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[nopil3os]

hello.

i've been playing df for a while now and while i know it's probably not a good idea in terms of performance (playing mostly on my trusty old eeepc), i would like to finally utilize something, i avoided so far: MAGMA!!
i have set up my forges just above the magma sea above hfs  (no other magma on the map unfortunately) which is fine, steel production is running smoothly and all, but its not fun. plus my dwarves have A LOT of stairs to climb.
i know how a stack works in theory (and have a very small one powering an artificial waterfall) but i don't have a clue about how to secure a stack pumping from the magma sea.

are there building destroyers in the magma? if so how do i prevent them from entering and destroying the stack (and after that, the rest of the fortress) ?

[Andrew425]

Build it next to your massive staircase.

Monsters probably won't attack it.

Flood gates would be your friends in stopping them

[nopil3os]

hrmmm.. "probably" sounds to me like a little too much fun for my taste.

are you saying i should build a "more direct" way into the fortress just next to the pumpstack to lure them away from the pumps?

[NecroRebel]

Fire and magma men should be able to destroy pumps, but I don't know if I've ever actually seen any. Checking the raws, they are extremely rare; each has a frequency value of 1, compared to 20 for fire imps and 100 for magma crabs, meaning that a given biome has only a 1% chance of having any, and underground biomes tend to be far larger than surface biomes (there might only be 2-3 on a medium world). Or does that mean that any given lava creature spawn has a 2/122 chance to be a magma or fire man? I'm pretty sure it's the former. Regardless, very, very uncommon.

Also note that building destroyers, such as fire and magma men, cannot, as far as it is known, destroy buildings on a different z-level from them. This means that if you just put a grate over the intake of the bottommost pump(s) in your stack and any other openings into the magma sea proper that you might have, even if any magma-capable building destroyers appear they won't actually be able to get to your stack. Pumps can pump through grates just fine.

[nopil3os]

so that's how everyone is building it? just a floor grate at the very bottom? that sounds almost too easy to me. its df after all

and i was having headaches, trying to come up with some sort of mechanism to pump it through a fortification while keeping the depth below 7/7...

[o_O[WTFace]]

Remember, z levels are separate universes.  If you close all the portals leading into your fortress (grate over the magma intake) you are safe from extra-planar invaders.  Unless they crawl up into the caverns and bust down your door. 

[Triaxx2]

Of course, doing it the dwarfy way of short stacking to get it through a fortification while keeping it below the 7/7 mark works, if you use a pressure plate to open and close floodgates to keep it from pumping too much.