I don't really understand how windmills work... How can I improve it?

[vinnland]

Built a basic windmill, it has 8 sails (2 lots of sales). It's 4 blocks above my house level.

The Windmill sail power is 40KN.

This basic setup allows me to use a VERY SLOW helve hammer. I have two questions:

1. Without adding more sails, how can I increase the speed of my helve hammer. I tried building the sail 8 more blocks higher and its SLOWER!
2. How much power does a helve hammer need to be at it's max speed? I cannot really find numbers for power output vs power requirements. For example, my sail power is 40. Does that mean my generated power is 40? And how much of that 40 is used by my helve?

Thanks

 

 

[Michael Gates]

A helve can absorb.. um.. it's a lot, of power. People sometimes do crazy things with gears and multiple windmill rotors and billions of sails and anvil go BRRRRR. That said, about 80KN gets you a usual "full speed" helve.

So, two sails never gets you full speed. Three can, if the wind's good.

You get better wind at altitude. Wind speed increases, I have heard, by 1% per block you go up, up to altitude 170. Dunno if that's exactly correct but it's not far off. Build your mill up on a hill, or make a tower for it, or one time I totally cheesed out and built just a ladder up into the sky and and a smithy at altitude. I tried to make it look like a nifty airboat, which completely did not work, but it DID run the helve pretty fast with two or three sails! Note that if you go up it also gets COLDER. Wintertime temps can be in the -20C range, easy. Here, this helps: 

Another thing you can do to compensate for a slow helve is, when you're processing iron blooms for it? Don't just feed the slag-covered lump directly into the machine. You can manually knock off up to nine voxels of slag with one hammer blow. So, DO that. Get all the big chunks off and then let the helve move the iron voxels, which it is more efficient at. That technique is actually useful even with a full-speed helve; it's possible to process about forty blooms in a long night with two forges going.

After all this, it's "get more sails." That's a matter of running around more widely in the first couple weeks after world launch, and teaching your eyes to see flax plants at a bit of distance, and getting your farmland going quickly. Nothing magic to do there, just practice, and maybe running 5k blocks or so south of temperate start for your first base. (Flax seems to be most common between z=5-15k.)

[Maelstrom]

There's a few things about mechanical power.  Yes, the higher you go the more power you get per sail.  It is 1% per block above (sea level + 10).  So go to your nearest large body of water and stand on the shore, that is sea level.  Now add 60 to that number and that is the minimum altitude to get maximum power from your windmill.

But wait!  There's an issue with transmitting that power.  EVERYTHING (except the brake) costs power.  If your windmill generates 300 units of power, dropping an axle 60 blocks is going to rob your helve hammer of 60 power, or 20% of what is generated.  BratWorst has an excellent video on this.  

In my experience a single rotor with full sails will have times of excellent helve hammer speed, but there will be lots of down time where it is either painfully slow or not operating at all.  Increase that to four rotors with a full 5 set of sails and there will STILL be times where it is painfully slow, BUT those times are fewer.  YMMV depending on how much you want to use the helve hammer combined with how long you spend doing other things in your workshop/forge area. 

Me?  I like that puppy humming all the time while I am working in my workshop on other things (like tools, chain armor pieces, etc).  I usually went to maximum windpower altitude and dropped an axle.  My most recent world I built my workshop at an altitude of 200 with a windmill even higher above that (my sea level is 135 or therebouts so max power is at or slightly below 200).  My windmill is 4 rotors with a full 5 sails per rotor and I still have times where my helve hammers (quad setup but I can stop 2 for better speed) are still hardly banging away and dropping it down to one would not do much good either. Most of the time I get good production out of them though.  By that I mean once I have a bunch of iron blooms heated (usually 16 to 24 or so) I'll be heating more blooms while feeding the helve hammer and be running furiously between the forges and the helve hammers.

Hope this helps.

 

[Z0ctb0x]

Isn't 60 blocks of drop 0.03 power loss, about ~0.35 of a Quern (0.085)? as the wooden axle looses 0.0005 each?

Edited February 27 by Z0ctb0x

[kal_culated]

There's a few solid videos on YouTube that can give good explanations. 

An easy thing to do, is have your windmill rotor connect to the teeth of a large gear with an angled gear piece, at the top of your windmill. This "downshifts" your mechanic.

Then a line of axels going down the windmill into the stem of a large wheel at the bottom. Have another angled gear coming off the teeth of this large gear (thus "upshifting" your mechanic, back to "normal" power), and connect to your helve hammer / quern ect as normal.

(Bonus: since the bottom connection is a large gear with 4 teeth connections, you can even hook up 4 items total, like 2 querns, a pulverizer, and a helve hammer to it - just use a clutch and transmission to turn each one off when you need power elsewhere.)

 

The purpose of upshifting and downshifting is trading speed and torque. Downshifting gives you a more torque for your power, but a lot less speed. This also makes it "cheaper" over distance ; so downshifting at the top of your windmill, then upshifting at the bottom gives you the 'straight' power of your windmill motor without losing much power over the vertical distance. This setup makes powerliss very mininal.

 

 

Advanced:

...However, even with full "normal" power, a helve hamer isn't especially fast. Its okayish; you can toss an ingot or slagged iron on it and itll do its work while you do other stuff.

But how do you make it go fast? So fast you can shovel two forges worth of items at a time into it, and still sometimes be waiting on stuff to heat up? 

By making a gearbox! : ) there's plenty of examples online, but just like how we downshifted with a large gear at the top of the windmill and upshifted back at the bottom, we can set up 3 clutches/transmission switches to toggle upshifting, normal shifting, and downshifting as we want. This is useful both to make stuff go f a s t, but with downshifting you can keep something running even with minimal windpower. or if you dont care about downshifting, you can do just normal and upshifting.

 

[Michael Gates]

...and this is why I attach the helve directly to the windmill rotor. Y'all are willing to expend genuinely incredible amounts of stuff to save yourselves ten in-game minutes of climbing up and down a ladder.

To make the helve go fast, let it do the part of the job it's good at! It is BETTER than you at that "move a voxel from here to way over there" thing; does it in one whack, where you have to go.. one.. space.. at.. a.. time. So let it do that part. But YOU are better at clearing big chunks of slag off a bloom or blister. Here, look at this bloom:

You can see I did NOT clear every bit of slag off, nor did I do the tedious work of moving voxels over. All I did was whack off those chunks of slag where I could get more than one with a single click. In the left picture, you can see the mouse pointer resting on a voxel where a click took off FIVE voxels. If I were processing this bloom by hand, it would be about a quarter done, but FOR THE HELVE it is much closer to finished. I will barely have time to do this to the next bloom before this one is finished. It's about three times as fast as just setting untouched blooms on the helve hammer; it's practical to run three forges while doing this. Here, observe this plate:

What I've done here is pile up two ingots, then used "Heavy Hit" to to punch five voxels right down the centerline of the ingot to place *fourteen* voxels where they need to go, then more heavy hits twice each in three spots on the left (center, two UP from center, two DOWN from center) to place another nine voxels, and then twice each in three spots on the left to place nine more. Seventeen clicks, thirty-some voxels. I never quite get it right because I'm old and tremula is a whole thing, but it's still about two voxels per hammer hit. Then, because every one of the remaining voxels would take between two and seven(!) hits to move into place by hand, I give it to the machine.

If I grab the previous plate off the floor where the helve dropped it, I have just about time to make a chain section or an 8x of nails and set up the NEXT plate before the helve finishes with this one. Again, about three times as fast as handing it the whole job.

Edited February 27 by Michael Gates

[Dark Thoughts]

1 hour ago, Michael Gates said:

...and this is why I attach the helve directly to the windmill rotor. Y'all are willing to expend genuinely incredible amounts of stuff to save yourselves ten in-game minutes of climbing up and down a ladder.

Is this sarcasm?
Because you seem to completely ignore gearing here, aside from this being inconvenient in pretty much every other way as well.

[Michael Gates]

You seem to have failed to read the text I posted. My point is that you can get productivity improvements equivalent to several windmills worth of extra power just by leveraging your strengths and the helve's.

If you like big gears and you cannot lie, I'm not here to stop you. But if what you want is to process a couple of ore discs worth of iron, it's faster NOT to grow four windmills worth of flax and enough pigs to make sixty axles and thirty resin for assembly and all the rest. I produced an estimate for it four or five years ago. It seems that a geared setup pays for itself sometime after the two-thousandth ingot, which is a pile eighty blocks high.

Edited February 28 by Michael Gates

[MKMoose]

12 hours ago, Michael Gates said:

...and this is why I attach the helve directly to the windmill rotor. Y'all are willing to expend genuinely incredible amounts of stuff to save yourselves ten in-game minutes of climbing up and down a ladder.

Because I don't want my helve to be hideously ugly. I don't play the game for pure efficiency, and neither do most people.

 

6 hours ago, Michael Gates said:

If you like big gears and you cannot lie, I'm not here to stop you. But if what you want is to process a couple of ore discs worth of iron, it's faster NOT to grow four windmills worth of flax and enough pigs to make sixty axles and thirty resin for assembly and all the rest. I produced an estimate for it four or five years ago. It seems that a geared setup pays for itself sometime after the two-thousandth ingot, which is a pile eighty blocks high.

Most players don't need to process a thousand iron ingots as fast as possible.

 

11 hours ago, Dark Thoughts said:

Because you seem to completely ignore gearing here, aside from this being inconvenient in pretty much every other way as well.

It may also be worth mentioning that the helve hammer's resistance increases with speed, so it's generally not worth it to upgear a helve either way (especially if you're willing to use multiple hammers on a single anvil), because it takes more than five times the number of sails to achieve a processing rate equivalent to a couple base-speed helves, and also produces very inconsistent speed. As far as I remember, the recommended ratio to achieve high uptime without wasting too much power in high wind is about three full small rotors per helve, maybe less depending on where you place them, and increasing the output is often better done by just adding another helve or two. This also allows to enable and disable some of the helves using clutches to match the current wind speed better, which also reduces the effective optimal number of windmills per helve.

 

12 hours ago, Michael Gates said:

You can see I did NOT clear every bit of slag off, nor did I do the tedious work of moving voxels over. All I did was whack off those chunks of slag where I could get more than one with a single click. In the left picture, you can see the mouse pointer resting on a voxel where a click took off FIVE voxels. If I were processing this bloom by hand, it would be about a quarter done, but FOR THE HELVE it is much closer to finished. I will barely have time to do this to the next bloom before this one is finished. It's about three times as fast as just setting untouched blooms on the helve hammer; it's practical to run three forges while doing this. Here, observe this plate:

Especially when running two helves at a time, I tend to only hit each bloom ~3-7 times to clear the biggest clusters of slag from the corners at a rate of ~5 per hit, and doing it on the same anvil as the helve is working. If you still care about efficiency, then spending less time on the blooms allows to easily squeeze in a toolhead or two or at least make chain out of plates with barely any reheating to process the output of a single bloomery. Granted, it's gonna be much more difficult if not impossible to do it without reheating in 1.22.

 

12 hours ago, Michael Gates said:

What I've done here is pile up two ingots, then used "Heavy Hit" to to punch five voxels right down the centerline of the ingot to place *fourteen* voxels where they need to go, then more heavy hits twice each in three spots on the left (center, two UP from center, two DOWN from center) to place another nine voxels, and then twice each in three spots on the left to place nine more. Seventeen clicks, thirty-some voxels. I never quite get it right because I'm old and tremula is a whole thing, but it's still about two voxels per hammer hit. Then, because every one of the remaining voxels would take between two and seven(!) hits to move into place by hand, I give it to the machine.

You can move seven voxels each with the first two hits, and then it's diminishing returns. Same as for blooms - let the helve do what it can do for free, maybe help it a bit where it matters most, even on the same anvil. Sometimes productivity is about figuring out how to make the work more enjoyable and not strictly faster.

Edited February 28 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Sometimes productivity is about figuring out how to make the work more enjoyable and not strictly faster.

This is why I'm leaning a little more towards watermills in 1.22. They might be an expensive investment, and not as fast as windmills, but there's enough power there to keep a helve hammer going at a good steady pace. A windmill is still nice to have, however, it's really disappointing when the wind up and dies right in the middle of a big smithing project(like armor).

[Teh Pizza Lady]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This is why I'm leaning a little more towards watermills in 1.22. They might be an expensive investment, and not as fast as windmills, but there's enough power there to keep a helve hammer going at a good steady pace. A windmill is still nice to have, however, it's really disappointing when the wind up and dies right in the middle of a big smithing project(like armor).

/weather setw mediumbreeze

you're welcome.