Waterwheel

[chromo1418]

I dont know if there was already a suggestion for it, but how about a Waterwheel as an alternativ to the Windmill?

[Hirou]

It 100% will be in game, because it in roadmap

[Irulana]

This require changes in water first, so you will be not able to move water source block, currently water wheel doesn't make sense. I see some changes to water mechanics are coming so I hope we will get it soon.

[ChubbyDemon]

On 6/7/2022 at 2:39 AM, Irulana said:

This require changes in water first, so you will be not able to move water source block, currently water wheel doesn't make sense. I see some changes to water mechanics are coming so I hope we will get it soon.

Moving water sources is practically required, so I can't see that changing.  Maybe they'll make it so that player placed water and naturally generated water are distinct for the sole purpose of powering waterwheels?

[Maelstrom]

It depends on how Tyron would like water and the waterwheel to interact. 

 

[Topminator]

Make it so moving water sources needs steel so to reach it you are encouraged to use wind or existing rivers to work blooms and make refractory dusts. Then make it time intensive to move, make it need something like at least 500 connected water sources with air above them or something, using a bigger lake/river maybe could give a bonus, also when water freezes no more water power to make wind still be relevant after making waterwheels

[Guimoute]

Every time waterwheels are mentioned, someone brings up GaMe BaLaNcE and how easy it would be to power them. I want to ask: so what? Windmills are not hard to power either. Waterwheels are a visual alternative to sails. Make crafting the parts expensive if you want so that people naturally start with wind power, but talks about water being too easy to move have to stop. 

Edited September 25, 2023 by Guimoute

[Thorfinn]

That was amazing! By simply spelling it, "GaMe BaLaNcE", you've made the concern disappear entirely!

It's more than visual. You have to range far and wide to get enough seeds into the ground to make sails. You have to extensively play the farming mini-game, and it does not scale well -- you usually get back just the one seed, so unless you keep expanding your explorations and your farm, you hard limit yourself to maybe a couple mills per game year. If one were to build a waterwheel based at least part on reality, you are limited by, what? Boards? Pegs? You don't even need to find a stream or somewhere you can build a millpond. Just one bucket of water on top of a block of packed earth levitating in mid-air.

@Rhonen's excellent Medieval mod locks it behind iron, but once you find iron, you find a crapton of it, so while an improvement, it's still trivially easy to by fall of year 1 get enough automation that it'll make you puke. ("I don't wanna puke!")

It's not that it would be an alternative to windpower, but a complete replacement of it. There would be no reason to bother with farming more than just a small plot for food, as the time spent growing flax would be vastly less productive than chopping down a few trees or doing whatever else it is that you need to add a water wheel. You can prove it to yourself. Play the Medieval mod for a while, and see how many windmills you find yourself producing. Particularly when you find axles and gears are trivial with the fat drops from aurochs.

[Maelstrom]

If waterwheels were to be implemented in 1.19.  I wouldn't mind if they were large (5 block diameter like windmills), but gives low and consistent power - say equivalent to 20% wind speed thus limiting maximum of 4 water wheels (on a small island in a lake btw) to a single big gear and total power of 80% windspeed.  The large size would limit how many could be connected to a single big gear.  Could easily gate a waterwheel hub item behind bronze level tools.  Those parameters feels like it would fit well with windmills (and encourage development of wind powered mechanisms.

[Thorfinn]

I guess it would depend on how much power one could extract from water. I was just kind of going with reality, where water is a better energy source than wind. A water wheel, a couple angle gears, maybe 1 axle, and you have your quern automated. If that's enough power, and is consistent, it doesn't matter if it's gated behind bronze tools. You can always get yourself some kind of bronze before your first flax harvest. Then why plant flax? Slow maturation of an inferior grain? So, another role-play thing?

Gating it behind some tech level doesn't fix the problem. It has to be constructed of some material whose production is limited temporally, as linen is, or there's no point in developing undependable wind power in the first place, except, of course, if you live far enough north that you contend with freezing weather. So build winter digs? That's already a good idea. That would make it even moreso. 

 

[Rhyagelle]

It's in the roadmap, isn't it? So it is going to happen, though I'm not sure how it will be implemented. 

[VaelophisNyx]

Do consider that sometimes you can't get a good flowing water source to use a water wheel, thus making wind better

Waterwheels also stop working in winter. Wind doesn't stop blowing due to a season change

Pair that with: you can just make it resource hungry to craft and space hungry to set up

[Maelstrom]

Yes, waterwheels is on the roadmap but so is improved water mechanics in the same bullet point.  I suspect Tyron would like to have flowing rivers in terrain generation in connection to waterwheels.  I recall him mentioning sometime in a post that rivers are really hard to generate.  I would like to see waterwheels implemented even if the mechanic is dramatically modified in the future; but the roadmap seems to indicate that waterwheels are waiting for the desired water mechanics.

[Thorfinn]

Yep, it's coming, and like @Maelstrom says, it's probably linked to rivers. It would be really cool to link it to millponds, but that would be a lot of work to code, I'd think. One would have to come up with some mechanism for accumulation of water. Unless, of course, VS water were replaced by something more like Terraria water, where a bucket would fill one block completely, or 2 blocks halfway, or 5 blocks to 20%, etc., and if one block of water spreads out too much (10? 16?) it soaks into the ground or evaporates or something. Though it would make things like building a farm in the current style much more involved, using a liquid model like Dwarf Fortress, where it takes many buckets full to fill a block would work well, too.

But pretty much anything that's not going to be OP relative to windpower is probably going to have to use some flowing water mechanic other than the one that currently exists.

11 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

Do consider that sometimes you can't get a good flowing water source to use a water wheel, thus making wind better

But that's not the case currently in VS. Simply dumping a single bucket anywhere gives you a good flowing water source.

11 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

Waterwheels also stop working in winter.

They don't if the temperature stays above 0C. Which is not that far south. On a "normal" start, you can often be in redwoods in a couple days, and, depending on the worldgen, frost-free maybe a day or two beyond that. And then you can also grow crops through winter, too, and move back north when spring comes around so your crops don't all die out from heat.

11 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

you can just make it resource hungry to craft and space hungry to set up

Windpower requires at least a couple sets of sails, 20 linen each, so 640 fiber. That's a massive amount of farming. Building up to a couple hundred plots of flax will get you there by fall if you plug away at exploring for wild crops. Resources that make any sense to use in a waterwheel are way too common, with one possible exception I can think of -- something constructed with hides.  Maybe pelts, possibly leather. At least then you are constrained by SOMETHING that has a limit to its production rate, like you are with flax. But again, how much leather would it take to keep wind from becoming more effort than it's worth? A score of medium leather is quite a bit less game time/effort than just a single set of sails, which is powerful enough to usually run a quern. Is that a rough balance point? 20 sails vs. 80 leather? I don't know. I've never bothered making more leather than needed for backpacks, but my gut feel is that's a pretty good starting point.

And who cares about space? It's not like there isn't more of it in the world than you will ever see. The only circumstance I can see where space would be a concern is if there were some way to limit the player to only constructing on so many tiles. Something like a limited number of land claims, I suppose, but claims make no sense if there's no one else in the whole world.

[VaelophisNyx]

could always make it require rare woods, or even Aged Wood to build

[VaelophisNyx]

and ultimately I think part of this comes down to how ID Software's twitter put it

"You control the buttons you press"

People will just choose wind sometimes, people will just choose water if it were added; there's not much point in gating it too hard compared to wind as such, otherwise it becomes so long-winded to make that no one will bother

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

could always make it require rare woods, or even Aged Wood to build

I wouldn't do that. Aged Wood is all over the place, and purpleheart or ebony are almost impossible to find. Neither addresses the issue.

 

44 minutes ago, VaelophisNyx said:

People will just choose wind sometimes, people will just choose water if it were added; there's not much point in gating it too hard compared to wind as such, otherwise it becomes so long-winded to make that no one will bother

Exactly! I think ideally, if one is suggesting it as simply a visual alternative that it needs to not be better or worse. The absolute best way to make sure of that with the game as it exists is to require 4 linen per waterwheel tier, just as it is with windmill tier. Problem is that linen doesn't make much sense in a waterwheel. You need to come up with something more or less equivalent, so you are genuinely choosing water or wind for purely aesthetic reasons.

Personally, I'd choose to build whichever best suits my needs, aesthetics be damned. To maximize wind, you have to be at cloud level or above, with either a work platform in the clouds or an axle to the ground. Moving water is literally anywhere. Including in your living room, where it is kept from freezing by being in your living room.

I'm not championing it to be beyond windpower. I'd just prefer if wind were not relegated to being something only an absolute idiot would pursue.

[VaelophisNyx]

could make it a Paddle instead of linen, made of some planks, resin, nails, and fat?

[Maelstrom]

To add to my idea.  Waterwheel itself should take up a 5 block diameter and 2 block width but also require at least water measuring at least 3 block width, 2 block depth and 5 block length.  If you want to try and fill that kind of pool, I wish you luck for it will be exceedingly frustrating to accomplish.  I recently made a pool to grow reeds in which was just 1 block deep and had an exceedingly difficult time with it.  Increase that to two blocks and the frustration factor increases geometrically.  It would be much better to find a suitable place pond, lake or other natural body of water.  Want to maximize water wheel power?  find a small island on a large lake, but then you'll be travelling to your farm.

[Thorfinn]

Sure, @VaelophisNyx, though I wouldn't advise using resin as a limiter, as it is impossible if you don't have the right kinds of trees near. But nothing else you suggested is particularly difficult to come by. Even fat. Just run around looking for pigs. Two resin per tier would be too easy -- 10 for a fully upgraded waterwheel. The large gear takes 8 all by itself, and unlike windmills, you won't need one of those until maybe pulverizer, if at all. Unless you set it to some absurd amount of resin, as in more than 4 per tier (20 per fully upgraded wheel), you could have several of those up and running by late June, maybe earlier, since you wouldn't be spending game time farming huge plots of flax.

@Maelstrom what is frustrating about that? Placing water into an air block above a solid block is easy. The second Z and from then on as high as you like, you can't place the water in the air block over a water block, so you start with a 2-wide gap and place water on the sides of both rows of dirt, then remove the row of blocks from one side, and place water against the sides of those blocks. Repeat with the next Z if desired. The only real complication I ran into in doing it is I always play with dirt gravity, so I had to use packed earth.

As a suggestion when making lakes (I did that for something similar a while back for some unfathomable reason), it's easiest to just fill the area with dirt, then dig down to where you want the bottom of the lake and remove one block at a time and immediately refill that space with water so you know exactly where to place it. You can clear out a row at a time if you are good at seeing which blocks need filling in when/if you build farms, you make trenches of water instead of 1 block surrounded by 8 farming blocks. 

But, again, that size is not a problem. One could build a room around it and keep it warm all winter long even by the old room rules. I don't understand the new rules yet, but I believe it makes even larger spaces winter-proof.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Thorfinn

[Lacrimarum]

I think the best way to do water wheels would be to make water source blocks immovable, but allow them to 'flow' into nearby air blocks if they aren't contained. You can also take infinite water out of a source block with a bucket and place it elsewhere, but that water which you place will be limited, not infinite - as it flows it will deplete. Generate flat rivers in 'steps' with fall lines dividing the different elevation sections from one another - where the river crosses the change in elevation, the source blocks from the higher level will flow over a slanted slope to form rapids or form a large waterfall if the drop in elevation is sharp and sudden. That way, to build a watermill you would have to either find the fall line and build by the river there, or build some kind of infrastructure like an aqueduct or canal to transport flowing water from a source block - most likely from a river section at a higher elevation. This would also make irrigation important - you would plant your farm by a river, and draw water off of the source blocks in the river to irrigate your crops. If a thirst bar was added, you would be able to dig a well to have a water source away from rivers - maybe add a dowsing mechanic that functions like prospecting to find wells. This would be even more crucial in the desert.

Being able to move source blocks just defeats the entire purpose of seeking interesting, nice spots to build bases in survival imo and would make windmills pointless. This way a base by a river would build a watermill, whereas one up on a hill or near the coast would build a windmill. A place with falls and hills would be more valuable for a base, and a place on the lowest stretch of river with all of these would be even more valuable as the river would be navigable all the way to the sea.

Edited September 28, 2023 by Lacrimarum

[Thorfinn]

Don't know if I'm quite following you, @Lacrimarum, but I think I'm more or less on the same page.

It sounds to me as if your vision does not change the ability to create farms, at least the 8-around-1 type, or quenching basins for smithing, right? Since the destination is not flowing, it does not deplete. But if you dig the adjacent block, what happens? Do you now have 2 blocks, each half full, like Terraria, so you need to maintain information about how deep each block is? Or do you have a partially depleted placed block with a flowing block in the newly dug tile? Does the flowing block further deplete the placed, or is it stable in this new configuration until you dig another block for it to flow into? When you hit the magic number (4?) of blocks flowing out of the placed block, does the whole shebang go dry or what? 

At the very least, getting rid of movable source blocks would stop that form of griefing

[VaelophisNyx]

Personally I think the current water mechanics are fine, and that finite water would just make anything that demands water usage a chore if you can't settle near water. It'd be detrimental to the gameplay experience. There are ways to balance the conceptual waterwheel, and I do not think hard limiting all water in the game is it

 

that said we DO have other water types, why not simply add a "River water" type that can't be collected and moves much faster than standard water, allowing for waterwheels

 

also something I'd thought about last night, water wheels are subject to tremendous forces compared to a windmill, so you'd need extremely sturdy construction for them to be viable. The upside to that does however mean they could generate much more torque with ease, realistically speaking

[Lacrimarum]

12 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It sounds to me as if your vision does not change the ability to create farms, at least the 8-around-1 type, or quenching basins for smithing, right? Since the destination is not flowing, it does not deplete.

Quenching basins I think would be fine. When it comes to farms it's a separate topic, but I do think it's a bit lame that, for example, in a desert you can bring 8 buckets of water and grow crops for 3 years. I think that farmland, when drawing moisture from nearby blocks of water to recharge its moisture, should deplete the water in those blocks. If they are irrigated off the river that would be inconsequential as the flowing water from a natural source block would be infinite. The problem with this is that it makes farmland, which is essential, way too hard to maintain. I think maybe there could be a pump which would draw up water from a well (basically an underground pool of water source blocks that would spawn) to fill the area around farmlands. If it was a hand pump you'd do this manually say once a week if it doesn't rain, or you could also hook it up to a windmill gear system to make it just keep those blocks full. This would mean that to start out you would need a small pond, or to be at a riverside for your first base, but later on you'd just need to find a well.

12 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Do you now have 2 blocks, each half full, like Terraria, so you need to maintain information about how deep each block is? Or do you have a partially depleted placed block with a flowing block in the newly dug tile? Does the flowing block further deplete the placed, or is it stable in this new configuration until you dig another block for it to flow into? When you hit the magic number (4?) of blocks flowing out of the placed block, does the whole shebang go dry or what? 

Yeah, this how I think it should work. And if the water spreads too thin, it should just dry up. Something like a quenching basin or an aesthetic reflecting pool would stay static. If you dumped a bucket of water onto an open plain it would just run out and almost instantly vanish. I don't think it would cause much lag problems because all naturally generated water would be infinite, only player-placed water would have a 'quantity' like this, and any perpetually flowing water would quickly spread out and dissipate into nothing.

[Bumber]

36 minutes ago, Lacrimarum said:

I do think it's a bit lame that, for example, in a desert you can bring 8 buckets of water and grow crops for 3 years.

Pretty sure you just need 1 since you can refill buckets with one you've placed.