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[Neowulf]

Yeah, I've tossed out the collector tiles and the ramps change a half dozen times so far. Not like it hurts anything to keep the idea alive.

[Valdrax]

Admittadly that is fairly counter-intuitive, I mean in the real world rivers flowing into oceans and lakes in the vacinity of (but not connected to) oceans are not normally salt water.

Actually, the borders of rivers and the sea are called estuaries and are often a mixing zone of brackish water.  This water is often undrinkable. 

Saltwater intrusion into aquifers is also a real world problem, but not nearly to the extent in Dwarf Fortress, where groundwater at the surface can be contaminated at multiple 16x16 embark areas away from the coast.  (The Wikipedia article on saltwater intrusion gives a nice picture and explanation of the Ghyben-Herzberg relation, which could be used to more realistically model the salt/fresh boundary in aquifers.)

However, saltwater rain and salty murky pools are just silly outside of where the waves touch. 

Perhaps altering the warning to say something like "Warning, all the water in this embark will be salt water.. etc.. etc.. etc"?

Well, the thing is that that's not always true, IIRC.  You can have a saltwater biome touching a freshwater biome without the latter becoming all salted, can't you?  Some way of telling which water is good or bad besides trying to lay out "water collection" zones would be nice.

[peskyninja]

Here's an idea - let us barrel up water to store it for the icy winter!

I already suggested that along with giant barrels that store booze and water of the same kind. Sorry. 

Anty, got a link?  I tried doing a search but came up empty.  I'm curious as to how it would work, though -- wouldn't the water barrels freeze in winter?  (On the plus side, you'd at least be able to haul water to the opposite side of the map, keeping it on hand for hospitals etc.)

try searching for large stationary barrels it's the thread name

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Well, the freezing mechanics need some love.  I think everybody knows that.

A good start would be to use the existing specific heat tags for water.  That would do things like make water freeze faster if in contact with more cold tiles, slower if in contact with more water, slower if flowing.  It could be adjusted for use with contaminants such that salt water froze more slowly as well.

Seperately, it would be nice if floors froze above ice; in fact, it would be nice if floors froze before the rest of the water froze.  In combination with specific heat, you'd see realistic freezing patterns this way (from the top and edges), especially if any convection effects were ever added to temperature, with ice floors serving to insulate the water underneath.  They'd melt the same way, too, so dwarves walking over solid ice would be fine, but dwarves walking over floors during the melting season would be at risk of the ice melting/cracking.

This would make ice traps behave a little more realistically (there's always the problem that fortress mode critters move at the rate of about 10m/hr; nothing is ever going to be very realistic so long as that's the case).