40d:Flood

There can be up to seven units of water in a tile: 1/7 is ankle-deep, while at 7/7, water fills up to the ceiling. At 1/7 though 3/7, the water is too shallow to pose a threat and dwarves cannot swim in it, although it is possible that aquatic creatures can.^[Verify] At depths of 4/7, a dwarf can choose to swim, but is still capable of walking freely. At depths of 5/7 and above, dwarves must swim. A dwarf who can't swim can drown in a tile with too much water in it.

Water in a tile will designate all tiles around it (including those above and below) as "damp". If a miner encounters damp stone while digging, the designation will be canceled, you will be given a warning, the game will pause and you will zoom to the damp tile. Re-designating the tile to be mined will cause your miner to ignore the damp stone and dig the tile out anyway, although you will receive a new alert for each additional damp tile uncovered. Note that unless you know what is causing the tile to be damp (a murky pool on the z-level above, for example) and are reasonably sure that removing this section of wall will not breach some other water source, it is advisable to simply avoid digging in that area. A tile will flood if there is a water source adjacent to it, including diagonally.

After a flood, the water level in an area will even out, given time. Therefore it is possible to drain a small pool completely without getting too many things wet. Larger lakes can be drained with the judicious use of a screw pump or well-designed networks of channels. Note, however, that rivers and oceans are considered to have offscreen water sources; their supply has been observed to be infinite, and in order to drain these you must remove water faster than the flow supply.

Deliberately flooding squares can be useful for farming, particularly on squares that need to be muddied before being worked (e.g., fertile land on the surface, and rocky tiles anywhere). However, water spreads very quickly and floods can get out of control if you don't know what you're doing; if your map has any farmland that does not need to be muddied (such as peat or loam), then it's probably safest to farm there, without messing around with floods.

Water movement is a major source of lag in the game.