Developing "Advanced Hydrodynamics"

[Seyko]

This topic is dedicated to the development of additional mechanics for the vanilla version of the game, introducing realistic water behavior with all that it entails: rivers, groundwater, wells, canals, aqueducts, cisterns, irrigation, water energy, and possibly erosion.
Topic created as a branch [HUB] - Water mechanics overhaul: Farm irrigation, sail boat canals, pipes, aqueducts and natural occurring water sources

[Ranakastrasz]

Well, as a placeholder, put infinite water like the other block game, since we already have infinite water with buckets anyway, and then we can manipulate water or pan sand without ruining the water and ice in the area.

Not for realism, but for suspension of disbelief.

Once a better solution is developed, realistic or not, replace with that.

 

[Seyko]

At the time of opening the topic:

• The inclusion of "Advanced Hydrodynamics" (for now this is a working title, hereinafter AH) in the game is an option when creating a new world similar to the existing "cave-in" system. The player can try the new option, or play as before.
• So far there is an understanding of the need to add a new block - advanced water. For brevity and convenience, we will call it A-Water. A-Water has height options like charcoal when you dig it out piece by piece. A-Water contains 16 layers, each 10 liters (1 bucket).
• Vanilla blocks and A-Water get new parameters: VOLUME, HUMIDITY, POROSITY.
• Perhaps the new parameters should be stored in a separate data array (water map), which only exists if the AH option is enabled in the world. This may free you from having to rewrite the code for all existing blocks, including those from mods. But in this case, the mod must have an additional parameter grid for its blocks, or it will not support AH. Or it will work strangely. Perhaps storing some of the data in another place will have problems with write/read speed. This point requires an assessment by a competent specialist. It is also not entirely clear how much additional disk space all this will require. It seems to me not very much 
• More details about the new parameters:

                 VOLUME (V) - the amount of water that a block can hold.
                    - For impermeable blocks (stone, clay) V = 0
                    - For air V = 1 (when air is filled with water, an A-Water block appears in place of the air)
                    - For sand and gravel V = ... maybe 10
                    - For all types of soil V = 8
                    - For different building blocks, you need to think. For example, 4 or less. It does not matter now.
The idea here is this: if the A-Water block contains 16 units of liquid, this is the maximum stacking. Earth and other materials capable of absorbing liquid thus fill the internal voids. Depending on how many voids there are in the material, it will be decided how much liquid it will contain. For all types of soil, V = 8 was chosen because it is half of 16. I can't explain it, but my intuition tells me that in the future this may be convenient, because the soil will be watered for agricultural crops.

                POROSITY (P) - it's probably more correct to call it a priority. This characteristic shows what place the material has in the queue for absorbing neighboring excess water.
                    - For impermeable blocks (stone, clay) P = 0
                    - For air P = 1 
                    - For sand and gravel P = ... maybe 6
                    - For all types of soil P = 9 - maximum
                    - For different building blocks I haven't thought about it, we can decide later.
                    - For water and A-Water P = 1.
I think: if you bring a napkin to water spilled on a table, the napkin will pull the water towards itself. This is surface tension due to porosity. Therefore, for water and air, P is low.

                MOISTURE (M) - how much water is in the block at the moment. If the M of block has more than 75% of V, then P = 1.
This way, the soil will not try to become wet mud (a figure of speech, this is the same earth), unsuitable for agriculture. Filling the block over 75% will only happen if the excess water has nowhere to go. Well, or maybe with the help of a watering can.

• The sources for groundwater and replenishing the world with fresh water will be rain, springs and melted snow. And possibly aquifers - permeable blocks located near the ocean or lake.
• Depending on the biome, blocks lose fluid at different rates.
• Blocks that are capable of collapsing fall if they contain 100% liquid by volume.
• Vanilla water blocks located at sea level or below infinitely fill adjacent voids, infinitely absorbing incoming water. Maybe not all blocks, but only those located in the ocean, lake biome. Thus, a channel for a sailboat can be created simply by digging it at sea level. But it was noted that this will provide a new way for griefing. Perhaps it is worth thinking about it better, or accepting a new threat.
• Rivers are basically a long hole with a spring at the beginning, so river generation is mostly landscape generation.
• The new parameters and rules of their interaction should lead to plausible water behavior. And as a result, having dug a hole, it will be filled with soil and rainwater. Or, having created a gutter from an impermeable material, you can direct the flow of water where it is needed.
  The downside is that now when choosing a construction site, you need to think through the landscape and the choice of material more carefully.
  I really hope that perhaps not in detail, but in general, the concept of advanced hydrodynamics will interest Tyron and the developers and we will get a unique, even more elaborate survival world! Hopefully soon! 

Water behavior algorithms are being considered. There are a lot of nuances and alternative thoughts. I'll try to write next time.

[Seyko]

I'm trying to remember C# to model the idea. There are results, but they are too childishly primitive to publish.

If anyone is interested..

[Katherine K]

This is tricky. You need to make sure your system can quickly reach steady states so that you don't have to update a river-worth of blocks just to confirm that yup, every block still got as much water flowing into it as flowing out of it. This has to be built model-first with that consideration in mind.

I'd also suggest that river generation is a huge project on its own. River formation is a kind of optimization problem that's not terribly complex locally - water solves it by just existing, and it's not very smart. But it does take millennia to do so, and you don't normally have that sort of time. You kind of have to pre-simulate rainfall and erosion over a very long time period on the map before you carve out final rivers and mark their watersheds. Then you can pre-place the sources that will generate more or less water depending on rainfall in the region, and the rest will be taken care of by your water physics. If you don't do this, and just try to use a random carver like Minecraft does, then the moment your water becomes simulated, your rivers are either going to run dry or turn into static lakes.

I'll be honest, I haven't looked at VS world gen too closely yet. It sounds like there are some generation steps that are applied globally rather than generating one chunk at a time. That'll definitely help, since you do need that preparation step. But you probably also don't want to run the actual block generation for every single chunk in the world upfront (unless the game already does that on world creation...) in which case, you'd need an intermediate representation that lets you store the river as a modifier and apply during chunk generation...

None of it is rocket science, but it's a lot of work. Trying to do that and water physics at the same time seems like it might be a bit much.

[Bomboclaat]

I'd imagine if flowing rivers were in the game you could use a Water Wheel/Water Mill to generate power and connect to your helve hammers etc, instead of using a windmill.

[Katherine K]

That's probably best handled as a separate mod that uses hydro overhaul as a core. Water mills, angled Archimedean screws, and pipes would be a great mod to add on top of it.

Rivers can probably also be a separate mod that works with all of the above, but for reasons I outlined in a previous post, hydro and rivers really have to be developed in tandem by the same person/team.

@Seyko I wouldn't have the time to really drive a mod to feature-completion most likely. But I have tons of experience with relevant solvers. If I wrote a performant hydro core solver and a river carver as functional modules that do what it says on the tin, would you be interested in driving it to feature-complete and/or maintaining it?

I'd also be perfectly happy making it a public git repo for anyone who wants to contribute, so that's kind of an open offer. I just don't want to put in the time if it's going to sit half-finished, perpetually out of date with latest version, and if it's going to be on me to polish and maintain it, it definitely will be.

[Seyko]

@Katherine K Firstly, I am very pleased that someone is seriously interested in my point of view. Unfortunately, I will not be able to support your work. And with even greater regret, I will hardly be able to continue it.
I believe that advanced hydrodynamics should be at the core of the vanilla version. At least as an option.
It is obvious to everyone that this is a difficult task and I cannot imagine that enthusiasts will do such work, and then rewrite the code for each game update in years.
I am trying to make some kind of model so that the developer in this topic will find not only terms of reference, but also examples of execution.

On 8/1/2025 at 3:03 AM, Katherine K said:

I'd also suggest that river generation is a huge project on its own. River formation is a kind of optimization problem that's not terribly complex locally - water solves it by just existing, and it's not very smart. But it does take millennia to do so, and you don't normally have that sort of time. You kind of have to pre-simulate rainfall and erosion over a very long time period on the map before you carve out final rivers and mark their watersheds. Then you can pre-place the sources that will generate more or less water depending on rainfall in the region, and the rest will be taken care of by your water physics. If you don't do this, and just try to use a random carver like Minecraft does, then the moment your water becomes simulated, your rivers are either going to run dry or turn into static lakes.

I also think that rivers are a task of the terrain generator. And this is another reason why advanced hydrodynamics should be part of the vanilla version.
Regarding static lakes in rivers. I had time to think, and everything I wrote in the topic title about VOLUME, POROSITY and MOISTURE is redundant. It is enough to leave VOLUME (or MASS) and ENERGY (for mechanisms). It is the ENERGY parameter as an increment of MASS that will make rivers dynamic.
When I feel strong enough, I will rewrite the initial post.

Is it just me who thinks that everything related to water in the game is incomplete?

[Krougal]

12 minutes ago, Seyko said:

Is it just me who thinks that everything related to water in the game is incomplete?

Not at all.

[Thorfinn]

On 7/17/2025 at 4:18 PM, Seyko said:

But in this case, the mod must have an additional parameter grid for its blocks, or it will not support AH. Or it will work strangely.

...

And this is another reason why advanced hydrodynamics should be part of the vanilla version.

Do you believe this to be a reasonable "ask" of mod makers? Having to continuously adjust to a moving target to a game still well in EA? Wouldn't it be much better to have AH be a mod that people could develop libraries to accommodate?

[Seyko]

15 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Do you believe this to be a reasonable "ask" of mod makers? Having to continuously adjust to a moving target to a game still well in EA?

This is not a requirement, but a nuance for the future. If a specialist takes up the idea, it will be clearer to him how to proceed.
Even as it is stated now, if the modder wants a mod without AH, then there is no need to bother. If this is some kind of water wheel for interaction with AH, then you need to register the parameters for the mod blocks.
Or simply. For a block without a parameter, the default value is selected.

15 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Wouldn't it be much better to have AH be a mod that people could develop libraries to accommodate?

I have nothing against it, but I would like to have it in vanilla. I try to make an effort to somehow clearly describe how it could work. So that it would be easier for a developer or enthusiast modder. But this is not enough to achieve a result. Therefore, hope is on the developer. Especially if the idea received support from users.

[Thorfinn]

ATM, it does not appear to be in the cards. Waterwheels are, but that does not require anything more than disabling source blocks, which was recently done, at least as an option. You just have to find a place suited to build a waterwheel, rather than bring the water there. I could see a setting which gave you the option of movable source OR waterwheels, not both. Otherwise, you build wherever you please, use a single  bucket of water to drive your array of waterwheels, and you have a power source superior to windmills.

The other water-related item on the roadmap is "experiment with rivers". Not exactly a strong statement they believe it can be done, at least while maintaining other standards, most likely performance. I'm amazed at all the people still playing on an i3 or less. A good way to kill the game would be to make game that required an i9 with 64Gb and a 3xxx video card. 

[Krougal]

18 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

ATM, it does not appear to be in the cards. Waterwheels are, but that does not require anything more than disabling source blocks, which was recently done, at least as an option. You just have to find a place suited to build a waterwheel, rather than bring the water there. I could see a setting which gave you the option of movable source OR waterwheels, not both. Otherwise, you build wherever you please, use a single  bucket of water to drive your array of waterwheels, and you have a power source superior to windmills.

The other water-related item on the roadmap is "experiment with rivers". Not exactly a strong statement they believe it can be done, at least while maintaining other standards, most likely performance. I'm amazed at all the people still playing on an i3 or less. A good way to kill the game would be to make game that required an i9 with 64Gb and a 3xxx video card. 

Why do movable water sources and waterwheels need to be mutually exclusive?

For balance reasons? There's no rule it has to be. There are other ways it could be balanced as well.

If they make them require steel then you'd still have to build windmills.

Even if they just needed iron, I'd still want a powered quern before I had iron.

 

[Calo-Mari]

I would just love if a system like this would be implemented, even a barebones version of it would be amazing. It’s a missing part of the game that I’d love to be vanilla.

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Krougal said:

For balance reasons? There's no rule it has to be. There are other ways it could be balanced as well.

If they make them require steel then you'd still have to build windmills.

That doesn't balance it. It just delays the timing of when the system breaks down. The plasma rifle was devastating, way OP, even if it was not available until E2M1, IIRC. Or to borrow from a different game, a very tiny group of 3-4 Heavy Horse Archers could dominate anything else on the field in competent hands. Even though HHA were a late Iron troop. Their range, speed, dodge and damage had no effective counter except to keep the player from getting them in the first place.

Edited August 11, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Krougal]

4 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That doesn't balance it. It just delays the timing of when the system breaks down. The plasma rifle was devastating, way OP, even if it was not available until E2M1, IIRC.

I don't get the reference. I don't know what E2M1 is. Plasma rifle is so generic sci-fi it could be from any number of franchises and I don't know WTF it has to do with waterwheels and windmills.

What's your reasoning then?

[Thorfinn]

Doom. Episode 2, Mission 1. Once you got a plasma rifle, the game was a cakewalk until at least E2M7. Same here. Once you get your first waterwheel, even if it is heavily resource intensive, it becomes the means to build more. Iron is essentially an uncountably finite resource. Charcoal is effectively infinite. Makes waterwheels basically the same as murder -- after the first, all the rest are free.

[EDIT]

Sure, you could require implausible materials that are very difficult to find, like cinnabar and Jonas assemblies, but the problem is exactly that they are implausible -- everyone knows water wheels never required anything remotely like that, and the whole reason for the idea, verisimilitude, is destroyed. As if a single bucket containing 10 liters of water making an infinite water source 1000 liters in size weren't already straining credulity.

Edited August 11, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Krougal]

1 minute ago, Thorfinn said:

Doom. Episode 2, Mission 1. Once you got a plasma rifle, the game was a cakewalk until at least E2M7. Same here. Once you get your first waterwheel, even if it is heavily resource intensive, it becomes the means to build more. Iron is essentially an uncountably finite resource. Charcoal is effectively infinite. Makes waterwheels basically the same as murder -- after the first, all the rest are free.

Oh, Doom came out in 93 and I was too poor to buy a PC until 96 (which I only know cause that is when the bigboy 200Mhz Pentium was released) so it was never really my thing.

As usual, you aren't really making a point. It could be said of everything in this game. It is the same as Minecraft. There is pretty much have and have not. Before you have a source of whatever, it is precious and rare. Once you find a source of it, you are pretty much set and move on to the next hurdle.

Oak trees are generally pretty common in the temperate band. One game I had to travel several KM to find any, and they weren't even big ones so I had to collect seeds and wait for them to grow, which really slowed down my leather operation. Which really sucked. So in that particular instance, oak trees were precious, rare and a major bottleneck.

Once I had enough oak to produce a few barrels of leather, it was a non-issue.

My current game I just hit August and I am swimming in cloth. I got basics locked down and then prioritized getting seeds and my region is high fert dense. I already have so much cloth I don't know what to do with it.

Yes, windmills are resource constrained as far as you've got to prepare for them 2 months ahead of time, and winter better not be anywhere in that timeframe, but it isn't rocket science.

If the same kind of time-gating was desired for waterwheel, they could make us age/cure some medieval/steam-punk equiv of pressure-treated wood. Maybe we'll have to coat it with pitch, which will be some kind of long-arsed process to make and require steel tools. By the time you have steel, unlimited mechanical power is kinda moot.

Could also make the waterwheel subject to mechanical breakdowns. There are all kinds of evil things Tyron could do to us to make it feel like more of a pain in the ass than it is worth, and knowing Tyron he will.

 

[Katherine K]

10 hours ago, Seyko said:

I believe that advanced hydrodynamics should be at the core of the vanilla version. At least as an option.

Agreed, but the problem with this is that is a pretty niche task. If this was a large studio, it's not too big of a problem to hire a specialist specifically to develop AH. For the team the size of VS? I think the most viable path is that this is developed as a mod, then integrated into core VS with permission.

10 hours ago, Seyko said:

I also think that rivers are a task of the terrain generator. And this is another reason why advanced hydrodynamics should be part of the vanilla version.

Yeah, but a worldgen mod is entirely viable here. It would likely conflict with almost any other worldgen mod due how thorough it has to be, but so many people mod the heck out of their mechanics without touching the world, that I think it'd be fine. And again, if that becomes the starting point for integration into the game, that's fantastic.

6 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

The other water-related item on the roadmap is "experiment with rivers". Not exactly a strong statement they believe it can be done, at least while maintaining other standards, most likely performance. I'm amazed at all the people still playing on an i3 or less. A good way to kill the game would be to make game that required an i9 with 64Gb and a 3xxx video card.

Performance is a big problem. I was thinking of how I'd approach the solvers for both the river worldgen and core AH, and I don't think I'd want the core to be running C#. Generally, overhead of pure compute isn't that high with C#, thanks to JIT, but it's still significant, and it's a lot harder to make C# code run better when you do find a bottleneck.

Fortunately, it wouldn't be all that difficult to have a bit of platform-independent C++ code that runs the core solvers imported as unsafe DLL. The mod would then register any block changes with the core, run the sim tick, and then communicate any state changes back to the game. That would allow the core AH to make use of SIMD, threading, and better optimized code, while keeping the wrapper in C# land.

That would make the mod to be harder for anybody to work with, but I think "hydrodynamics solver," even a highly simplified one, is already a pretty big skill barrier.

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Krougal said:

As usual, you aren't really making a point.

You are familiar with argumentum ad absurdum, right? This is similar to that; the name escapes me at the moment. I can't even get close enough for the search engine to help. Like ad absurdum, you construct an extreme example and, while it does not necessarily mean the opposing argument is flawed, if one cannot come up with a distinction with a difference between the extreme and the base argument, it likely is. The likelihood increases as the number of extreme cases one cannot logically dispatch.

Your argument is that while you do not think it should be Copper Age, it would be appropriate for Steel, or maybe Iron. The extreme parallel I'll pick is rape should be illegal, but it would be appropriate if one is a billionaire. Yours is that a later Age makes it OK, mine is that more money makes it OK. So what's the distinction with a difference between them? Let's say you actually can come up with something. How about if I go with something related to age, just as you are. It is wrong to steal if you are 20, but OK if you are 60.

[Krougal]

24 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

You are familiar with argumentum ad absurdum, right? This is similar to that; the name escapes me at the moment. I can't even get close enough for the search engine to help. Like ad absurdum, you construct an extreme example and, while it does not necessarily mean the opposing argument is flawed, if one cannot come up with a distinction with a difference between the extreme and the base argument, it likely is. The likelihood increases as the number of extreme cases one cannot logically dispatch.

Your argument is that while you do not think it should be Copper Age, it would be appropriate for Steel, or maybe Iron. The extreme parallel I'll pick is rape should be illegal, but it would be appropriate if one is a billionaire. Yours is that a later Age makes it OK, mine is that more money makes it OK. So what's the distinction with a difference between them? Let's say you actually can come up with something. How about if I go with something related to age, just as you are. It is wrong to steal if you are 20, but OK if you are 60.

The simple question I asked, that you evaded as usual to turn everything into an argument, was why you felt that waterwheels and placeable water sources had to be mutually exclusive.

I made examples of balance, since I was trying to understand your line of thinking and maybe drag a simple answer out of you.

I'm really tired of talking to you. Everything turns into the same pile of convoluted crap; nothing in the game is necessary and you shit on everything. It isn't even necessary to play the game right?

I'm done. Bye Felicia!

[Mrozak]

I'd like to have rivers and waterwheels.
(better if the rivers would have current, but even without a current it would be still way better than not having rivers and waterwheels)

I would also love to have what i call "infinite water".
So when you dig a ditch leading to a water source, the water source would fill that ditch with flowing water no matter how long it is.
I was very disappointed the first time i dug a little watering canal for my field, and the water went in just two blocks and stopped.
I was even more disappointed when the same happened with a little stream i planned to go through a garden behind my house.

And i cannot imagine how any of that could be a problem for progression or a balancing issue.
The game already has windmills, which are waterwheels powered by air instead of water and using sails instead of wood.
And "infinite water" is much more immersive than the opposite.

I am not saying i want some super uber Advanced Hydrodynamics to be part of a vanilla game,
but i wouldn't mind - provided that the very basic stuff i mentioned above will get added first
 

Edited August 11, 2025 by Mrozak

[Katherine K]

4 hours ago, Mrozak said:

So when you dig a ditch leading to a water source, the water source would fill that ditch with flowing water no matter how long it is.

Yeah, this is part of why I think the water solver needs to be very robust. Basically, you want to have concept of ground water. It won't be infinite, but it should be vast enough to be effectively so for most tasks in most relevant regions. OP's approach of allowing blocks to be porous is what lets you do that. Rain will wet the top layer of blocks, which will refill the ground water as water seeps through. At some depth, porous blocks are replaced by non-porous, and that holds the ground water. It's a simplified model, but it should be enough.

That would make farming in some areas easier than others. If you have granite under 1-2 layers of dirt, you're probably not going to be doing much farming there without building an aqueduct from somewhere else. In contrast, if you have a thick layer of sediment rocks, you might have effectively infinite water, so long as you don't mind working the crank of a well.

With current world-gen you could just use sea level as proxy for ground water level, and have it never change, but I don't think that's terribly exciting. With river basins being properly simulated, you could easily have areas that are 20-30 blocks above sea levels, yet still have lakes, rivers, and ground water that's just a few blocks below the surface.

Solving for all of the dynamics on every game tick is obviously impossible, but also not necessary. Ground water levels should only vary gradually with seasons, unless player does something truly drastic to the terrain, which is also unlikely to happen all at once. So long as relevant relations between rainfall and water levels is pre-computed for every chunk during world gen, adjustments can be made as they come in due to player placing or removing blocks as it happens.

And yeah, none of it is a requirement for water wheels. This would be by far the most comprehensive way to implement rivers, wells, and player-built irrigation. But you could absolutely just mark sources with "flow" during world gen, and only allow player to build water wheels on these. But then you couldn't, say, partially dam a slow river to make the water wheel go brrr, and that really seems like part of the fun with a feature like that.

[Thorfinn]

8 hours ago, Krougal said:

I made examples of balance, since I was trying to understand your line of thinking and maybe drag a simple answer out of you.

What you proposed was not balance. You don't balance something by making it rare, because even if you set the admin sword at a 1 in a trillion drop rate, that one time it happens at 9:15 of day 1, it has fundamentally altered the balance of the game. I get it that games do that all the time. But the effect is not to balance the item, as to make the consequences of there being an unbalanced item more rare. Same thing with making it more resource intensive. It just changes when a fundamentally unbalanced mechanic manifests.

I honestly don't know why there isn't a durability to machinery. From both a verisimilitude POV (we all know mechanical stuff wears out and sometimes just breaks) and a game consistency POV, it seems a no-brainer. You can grind, say, 50 units before you need to repair the quern. Maybe you get double that for soft items like grain. Once you have better materials you can build something that lasts longer. From a game consistency POV, that should apply to all mechanical systems. Windmills, too. Pounder caps. Helve hammers. @traugdor was onto something when he proposed high winds damaging windmills, but the implementation would punish intelligent building of mills. You would intentionally design them with fewer sails and at lower altitude so they would not be subjected to strong winds. But if the gears and sails wore out over time, like it does in real life, it accomplishes the same end, that of using up part of next season's flax and fat and resin, giving you an ongoing, realistic need for resources.

8 hours ago, Krougal said:

I'm really tired of talking to you.

Same. I know you are smart enough to follow this. I can't for the life of me understand how it eludes you. Possession of a handgun at age 20 years, 364 days is a felony, at 21 years, fine. Even though we both know there are 14 YO who would be fine with firearms, and 30 YOs who should not be within miles of one. You don't balance out the psycho 30 YOs by raising the age limit or making it more expensive. Whatever that is, it's not balance.

A water wheel is not rocket science, and should not be made so. It should be balanced the same way it is in reality -- by making you build the mill in a place that has an appropriate water supply and require recurring maintenance, rather than the obviously unrealistic means of 10 l = 1000 l of infinite water, anywhere you want, even in thin air. Particularly since you would have to invent nonsensical reasons to disallow stacking multiple water wheels on the same shaft, all drawing their power from player-created infinite sources.

I know you want to keep your unrealistic ladder for gameplay reasons. And because the same thing happens "naturally" in caves all the time, I can kind of see it. But that does not mean you should be able to turn it into an exploit.

Edited August 11, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Krougal]

6 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

What you proposed was not balance. You don't balance something by making it rare, because even if you set the admin sword at a 1 in a trillion drop rate, that one time it happens at 9:15 of day 1, it has fundamentally altered the balance of the game. I get it that games do that all the time. But the effect is not to balance the item, as to make the consequences of there being an unbalanced item more rare. Same thing with making it more resource intensive. It just changes when a fundamentally unbalanced mechanic manifests.

I honestly don't know why there isn't a durability to machinery. From both a verisimilitude POV (we all know mechanical stuff wears out and sometimes just breaks) and a game consistency POV, it seems a no-brainer. You can grind, say, 50 units before you need to repair the quern. Maybe you get double that for soft items like grain. Once you have better materials you can build something that lasts longer. From a game consistency POV, that should apply to all mechanical systems. Windmills, too. Pounder caps. Helve hammers. @traugdor was onto something when he proposed high winds damaging windmills, but the implementation would punish intelligent building of mills. You would intentionally design them with fewer sails and at lower altitude so they would not be subjected to strong winds. But if the gears and sails wore out over time, like it does in real life, it accomplishes the same end, that of using up part of next season's flax and fat and resin, giving you an ongoing, realistic need for resources.

Same. I know you are smart enough to follow this. I can't for the life of me understand how it eludes you. Possession of a handgun at age 20 years, 364 days is a felony, at 21 years, fine. Even though we both know there are 14 YO who would be fine with firearms, and 30 YOs who should not be within miles of one. You don't balance out the psycho 30 YOs by raising the age limit or making it more expensive. Whatever that is, it's not balance.

A water wheel is not rocket science, and should not be made so. It should be balanced the same way it is in reality -- by making you build the mill in a place that has an appropriate water supply and require recurring maintenance, rather than the obviously unrealistic means of 10 l = 1000 l of infinite water, anywhere you want, even in thin air. Particularly since you would have to invent nonsensical reasons to disallow stacking multiple water wheels on the same shaft, all drawing their power from player-created infinite sources.

I know you want to keep your unrealistic ladder for gameplay reasons. And because the same thing happens "naturally" in caves all the time, I can kind of see it. But that does not mean you should be able to turn it into an exploit.

Ok, fine. Honestly if you had just said that in the first place instead of going on about plasma rifles I would have actually agreed with most of it, maybe even all of it.

As far as balance, I was spit-balling ideas, and you are right, while they are workable gamey solutions, none of them are solutions either of us would be happy with.

I was really cranky and over-tired by the last post; only reason I was up was I couldn't sleep. When you started going off the rails with the absurd examples I wasn't in the mood for it, and too tired to understand any of it. I felt like you were just being pedantic at that point.

I understand the handgun example perfectly.

I agree that things should wear out. I was just saying in another thread we need more resource sinks.

As far as the water wheel, yes and no, you need to be near a stream at least, but you can build a raceway to move the water a bit, or a dam. We should have the capability to build these things in the game. We currently don't. We don't even have rivers & streams.

If we aren't going to get these things, then it should be an option, just like the water is, and they should not be mutually exclusive. It should be the default for survival and an option in standard. Otherwise it is like adding the need to take a crap but not letting us build outhouses.

Yes, my water ladder. I live in fear of the day Tyron decides you can't hold your breath that long. Although to be honest, lately I have sticks coming out of every orifice. I had to make a 2nd crate and I even use them for campfire fuel. It would be no hardship at all for me to make stacks of ladders. Lately, believe it or not, I have been using ladders more often than the water exploit.

Anyway, peace.

Edited August 11, 2025 by Krougal