How many waterwheels is too many?

[nnm711]

I don't know if this too lucky or not, but after thorough exploration of a nearby mountain, I found 14 rapid streams on it. From my current homestead location, 12 could reach it, although all but 1 would end up deep underground. I feel like at this point where I am planning it, I think I am heavily underestimating how nasty building the aqueducts and the whole system would get, considering the furthest streams would end up at height around 20. That's tier 3/4 enemy territory, not even counting how fast that cog in the middle of the UI would spin, and how many breaks I would have to take to recharge.

If I would relocate my home below the mountain, I could plug in all 14 streams rather easily, with 10 of them remaining comfortably above ground, allowing for some kind of potentially awesome structure, and the rest not too deep underground. I would lose quick access to a planned, but unfinished pathway through good translocators to the tropical zone (3 translocators move me almost 20k blocks south, with less than 1k blocks distances between them) and I would have to start growing fruit trees anew, after many of them being almost fully grown at my original location. I haven't fertilized my berry bushes yet, so that wouldn't be much loss. The new area is also a lot more stable. My current home is partially on a tiny island of small stability among low instability, but if I smelt stuff for too long, I begin hearing the "creepy" music. The low height would also make it need 150 or more axles to bring the power to my home. I am not sure how much of a debuff to the overall power produced it would be, as the waterwheel has no visible torque, unlike the normal windmill rotor.

But is that even worth it? Is there something 14 wheels can do, what 6, 8, 10 or 12 can't? I would like to upgear my quern and pulverizer twice, considering the default speed of the wheel is slower than a windmill going full tilt. In my current, wind-powered setup, the helve hammer is on a default speed, and at full wind speed it's just enough to keep heating iron blooms and turning into ingots with a single forge and hammer.

I have been testing in a creative world how multiple wheels behave with upgeared (once) machines, and it gets rather weird. When chunks get unloaded and then loaded again, or I am loading  into my singleplayer world, it looks like a single waterwheel will be stuck not reaching its full speed and machine performance is almost like they weren't upgeared at all. (quern directly connected to a wheel will take around 15 seconds to grind a single grain, in that weird state, the upgeared quern will take around 13 seconds) But toggling clutch off/on anywhere in the system makes the wheel reach full speed, and it doesn't slow down afterwards. Even if I plug multiple things in at the same time, it doesn't seem to affect it much. (quern will grind single grain in about 3 seconds, 3.5 seconds if helve hammer is also connected)

There is also a weird speed oscillation happening, but it didn't matter at all whether 1, or up to 5 wheels were connected to the system. With more wheels the initial loading-in penalty was lower, but toggling the clutch always made the machines faster, if very little with 3-5 wheels. After some initial frustration, I made sure I placed all the wheels while facing the same direction, and that the axle is spinning the same direction as the axle inside the wheel itself. If I placed the wheel incorrectly and the connected axle spun the other way, I found that the wheels rotated the wrong way when I loaded into the world! While wrongly placed, any interaction with the system (adding more machines, toggling any clutch) caused the whole mechanical system to fully stop for several seconds, before beginning to spin again. (and after first interaction, the wheels begun to spin as they should)

I have experienced the same thing while building my windmill system before, but then I expanded and redone it, and the issue (temporary full stop when toggling clutches) went away. I suspect with the redesign I placed the windmills "the intended way", which makes them spin the attached axle shafts the "correct" way. I think I have seen one of my windmills spinning the other way compared to its shaft, but all my recent attempts to recreate this behavior have failed. So I don't know what I was doing, or what could have caused it.

 

Here is a map of the mountain, my current location is way to the top left, outside of this map, the better location is marked with an X. In case anybody would like to play on the world, the seed is 1737701172, all default settings as of 1.22.(3-6). This is my first world/playthrough of VS, so I didn't experiment with different world settings.

Legend:

swirls are the locations of each rapid

skull: rapid is trapped with gravel. (approach very carefully and place a fence on the source block, or the stream is permanently gone)

swirls colors relate to the height of the rapid:

blue - above 200

green - 175-200

orange - 150 -174

red - below 150

I also have a very crude google sheet that calculates at what potential height aqueducts would end up, given coordinates, if anybody wants to look: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mQObnQhHLYkD1b1BDc4Wg-qEx2K6cVVFcC9qCzV0sB4

 

[LadyWYT]

I would say it's the kind of thing you really only do just to see if you can/say that you've done it. Waterwheels are very nice to have, but they're most useful for things that both need a lot of power and that you'll want to use regularly, such as the helve hammer. Windmills tend to be just fine for things that don't require active supervision to use, such as the quern or pulverizer.

That being said, if you decide to go for multiple waterwheels, I highly recommend making sure that the streams you've got marked are actually rapids, since a regular stream of water isn't powerful enough for a waterwheel but can be mistaken for rapids. The main differences between them are that rapids are much louder, and tend to have a brighter, slightly more opaque coloring along with a lot more particle effects.