Introduction
Hi everyone! I posted a screenshot of my inn and someone asked about my waterfalls. I use a pretty basic method though it was a huge project to set up. Here's a walkthrough my fortresses plumbing and some tips on creating your own!
Note: This relies on a Pump Stack, something that's a little hard to wrap your mind around. Check out this entry[dwarffortresswiki.org] at the wiki for the technical details of setting yours up.
So without further ado, let's start our tour!
This is Scorchbrass, a Kobold fortress inside a volcano.
For my own reasons carefully picked an vertically shaped embark that has a volcano at the bottom and a river above - the location doesn't matter too much though as long as you know what direction your river is flowing for the power.
I also have a jungle location so I don't have to worry about the water freezing. You can do this even if you have to bring the water all the way up from underground, though!
Walthrough: Touring The Waterworks
Fig. 1. Outdoor view of the aqueduct into the building. The aqueduct was a big project, and in retrospect somewhat stupid. I had to bring the water up like 5 stories to get to the top of my already built housing inside the volcano.
The pump stack part is normal, but since I started so far away where the river originally ended, I made a HUGE aqueduct construction.. and realized after I simply could have moved THE RIVER by carefully channeling it closer and saved myself a couple days work.
Or I could have brought it one Z level up all the way to the front and THEN made it go up more... but I built it several stories up the whole way like an actual giant aqueduct. Anyway, it's kind of cool looking - hopefully your project will be more elegant understanding my mistake!
Fig. 2. Here's my pump stack, running on a very high power water wheel set up. It just goes up several floors from here.
A basic switch here on the ground floor turns the pump stack on and off. You want to have this connected to a gear connected to your pumps. Mine is connected to the fourth one down, there just to allow me ability to turn the monstrosity off when needed.
Up top, here's an emergency release sprinkler here that gives all the animals below a happy shower. This is important because you can turn it off but if you are doing so to fix your drain you need another way to drain it and get in there!
There are stairs going up and down each side (also support passages below) coinciding with wells. They don't use them much but I thought it looked cool. I was worried the water might overflow but it's fine, I enjoy seeing it through the top!
Fig. 3. Inside my plumbing is built for control and expansion. Controlling the pressure is a bit of work - the blocks inside keep it from going too fast (and flooding below) but I admit I'd like a little more splatter.
I attempted a second path to up the pressure a little bit but I'm not sure it did much. When I want to REALLY shower it down, I can flick the switch off just to that one waterfall, remove a wall for access, and then remove the middle block so the water goes straight through.
There are switches to flood gates both with plumbing in use and on the right side as well in case I want to bring it anywhere later. You don't need this weird symetrical shape, I just liked the way it looked compared to one turn. The one turn below works just as well to stop pressure.
Stairs go above the pipe for easy crossing and even more wells. Well, why not?
Fig. 4. The plumbing proceeds all the way to the bottom of the map, with another output for my bottom central stairwell and 5 more potential paths already set up with floodgate (I knew it would be annoying to fix later)!
You MUST carve a drain or this will start overflowing and can never be easily fixed. To drain, you smooth and then carve fortifications in the very end of the map. You will know these blocks because you can smooth them but NOT dig them.
Fig. 5. The left-most output goes into the Inn, aka the Bar of Copper. There are wells on every level, again, why not! The drains are very important as the water splatters a bit even on low pressure.
There's a cute little step waterfall down several z levels that isn't really needed but I think looks cool. This well is unfortunately usually dry.
The first floor is the entrance to the fort and a little weird looking since it started as a MUCH smaller tavern before getting opened up. Folks going in and out of the fortress tend to pass through a bit of mist here.
The second floor is my brewer's guild (which accidentally got super popular being inside the inn resulting in a bunch of legendary brewers and 60 damn guild members.) The waterfall continues near the stairway down and a small dining nook.
My original "dance floor", aka the Bar of Lead is the next floor down.
Then their new golden dance floor below. The mist hardly goes much farther than its original spot but people tend to walk through it once a visit. It can't hurt! They also love to pass out on the grates drunk for some reason.
Fig. 6. Under the inn there are a few stories of drainage.
I think mist gets generated when it hits something. So I alternate the open spaces and floor.
The final story is the dungeon, near the exit of the fort to the caverns (seemed a good place to put next to the barracks.) It helps a tiny bit if a prisoner ends up nearby.
Fig. 7. The "main" waterfall is really the stairway one that goes through all the residential areas.
It drops right in over the stairs. There are wells in all these spots too.
This well is actually near the stairs instead of in the center but it's good there since most traffic from the workshops up top comes that way (forges are below.) People get happy thoughts going all the way up and down these stairs, which they do a LOT!
On this floor the stairs are between residences, a big temple and a library on the left.
Fig. 8. Here's a sketch overlaid on top of the 'ground' floor showing where the pipes go. I put waterfalls on main stairs at the top and bottom so they have a couple places to go up and down quickly without missing any mist.
Fig. 9. Here's a zoomed out view of a residential floor (with the golden bar up top)
Fig. 10. Sewers! The first time I tried this (before the pressure fix) there was a LOT of flooding. Turns out if water comes in too quick it just goes right up (And I made some mistakes with trying to drain into a cave river.)
First drain floor is pretty small, just a little buffer but I was ready to expand it if needed. It's important to remember to SEAL THE WHOLE SYSTEM or you get bad guys coming up through your wells. Bleh!
The second floor is a 'backup' system, kind of a full path that mirrors the one below in case of flooding.
The third drain always sits pretty full (sometimes has fish in it??) and is fully flooded. As you can see I tried draining it into the undersea river once.. which made it totally overflow so now that is blocked off and it only drains south.
Fig. 11. The drains!
This is the backup drain floor
You can see here how the drainage works (carved fortifications in the edge of the map)
Same thing directly below it. The wide output keeps it pretty low water levels as it spreads out so I can even get in there and have em stand and work if I really wanted to.
Fig. 12. After I built all this and wanted a mill, I wanted it CLOSER. I realized I could have just channeled out the river down to here at the very start and saved a LOT of long construction (with annoying scaffolding steps I needed to remove after, etc) of the aqueduct.
Tips For Your Project
So that's the system! It works GREAT.
They were all pretty miserable after working non stop on this construction project for a couple years, then within a month or two they almost all became incredibly happy - it's true that waterfall mist is an amazing way to get your fort up!
This project was much harder and more deadly than setting up the magma forges. But I'm pretty proud! They're now very happy even though many of them had clothes rot off and run around naked!
Summarizing what I learned for some tips:
ALWAYS HAVE AN OFF SWITCH. You will flood yourself many times while trying this out, and turning it off in a panic is much more Fun than save scrubbing.
Bring the water to you.. this includes channeling out the river. It can save a lot of time brining it to you that way instead of building up stories for a cool looking aqueduct.
River is best for this, not filled aquifers or anything, because it can also power the wheels for the pumps. I love setting it and forgetting it, no managing pump folks etc.
Beware the push! It's very easy for your little guys to get pushed around by water, possibly pushed into ledges or dropped all the way into the sewer. It's quite possible people will end up even pushed into the well if there's a fight though
It's probably best to have some escapes in your sewers but I didn't manage to build that in.
MIND THE PRESSURE! It's almost impossible to keep these under control at full pressure, making the water link through a diagonal helps a lot.
MAKE DRAINAGE. Not just the under drainage but gates all around your waterfall area, otherwise it's likely gonna flood (less of a risk with less pressure but still a problem.)
HOOK UP YOUR SWITCHES FIRST. Definitely have floodgates everywhere that might be needed to control if you need to turn it off to fix things. But keep in mind they have to walk to the floodgate to hook it up, so you need to do this before sealing the gates in.
HAVE RELEASE VALVES. Give yourself some flood gates to nowhere along your piping. Otherwise you can turn it off but you'll have 7/7 water just sitting there along the line, still pretty dangerous. A release valve into a big carved out cavern quickly turns that into safe 1/1 water that evaporates. You could also use this to make mud or water your lawn!
Be careful of stuck workers - they'll tend to complete a wall section by walling themselves in. Making and suspending some wall spots INSIDE it seems to help, they won't stand in those as often.
Don't underestimate wells everywhere - they like cleaning themselves and can help your orderlies in an emergency. Plus they can end up admired.
You can stack happiness by using gold grates, etc, and making the whole thing very opulent.
Put your waterfalls in high traffic areas, ideally ones that even dwarves without socializing breaks will go through often. You can kind of limit the amount of stairs you have to force them going through but that's a trade off with time/efficiency.
You want this ASAP to keep people happy but take your time to make it look great because you won't be able to fix it easily while it's running lol
Do NOT drain into underground rivers, they will overflow. Do not drain into caverns, it's very unpredictable. Drain off the EDGE of the map!
Draining off the edge will not lose water pressure farther up, they don't really impact much once you have the pump stack pressure up.
Remember to make sure all your drain pipes are totally SEALED below, including all open areas above the pipe, any level between the end drain and the well, etc. Otherwise you will get a LOT of beasties coming up out of your well and you really don't want that.
Avoid using these as garbage dumps, it's tempting to just throw ♥♥♥♥ down there but they can rot. Divert some lava to the center of the fort instead and drop your trash there!
I haven't figured out if there is a 'best layout' for mist as it drops through (dropping through w. nothing, hitting a well, hitting a grate, hitting a statue, etc) but it seems to be working just fine even though I used a couple different methods on different stairs.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2926561965
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