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[Torit]

I have just recently embarked onto a salt-water biome with an ocean, and have tried multiple times to get a clean desalinated source of water but I haven't managed to desalinate water anywhere on the map. I think I might be doing something wrong? I've tried making a channel to the ocean to fill it with water, then next to that I've been placing the screw pump to pump the water into a 4x1 cistern which has a constructed floor and constructed walls. The pumped water was still salty.
I then tried pumping the water straight form the ocean, with no channeling, into a new cistern of the same shape. Still salty.

I'm still relatively new to this game so I have no idea what I'm doing wrong after reading the wiki page for this and it's frustrating that the OP is getting fresh water so easily.

[Sphalerite]

Can you post screenshots or upload a save of your fortress so we can see what's going on?

[Cellmonk]

I never re-constructed the well... I was under the impression that salt was a contaminant that a well couldn't filter.

From my experiments, it appears that a well will always be usable no matter what kind of water it is placed over.  The water could be salty or murky yet the well will still work and be usable for producing water.  It seems that dwarves will always drink water out of a well.  I'm going to run some more tests to verify that however.

Edit: Oops. This was an accidental post from when I tried to quote this for another page. Please disregard. Is there a way to delete accidental post?

[Lyceq]

In an effort to preserve knowledge and save newbies time (from constructed cisterns), I think the wiki needs to be updated. Hopefully I'm not being premature with this since there has been a peer review from Nan.

In order to help start the effort, here is a list of relevant pages and the updates they need.

 - Screw pump: Update info about needing constructed cisterns.
 - Well: Add information about using saltwater and the ocean as sources.
 - Well Guide: The well guide seems to already mention wells ignoring salinity. The Water Sources - Ocean section mentions needing constructed cisterns when using pumps.
 - Water: It looks like the salt water section was updated with a link to this thread. The way I read it, the section is stating that dwarfs receive unhappy thoughts from drinking salty water from the well. This is contrary to what Sphalerite posted earlier.
 - Reservoir: Contains accurate information, but could use more complete details.
 - Ocean: The waves section needs the information Nan discovered.
 - Aquifer: Does not contain information about desalinating and should probably stay that way.

Any other pages that need updating?

[jcnorris00]

I can't believe this thread has made it to page three and still no one has asked if MAGMA will scrub a tile clean of salt.

[Loud Whispers]

I can't believe this thread has made it to page three and still no one has asked if MAGMA will scrub a tile clean of salt.

Because the main contributor to magma spam is gone.

Although it is a valid point, plus obsidianisation would prolly work too.

[jcnorris00]

Necro's gone again?

Someone already asked about obsidianisation.  (obsidianization?)  It's a distinct but obviously related experiment.  If Sphalerite goes through the trouble of testing one method, he might as well test both.

[Loud Whispers]

Necro's gone again?

Someone already asked about obsidianisation.  (obsidianization?)  It's a distinct but obviously related experiment.  If Sphalerite goes through the trouble of testing one method, he might as well test both.

Banned actually, plus I think it was me who asked ;P
'Cept not with magma, I assumed that since the tile didn't change, it would still be permanently contaminated.

[Nan]

I seriously doubt magma or obsidian would work. What I did try was utterly removing a tainted reservoir by channeling out everything and building a new constructed reservoir in the empty space. It remained salty. Thus saltiness doesn't taint the floors or the walls but the space itself. This is also why a beach isn't salty - the tiles have never actually held salt water.

[slothen]

I would conjecture that the way stagnation spreads and contaminates is the same.  In 2010 you could check the well bucket and see "stagnant water 10."  I wanted perfectly clean water for my fortress.  I built an elaborate cistern of fully constructed materials and pumped water into it, and it was stagnant.  I realized a place I had messed up (at least under the no-natural-stone theory), so i built a new full-constructed cistern somewhere else.  The new one had non-stagnant water.  I then deconstructed and reconstructed the old one, being absolutely sure to get it right, and the water was still stagnant.

More science, is water stagnancy or salinity effected by filling things by bucket brigade?  I ask because wells seem to remove salinity no matter what, even though well buckets drawn from stagnant water seem to be filled with stagnant water.  if you filled a cistern from water drawn from a salty well, would that cistern be filled with salty water?

[Girlinhat]

(Didn't read the whole thread.)
Did you compare DF2012 against DF2010?  Perhaps the old myths are now defunct, but otherwise valid when they were reported?

[Sphalerite]

I have not yet created any long-term fortress in DF2012.  I have been too busy with non-DF projects to do anything more than mess around with the new adventure mode stuff a bit.

I also haven't experimented with stagnant water yet.  None of my DF2010 fortresses had any stagnant water.  I have been hearing that it's easy to accidentally create stagnant water in DF2012, so clearly some !!science!! exploring that is required.