Finally got all the badwater sources plugged. Ended up with some very dirty beavers, but they survived. One of them is a rig so that I still have a badwater source. Still have to wait for the pools to evaporate away, but that will give decent territory expansion once properly irrigated.
Started on filling the reservoir, as you have. BTW, you don’t have to dig a whole long channel to handle the badtides. Just make a short channel that goes straight to the edge of the map. The water will just fall off the side.
I noticed that there seems to be a limit as to how high a water source can “pump.” I dammed up the little section where the water source is, and it mostly filled, but not quite to the top of the crater. I didn’t count the number of tiles but I think it’s around 6.
Could that be a function of permeability? As in, are the floor and walls made out of dirt?
I think levees are impermeable, and I’m pretty sure there’s some constructible thing that makes dirt impermeable but it’s probably more expensive than levees.
My impression is that water will travel up an arbitrarily high distance if there’s no seepage.
My main reservoir (which also has both dirt and levee sides) is already taller than that–it’s just that the water source is from above rather than below. So I don’t think it’s permeability since that would affect both. It looks like it’s just that the source can’t push water up infinitely, but if it’s already high then it can fill anything up to that point.
“Craters,” and it’s the source on the opposite corner of the main source at the top of the cliff. It’s the one that drains directly into the giant circular crater.
You can see that there’s a sort of slot canyon that leads into the crater, and the water source is at the bottom. Try damming up that little section with levees to the top edge of the crater and see what happens.
Hmm. Maybe I somehow missed plugging something up? It’s a pretty small area but I’ll double check. It only goes up to one tile below the upper edge of the crater for me.
Not cheating, but I do wonder if the beavers on the adjacent territory are annoyed that I’m dumping toxic waste at some arbitrary spot on their property.
My initial hypothesis is that the water is flowing off the map. After damming it up with levees I realized that there were two squares at the top next to the water sources that I hadn’t leveed off, and water would have drained over the edge of the map.
Water can’t drain off the map directly over a water source, but next to it is fair game. I added a red arrow to the levees I almost missed.
6 cycles in my test run to fill up the crater reservoir. I had thought evaporation might be too much to overcome, but it filled.
Then again, I was in dev mode so it was the first six cycles. Even though I was testing on Hard, droughts and badtides are still much shorter that early.
The extra blocks on the edge fixed it. Thanks again.
Just ballparking, it looks like the crater refills about 2.5 tiles during the wet season, and then evaporates based on time. One tile is 22 days of evaporation. So on long badtides/droughts, I’m losing around 1.35 tiles and on “short” ones (still around 16 days) it’s more like 0.75 tiles. So I am coming out ahead, but I am probably losing almost half. Kinda lame.
Man, that crater is filling slowly. I think it’s rising only about 1 net tile per cycle. Maybe less.
I finished creating an elevated canal from one side of the map to the other. Unfortunately, the crater rim is one tile higher than the rim of my main reservoir. I tried using mechanical pumps but they’re too slow. I guess I’ll try raising the rim height on the main reservoir so they match. Kind of a pain since I’ve put a bunch of gravity batteries on the wall, but oh well. The extra storage should come in handy anyway.
I finished building the seed launcher thing, so I guess I “won.” My beavers have a happiness of ~72. But I do want to use every last drop of water that’s available. Too bad there’s no path in the tech tree to filter the badwater into drinking water.
This is a fun little game, but I do feel like I’ve done most of the things I’d want to do with it.
It does give me that city builder resource chain planner itch, though. Kinda split between playing some Anno 1800, Nebuchadnezzar, or Satisfactory to scratch it further.
