Strategy to clear water

Hey all. I'm stumped on coming up with a good strategy to clear water. The strategy to hollow out a cave is to simply traverse the volume with your turtle, but that fails with water.

My specific application involves creating a room of air in an ocean. It's going to be a very large room, so filling it with sand and then removing it isn't very desirable from a time perspective, but if there isn't a faster strategy, that'll have to do.

More specifically, I'm planning on writing a program to construct a spherical glass dome in the ocean rising from bedrock to above sea level. The slanted underwater walls present unique challenges. I'd rather not drain a column of water that is the dome's footprint, as then I'd have to refill portions with water (not to mention I'd be destroying part of the ocean floor). But then I'm not sure how to get rid of the water under the dome.

I'm sure this is a common design problem this community has run into before, but I'm not sure how to search for it on this forum. I ran into a similar situation a few months ago when I constructed a half-dome glass tube for ocean boat entry to an underground cave. In that case as I built each layer of the descending tube, I filled it with dirt and then removed it. That took twice as long to construct, and was unneeded once I dropped below the ocean floor.

Traversing the inside of the dome in rows, layer by layer should do it. Start at the top of the inside of the dome. Move along one side. Move to the next row, go to the end. Traverse to the other end of the row. Move over. Repeat. It's slow going. You'll have to visit each block in the dome at least once, so it's rather fuel-intensive and slow, but it should clear the water.

Part of the problem is that Minecraft is pretty rubbish at automatically clearing away "running" water once there are no "source" blocks left to feed it. That is to say, odds are just having the turtle surf its way through every block in the dome will still leave it mostly filled with running water, completely unlinked to any source blocks…

The most reliable way to sort that out is indeed to fill every layer with dirt or somesuch, then remove it. That is to say, once each layer is completely packed with dirt, start digging it out again, same as you did the last time.

Lyqyd, I tried your strategy and it works great. I think it failed on my tunnel project because I had an open side. The perimeter needs to be built first, then the insides traversed. And I like the idea of building the dome top-down. I was originally thinking bottom-up before but it makes more sense to deal with water removal in a downward direction. I'm so glad a simple traversal will clear the water instead of a two-step process!

BB, I clear out lava streams in the nether by systematically traversing them downward with a turtle. But I'll keep this in mind. My test just now was with a 4 block radius circle. It might fail on, say, a 100 radius circle.

Thanks, all.

Dredging a bit further into my memory, I think most of the issues I encountered involved water coming in from the sides of my quarries (spreading out and covering humongous areas which the source blocks shouldn't've been able to reach). Odds are you'll be ok with your enclosed dome. :)/>