- v50 information can now be added to pages in the main namespace. v0.47 information can still be found in the DF2014 namespace. See here for more details on the new versioning policy.
- Use this page to report any issues related to the migration.
v0.34:Magma
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
Magma is a red-hot fluid that wells up from deep within the earth (but not so deep that it cannot be found by dwarves). Magma that is above the ground is called Lava; the substance itself remains the same. It can often result in Fun.
Magma serves as an energy source, powering magma smelters, magma forges, magma glass furnaces, and magma kilns. Magma is extremely hot which can lead to even more fun. Workers that dig into a magma reservoir are not instantly killed as the magma touches them, but they are set on fire, which will kill them very quickly. For this reason, taking steps to ensure there is adequate water available to extinguish flaming dwarves running in random directions is advised before digging into any magma pools from the side. Channeling a single square wide pit across the planned magma pipe one tile away from the wall to breach and filling it with water using the pond zone tool is recommended, so the panicking dwarves have no choice but to run through the water, and the water itself turns into an obsidian wall as soon as the magma flows into it.
The list of materials that are magma-safe is extensive. Magma never cools, but can evaporate if left at a depth of 1/7 for long enough. When magma is mixed with water it forms obsidian. Note that magma located above semi-molten rock will be listed as a Magma Flow and cannot be cooled into Obsidian.
Without screw pumps to impart pressure, magma flows rather slowly (though no more slowly than unpressurized water). A pipe to bring magma across the full map can take as much as a year to fill. This, combined with the fact that it will evaporate, can make filling a reservior difficult and tedious. As a rule of thumb, the area coming out of a 1-wide-pipe shouldn't be more than three squares wide and 20 squares long, or else it will evaporate as fast as you fill it.
Bringing Magma Up
Magma can be brought to the surface by two different methods:pump stacks, and magma pistons. Pump stacks are conceptually the simplest, but require an enormous amount of in-game time to make. Magma pistons tend to be faster to make, but require more time to understand how to build them.
Pump stacks
Pumping magma up from the magma sea via a conventional pump stack is a lot of work, requiring dozens of pumps and significant amounts of power. Making all of the pumps magma safe also requires a lot of precious materials like steel or glass.
Magma pistons
Magma pistons are another way to move magma near the surface. Magma pistons require less time and fewer precious materials to construct than pump stacks. However, magma pistons are a bit more complicated than pump stacks, so it takes more time to understand how to operate and build them.
Magma pools
Although the name suggests them as pools, they are actually pipes (Unknown why Toady changed the name). They can be found underground, however they rarely reach the upper z-levels (40+). Most end just a few z-levels above the magma sea, though some may span more than 100 z-levels. Magma pools seem to be always connected to a magma sea, and the sea and pipe can occasionally reach up to the same level, making them hard to separate. However, magma pools can be identified by the obsidian walls which surround them. Magma pools will slowly refill themselves, giving the player an infinite source of magma.
Volcanoes
Volcanoes are magma pools that extend all the way to the surface. Volcanoes are an endless source of magma as they will always refill themselves.
Properties of magma
Magma behaves the same way as water with the exception of not being affected by pressure (except when being moved by a screw pump) and apparently not showing flow. Magma will turn into obsidian1 if it touches water. In the game, magma's temperature is 12,000 (2,032°F, or about 1,111°C). See the list of magma-safe materials for more information on what can (or cannot) be safely submerged in magma.
Tiles directly adjacent to magma will be heated to a temperature of 10,075 (107°F, or about 42°C), causing revealed unmined tiles to flash with ☼ when placing digging designations and causing unrevealed mining-designated tiles to cancel their designation (with a "warm stone" warning) once they are revealed.
1 - the rock that is used when magma mixes with water is the first rock encountered to have the [LAVA] tag during worldgen.
Dangers of magma
In DF2010, magma was not immediately fatal when first touched, due to a bug in the physics model that caused body fat to melt independently of the creature, resulting in an unintended Leidenfrost Effect[1] preventing the creature's body temperature from rising high enough to trigger combustion. In DF2012, this bug has been fixed, and now any contact with magma results in nearly instant immolation, followed by death if water is not close at hand.
Unlike how waterfalls create mist magmafalls create no magma mist, yet if some debris from a cave-in lands in some magma a deadly cloud of magma mist is released.