40d:Water

Water in Fortress Mode

Dark-colored water, when looked at, shows up as an 'open space'. This is because it is actually located one level below the camera level. Moving the camera down one level will cause the water to turn light and show up as actual water. Note that to specify a pool of water as a water source, fishing zone, or pond, you need to create activity zones at the level above the water. The "level above the water" is the level at which the surface of the water is at foot-level instead of ceiling level.

Aboveground ponds possibly seem to be refilled by melting snow and ice.

Also, there seems to be several water-types on the world map, as well as on the adventure map. The world map seems to be influenced (red tiles) as well as content of the water-- muddy water gets brown tiles. On the adventure map, there are also types of water: stagnant, murky, salt, mud(dy?) and ice.

If you dig through to an area of cavern with 777777 depth water, it is NOT a pond, it is a chamber full of water that will make your wet as they continue to dig through level 2223334444 etc. water while it releases itself.

If you dig into a small pond, it will spill out of the hole. If there are fish in it, they can be found flopping out of the water once it has spilled!

Water can be diverted withouting uncontrolable spilling, of course. You can either use a power source and a screw pump to pump water into a channel and into the desired area, or you can just let gravity do the job for you, if you want to transfer water from a high point to a lower one (to create an underground water source using an above-ground brook, for example).

Water in Adventurer Mode

Adventurer mode: Water preference (when possible or when necessary) is set by pressing the m key, and moving onto a water tile can be done using the 'careful move', or alt+direction. Alt+direction (even numpad+5) seems to be working for up and down. (Need confirmation on the up and down, I was told by a beta tester that "Swimming up is Shift + 5(numpad), and swimming down is Ctrl + 5(numpad)". , but does not seem to be working)

Once again in adventurer mode, one can discover a river. This is not, however, displayed on the Legends menu. What impact could this have upon the game?-- Twerty (WHO KNOWS?!)

Water in adventurer mode seems to be very 'unwelcoming', and if you enjoy your adventurer, avoidance is highly recommended. If an untrained swimmer jumps into water from a higher level, three things happen, they start drowning (which happens to any level swimmer completely covered in water, I believe, since this kind of represents their breath), they are stunned from the impact and subsequently are forced into a prone position (panicking/thrashing?) and are forced to a little under a third of their speed, which can probably be raised by raising the swimming skill level. Note that if you wish to train swimming from no skill at all, you'll have to find at least water displayed as (1/7); brooks are, as far as normal movement is concerned, actually ground tiles. Also note that the speed of swimming skill training seems to vary depending on the strength of the current; higher levels of water usually mean more current, and more pushing of your character around, which also unfortunately means more lag, so even if you can find a good current that won't drown you, don't expect swimming training to go much faster than ambush skill training.