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.