Where to find Water

[Rodent of Unusual Size]

I embarked on a location without a river or aquifiers and now my """Doctor""" (Random dude) complains that my """med-bay""" (old mineshaft) needs water.
Can I still find water underground or melt snow or are my patients doomed to die a slow death of dehydration?

[McFuzz]

Best hope is to discover all the cavern layers and hope they have water, or everyone who gets wounded will die.

You can melt ice with magma, but not snow.

[Celgaming]

Dig small holes outside and hope for rain. They fill up very slowly. Then make a pit area indoors and watch your dwarves fill it with rain water.

Not sure if this works at all. The hole has to be 1x1.

Look around the surface. Ice melts in spring and turns into water.

[McFuzz]

Originally posted by Celgaming:

Dig small holes outside and hope for rain. They fill up very slowly. Then make a pit area indoors and watch your dwarves fill it with rain water.

Not sure if this works at all. The hole has to be 1x1.

Look around the surface. Ice melts in spring and turns into water.

I was going to suggest this. But unless it rains 24/7 all year, it probably isn't going to fill up (and even then I'm not sure)

Sounds like it's snowy, which isn't going to leave any water in the 1x1 hole :(

[Rodent of Unusual Size]

fugg :D

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Margret Thatcher:

I embarked on a location without a river or aquifiers and now my """Doctor""" (Random dude) complains that my """med-bay""" (old mineshaft) needs water.
Can I still find water underground or melt snow or are my patients doomed to die a slow death of dehydration?

You're going to potentially have a very bad time... Or, FUN, if you want to see it that way.

While choosing your embark, did the spot you're in or any of the "squares" that your embark's "map size" cover show as having an aquifer? (eg: Always try to check each individual square there that is covered by your initial map-size embark setting. (Default is 4x4)

If so, then you have an aquifer "somewhere" and everything else listed in that little description of the embark point. Even if you chose "no aquifers" you could have still moved the embark point over a bit and have gotten one if you wanted or just by accident.

If not... you don't, and that's going to force you to hunt for the caverns, which could have some tough things waiting for you. If you look forward to overcoming the potential challenge of having a lot of Dwarves die due to their wounds, go for it! If no, you may want to retire that Fortress and just create another embark on that same world or another. If you stay in the same timeline in that world, you could even discover how things turned out for them... :))

[Darzan]

This is why I try always start with aquifer and also bit of river on map.

If you have river then you can make channel down from there to under castle but make sure you have diagonal paths to cut down water pressure.

Otherwise you can dig search tunnels under your your lowest ground level. With some luck you hit pond out there. If will dry up in time but with some creativity it lasts quite a long time if you transfer it to water tower ( deep pit with low surface area ).

It is also possible to have some part aquifer still somewhere on your map but it might be hard to find it. May need to dig tunnel at map edges under ground level.

If it all fails then you have search water in caverns or maybe capture rain.