advice for deep well ?

[LemonRaptor]

i've played DF for a while but was never amazing at it, usually embarked with rivers or aquifers, so my most recent fort is at -5 on a volcano, with an underground cave filled with water at about -75 and watching a 1 year old child pull up a bucket for multiple minutes i only just realized wells take time to pull up so it's incredibly inneficient.

so what's the move here ? have dwarf's go down to get water or finally learn how DF mechanics work and bring it up to a more sensible layer if possible ?

[Esca]

Walking down 70 flights of stairs takes a while too, especially if your people are slow to respond to hospital drink orders. It's probably best to pump some water up to a reservoir. If you imitate the wiki examples, it should be relatively straightforward to make a pump stack powered by water wheels.

You could also try to just use a pond zone + your existing well to fill it, but if it really takes that long to use, it might evaporate (or just take forever).

[Dain_Ironfoot]

Yep, pump or move your fortress closer to the water. Both will be pretty big projects. I tend to just make living and working areas close to the water source.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by LemonRaptor:

...
so what's the move here ? have dwarf's go down to get water or finally learn how DF mechanics work and bring it up to a more sensible layer if possible ?

Pump it to a reservoir or draw water into a reservoir from the surface. (Include beast-proofing strats. IIRC, there's some diagrams on the wiki or you can find them on reddit/bay12. eg: Beasts can't attack a grate a level above them, so make a u-shaped bend that drops a level and is blocked by grates, maybe hatches?.) The key idea being that you don't need "direct" access to the "feed" source, so you can just build a big reservoir, fill it up, and likely support most of your entire playthrough from it after it's filled...

(Or, a darn big portion of your play if the reservoir is big enough and you're just using it for regular consumption. For Waterfalls/Showers and other things, you'll need a good constant supply that just a reservoir can't provide for long without needing to be refilled.)

[harlequin_corps]

70+ z layers to water.. that's.. a lot. Even the best stack you are looking at 500 power, 5 watermills. That's a LOT of water. with a lot of moving parts.
Honestly, I would suggest to move your entire fortress down close to the water and either push a stinger into the volcano at that level or send it down a vertical shoot from the top of the volcano. Both of those will bring magma to any level you are on. To eliminate the pressure you can use diagonal adjacent digs, like 10 diagonal, to push the stinger into the side of the volcano at that Z layer, and the dorf doing the final dig will have a very good chance of doing the final dig and getting out w/o burning. Setup two or more magma safe floodgates in case one gets blocked open, and give a lot of space after the floodgates to maximize reaction time/lever time so you don't overpressurize and flood your fortress.
You will have to do the same setup if you send magma down from above, but you don't need to worry as much about that final dig because the final dig is a channel at the top to break the z layer below and allow the magma to flow into the vertical chute.

Thing is.. If you don't embark on a volcano but you want magma, you will end up with a fortress thats .. 130 z layers deep? because you want to use the magma under the 3rd cavern. So it's going to be a long way to go either way. Just make sure your stairs are 3x3 at least so your dorfs don't path block.

[Grumpy Old Gamer]

Best way is to build a pump stack to pump it up. The magic of DF lets falling water produce more power than it took to pump it up.