the room quite a bit, you probably need to place your pump somewhere else so that it can pump more efficiently.

After a while, you will have a neat, safe little room, right there, in the middle of your aquifer.

In the case that you're working with soil and constructed walls, you'll probably have a bunch of tiny little rooms, separated by constructed walls. Demolish these. Build your downward leading ramps or your stairs here and you're fine.

That's really all there is to this.


So. In the case that you have a very deep aquifer, it becomes a bit more complicated, because you need some place to get rid of all the water that you are pumping in every z-level. I guess that two pumps could do the trick, or just having enough room for a little output hole in the ground in each z-level.

One of our posters here had a technique for that, which I haven't had to try yet, because I haven't had to dig through one of these multi level sandstone aquifers yet.