05: On Farms and Tapping Water Sources

In order to make some farms, you'll need a muddy floor. This means a pool of water. If you're lucky enough to have started with lakes everywhere, then this will be easy. If you have a river nearby, then it's not as much. If you embarked at a hot location, or freezing, or just with no lakes/river, this will be significantly more difficult, and will require your entire fort's efforts bent to finding water, at first. In this case, you may want to seriously consider re-embarking with different skillsets, or in a different area. If you still wish to continue, you will have to find your water underground, and pump it to the surface. See my post on that very thing, here.

A note: you may be able to build viable farms in non-muddy soil or sand. I don't know, but it worked in previous versions.

First, lakes. Very simple. Count the tiles in the lake. In this case, there are 16. 16x7 tells you how many units of water are in the lake, and you'll want to build a room that is a rectangle whose dimensions are near this product. 103 is about 10x10, but you want a rectangle that isn't a square also. So let's go with 8x12, or some such. Dig this room right up against the lake, or, as in Diagram 2, put a stairway right next to the lake, and dig down until you find stone and dig out the room against the stairway in a more favored direction. In this case, west.

Diagram 1. Dig around the room to enter at the end far from the lake. This will keep all the water from spreading out into the entry hall. Don't worry, we'll be taking down the wall once the water is all mud.

Diagram 2. Dig the stairway down as many levels as you want, just don't go below the level of the farm room. Again, we'll be making this area much bigger once the water turns to mud.

Once it has all been dug out, designate that one square at the north end of the lake for digging, and watch the water flow. Afterward, re-wall the square leading to the lake. We wouldn't want any enemies to show up unexpectedly at our back door, oh no. Plus, this will allow the lake to re-fill.

After the water has calmed to 1s in every tile (if you didn't make the farm room big enough, fear not, just dig at it from the other side. See Diagram 3), build your farm plots as you please, just remember to designate which crops to sow. Dig out a large area around your farms. This area will be food-related and textile-related. Build one of each agriculturally-centered workshop in the area, and include cloth and food stockpiles.

Diagram 3. As you can see, I didn't make the room big enough, at first. But, I just dug out more open space. My textile industry is moving along grandly, and you can see a kitchen, fishery, ashery, soap maker's shop, and more.

Tapping a River

Tapping a river is a little more difficult, but not overly so. The idea is to make yourself a little lake, then drain that into your farming area. In this case, you get to choose how big your lake is, and make your preparations from there. You'll need two floodgates and six mechanisms.

One floodgate is against the wall of the river, the other between your new reservoir and what I call the conduit. The other end of the conduit has a stairway down to wherever we decide we want the farms.

Set up your new reservoir in similar fashion to the diagram. There are no extra points for neatness; as long as your conduit is at least five spaces long, including the stair and floodgate, it's good enough. Set two levers inside your base somewhere, and attach each of them to a floodgate. REMEMBER WHICH IS WHICH. Designate the square next to the river to be channeled, as in Diagram 4.

Diagram 4. Note that the channel is diagonally connected to the river, which will then flow directly to the floodgate below.

Then open that floodgate, flooding the new underground lake. See Diagram 5.

Diagram 5.

As you can see, in part 1 the lake is almost full. Once it is at a satisfactory level, close the floodgate, and open the other one, and part 2 will commence. Build your farms, and open the area a bit to allow the placement of workshops and stockpiles.

Once finished, build a wall on top of the stairway to the farms, up in the conduit. The stairs to the conduit should never again be used for water, but the conduit itself will serve another purpose, later, when we need to draw water for the reservoir in our fort, which will be quite large.

Hopefully, you've successfully prevented any unfortunate accidents. If you have no source of water as readily available as a lake or river, you'll have to delve deep underground to find an underground cavern, which won't necessarily have water, and may be as deep as 45 z-levels from your fort, and then pump it up to the fort itself. Go see my post here, about how to pump water. Good luck!