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[blue emu]

I've embarked on a map with no fresh water, and precious little Salt water... only three murky pools, totalling about 12 tiles. The Finder told me that there was an Aquifer in each biome... but I can't seem to find either of them. I've breached the caverns... fifty levels high, and dry as a bone.

... help?

I have a few questions for experienced players:

1) Can we survive (in the long-term) without water?
2) If I ever succeed in funding the Aquifer, will it also be salt water?
3) If I can find a cavern level with pools, will they be salt water, too?
4) Is the water in the cavern pools limited, or does it replenish?
5) I'm told that salt water can be desalinated by pumping it into a reservoir made entirely out of constructions (floor, walls and ceiling)... is this correct?
6) I'm told that Dwarves will drink salt water out of a Well. Is this true?
7) If yes, will they give this salt water (from the Well) to wounded Dwarves?

[Broseph Stalin]

Caverns, Aquifers, Rivers, Ponds, and everything else is going to have salt water.
The only time you'll need water should be to clean wounds, if you have a well then it won't be a problem because dwarves will use saltwater drawn from a well like it was fresh.
You can desalinate water with a screw pump and a cistern but more often than not you'll end up with some wasted time and tub of brine.

[Cheveux]

Caverns, Aquifers, Rivers, Ponds, and everything else is going to have salt water.
The only time you'll need water should be to clean wounds, if you have a well then it won't be a problem because dwarves will use saltwater drawn from a well like it was fresh.
You can desalinate water with a screw pump and a cistern but more often than not you'll end up with some wasted time and tub of brine.

This answers most of your questions, but let me answer those that weren't answered.

1) Yes, but any badly wounded dwarf will most likely die of thirst in the hospital. If the wound is not too bad he might survive if the treatment is quick.
4) It's going to replenish.

[blue emu]

OK, I've found one of the Aquifers... and yes, it is also salt water... but at least I can now begin experiments to build a desalination prototype.

[Lytha]

1) Can we survive (in the long-term) without water?

Yes, but your wounded will die. It'll be like living with hemophilia in a world with warfare and without modern medicine. Anyway, place a well over the murky pool; they'll give that to the wounded.


2) If I ever succeed in funding the Aquifer, will it also be salt water?

Yes.


3) If I can find a cavern level with pools, will they be salt water, too?

No. The water in the caverns of a saltwater map is usually clean.


4) Is the water in the cavern pools limited, or does it replenish?

Depends. If the water is at the edge of your map, it should replenish. Or, if you're unlucky, you could get one of those freak maps where the liquids actually leak out of the edges of the map to the outside. (I once had that happen on a multi-z-level magma sea)

If the caverns' pools do not touch the edges of the map, then it won't replenish. No rain in the caverns, you see.


5) I'm told that salt water can be desalinated by pumping it into a reservoir made entirely out of constructions (floor, walls and ceiling)... is this correct?

Yes, if you insist that your wounded shall have clean water, then construct a 1x2ish little room onto your surface, with a pump taking from a murky pool. Put a windmill on it or power it with dwarven power. The water in that tiny reservoir will be clean, unless you start to pour it somewhere else.

Same goes for your aquifers, when you find them. Dig a bigger room in the z-level above the aquifer, construct the pump, poke a hole from the z-level above the reservoir into the ceiling of the latter, fill the reservoir, and you have a nice big reservoir of clean water.

You can also go at the water resource from the z-levels below and have a reservoir of clean water in the depths. Just dig a tunnel from below towards the aquifer, construct the floors of it all to prevent tree growth that would block your plumbing, install a depressurizer at the bottom, a pump and a reservoir (bonus points if you make it automatized). Finally, dig a ramp into the aquifer. The miner should escape with his life (if you're lucky and he's fast), and your reservoir is tidy, wonderful and full of clean water.

What you need to be aware though is that the water will "contaminate" as soon as you have it fall through a "salty" z-level, i.e. a z-level that contains natural salty water.

Also, draining a reservoir and then refilling it in the same way can somehow "contaminate" the water. That happened once to me and I still don't know why, except that I had drained and refilled the thing.


6) I'm told that Dwarves will drink salt water out of a Well. Is this true?

Yes. No known health issues for the dwarves are known to me at this point.


7) If yes, will they give this salt water (from the Well) to wounded Dwarves?

Yes.

[Broseph Stalin]

This answers most of your questions, but let me answer those that weren't answered.

1) Yes, but any badly wounded dwarf will most likely die of thirst in the hospital. If the wound is not too bad he might survive if the treatment is quick.
4) It's going to replenish.

Your actually wrong on number 1, because they treat saltwater drawn from a well like fresh dwarves won't die of thirst in the hospital.

[Lytha]

Your actually wrong on number 1, because they treat saltwater drawn from a well like fresh dwarves won't die of thirst in the hospital.

Question #1 asked about a map without any water at all. The posting you quoted answered that question correctly.

[Saint]

water won't contaminate if you smooth the walls and floor of the area the water passes through or build walls and floors.

[Number4]

6) I'm told that Dwarves will drink salt water out of a Well. Is this true?

Yes. No known health issues for the dwarves are known to me at this point.

Except the issue about drinking WATER instead of BOOZE!

[Patroclus]

If you designate a square as a pond, dwarves will fill it using buckets from any water source (a well or designated water source area, from a river or murky pool).

Every bucket a dwarf dumps in a pond adds 1/7 to the water level in the pond.

Every ten buckets that a dwarf takes out of a water source lowers the water level in the source by 1/7.

So, like a reverse of a dwarven atom smasher destroying water on the squares when it closes, if you used a well to fill a pit that is connected to that well, could you manufacture water out of thin air?  The only thing is your well needs to be at least 3/7 deep to get started, so if you build like this:

Code: [Select]

##+##
#W P#  Z=2
#####

#####
# # # Z=1
#####

#####
# X # Z=0
#####

+ = door
P = Pit (on channeled space)
W = Well (on channeled space)
X = Floodgate
# = Wall


Start out by digging the area, and building the closed floodgate connected to a lever.  Designate a Pit on the W square, make it a Pond, and have your dwarves use buckets to fill it up to 4/7.  Then, remove the Pond, construct a well on top of the W square, and designate a new Pond on the P square.  Once the new Pond is 6/7 deep, you can open the floodgate, and all three levels on Z=0 will be at least 3/7 deep, so your well will continue working.  Now, dwarves will continue filling up the Pond using the Well as their water source, generating 0.9/7 new levels of water with each bucket dumped. All you would need to make this go down the road is the initial 4/7 of water.

[Quietust]

Every bucket a dwarf dumps in a pond adds 1/7 to the water level in the pond.

Every ten buckets that a dwarf takes out of a water source lowers the water level in the source by 1/7.

It doesn't actually work that way. Filling a bucket from a murky pool will put a single unit of "water" in the bucket and filling a bucket from a well will put a stack of "water [10]" in the bucket (and both will subtract 1/7 from the source tile), but emptying the bucket into a pond zone will always produce 1/7 water.

[Samoorai]

The problem with that is 1/7 water tends to evaporate fast, so unless you have a horde with buckets, filling a pond can be long, futile work. Pumps are almost always a better solution, in my opinion.

[ohgoditburns]

I think you get 1 job per pond zone, so you can make pond filling much faster by designating multiple 1x1 pond zones.

[alesia]

This is what I did for clean water when constructing a hospital:
1.  Build a fully constructed cistern.
2.  Dig a channel between 1 tile away from your cistern, and 1 tile from the ocean.
3.  (Optional for safety: Stick a drawbridge towards the ocean side and hook it up to a lever in your lever control room.  Microcline and cotton candy are great for color coding flood control levers.)
4.  Build a pump over the tile between your channel and your cistern.
5.  Connect the pump by axles and two gear assemblies to a water wheel that sits in the channel.
6.  Connect the gear assembly that the water wheel is *not* hanging from to a lever in your lever control room.  This safety step is not optional unless you really like flooding.
7.  Dig out that last tile between the ocean and the channel.
8.  Profit!
9.  Turn off the waterwheel and/or close the bridge when your cistern is full.

This should work for your desalination problem as well.  The waterwheel assembly makes the pump work automatically as long as there's water in the channel and the levers are all on.  Close the bridge and the waterwheel should shut off automatically soon enough, or you can just turn off the waterwheel itself through the gear assembly lever.  If you want to have to tell a dwarf to operate the pump, you can leave off the waterwheel entirely, but I like the automatic option.

Here's my rather huge cistern and lever control room:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And the level above it, with well (black circle in the staircase enclosure) and pumphouse (northern bit of my mushroom forest).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)