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[Martholomule]

tl;dr - can I dam up running water?

I didn't know exactly what to put for a subject here, but this is the situation, picture if you will:

I built a large round room as an arena, to the north is a small room with hatches and goblin cages above it for pitting.  Everything is closed off with floodgates, so i can control how many goblins get let into the vestibule and then the slaughterhouse arena. 

I did NOT build a floodgate for master flow control, so now that a goblin body is clogging up the floodgate in the vestibule, the whole thing is shot.  I can't use the room at all unless it's only going to be an irretrievable corpse pool.

Can I somehow dam up the water at the beginning of the line?  I can't figure it out unless the answer is a MASSIVE water diversion with a zillion floodgates.   

[Cassicotca]

With magma you can turn it to a obsidian wall, depending how you have constructed it it might overflow

[Sphalerite]

Your options:

1.  Pour magma over it to clog the waterway with magma.

2.  Expose it to the sky and turn the water to ice (only if you're in a freezing biome).

3.  Cave-in natural rock to clog the channel.

4.  Build a pump to temporarily divert water out of the channel long enough to build a wall.

"Corpse blocking the floodgate" is why I use raising bridges as emergency water channel blockers.

[Martholomule]

Thanks for all the great advice.  I foolishly forgot to remove the ramps so the drowning gobs made a break for it up the waterway, now there's corpses all up and down the path and no way in to clean it out without flooding the place.

"Hey, look - that water's coming from somewhere, let's escape into the ocean if we can!"

Funny how every fort so far has had at least one noob error, at least this one didn't cost me the whole fort.

[Doomchild-]

4.  Build a pump to temporarily divert water out of the channel long enough to build a wall.

i tried that yesterday, but my masons kept spamming 'construction canceled: dangerous terrain' eventhough they managed to build 1 out of the 4 walls needed to dam the river

after much trying i just gave up, my river is now 1/4th dammed

[Sphalerite]

4.  Build a pump to temporarily divert water out of the channel long enough to build a wall.

i tried that yesterday, but my masons kept spamming 'construction canceled: dangerous terrain' eventhough they managed to build 1 out of the 4 walls needed to dam the river

You pretty much need to have a pump drawing directly from each tile you want to build a wall on.  That's the only way to keep it water-free long enough to build a wall.  For a 4 tile wide river, you need 4 pumps.

[Victuz]

Funny how every fort so far has had at least one noob error, at least this one didn't cost me the whole fort.

The game is boring if you don't make mistakes . I flooded my entire apartment complex with an aquifier yesterday because I was certain it's not ACTUALLY an aquifier just the game whining about it because I was digging under a pond... Darn sand. On the bright side I have a well and an unlimited source of water in a map without a river.

Thus the construction of the water tower in front of my gate has begone . I like haw I now have 39 migrants called "Test subject <number>" ;3

[Doomchild-]

4.  Build a pump to temporarily divert water out of the channel long enough to build a wall.

i tried that yesterday, but my masons kept spamming 'construction canceled: dangerous terrain' eventhough they managed to build 1 out of the 4 walls needed to dam the river

You pretty much need to have a pump drawing directly from each tile you want to build a wall on.  That's the only way to keep it water-free long enough to build a wall.  For a 4 tile wide river, you need 4 pumps.

i had, 4 pumps pumping the water back upstream, i even installed a 5th to try and dry out the tile next to the wall i was trying to construct, but for some reason it didn't drain properly and my masons refused to build them.

[Cassicotca]

If all you have to do is to contain the water you could always use a door. Much quicker to build then walls and everyone can build them.

[Sphalerite]

I have also found that if you have a spot where the level of water is fluctuating enough to repeatedly cancel the build job, you can often force the job to be completed anyway.  Every time a dwarf tries to work on a construction job, he'll get a little bit done before suspending it due to water.  If you obsessively micro-manage, pause the game and un-suspend the job the moment it gets suspended, the job will eventually get done.  You just need the tile to be without water long enough to designate the job in the first place.

[Martholomule]

(I love how I forgot to mention that the vestibule doubles as a drowning chamber but everyone automatically assumes this is the case   Something about DF brings out the inner sadist, doesn't it?)

Probably going to try the pump route, I don't think I can make it there to put a door without being swooshed away with a 7/7 flow of terrifying, salty death.  It'll be a bummer to disturb my nice shoreline but this is an industrial complex, so it may as well look like one.

I didn't realize that one pump would completely reroute a stream, that's very handy to know for when i inevitably botch future attempts to work with water.  Master plumber I am not.  Next water project:  drowning everyone installing a waterfall in the dining area!

[khearn]

Rule number 1 for setting up plumbing systems: Always have a master shutoff valve.

[CapnUrist]

Rule 2, to assist with your dining room waterfall project: Assume you don't have enough drainage space. Too much will only take up room. To little will leave you with floating furniture and bloated dwarf corpses.

[khearn]

Which brings us to rule 1a: Make sure the lever to control the master shutoff valve is in a location high in your fort, hopefully higher that the shutoff valve. Trying to shut off the water when the shutoff valve is underwater would be difficult.
And rule 1b: Always test the shutoff valve lever before making the connection to the water. Finding out that you forgot to hook up the lever to the floodgate after your dining hall is flooding is the wrong time to do so.

[Sphalerite]

1c:  Your shutoff valve should be a device which cannot be jammed open by an object.  Use a raising bridge for a horizontal passage, or a retracting bridge or floor hatch for a vertical passage.