Waterwheel

[Hentai Ninja]

I am not sure if the topic of waterwheel balance has concluded, but beeswax is something not so readily available, and waterproofing waterwheel with large amount of beeswax could help balancing it against linen.

The more "tooth" on a waterwheel, the more power output, just like sails, that means more beeswax.

There is also a lot of untapped potential with torque and speed, which i was not aware of. Waterwheels are powerful irl, but perhaps lower speed would make it a very slow process. Something to offset the high speed, low power of a single windmill? That would allow multiple machines powered at once, but at a very slow pace.

[Lugh Crow-Slave]

On 9/21/2023 at 2:53 AM, ChubbyDemon said:

Moving water sources is practically required.

Not really and we've already seen several mods built around utilizing water without moving the source. 

 

Even base game iv turned that setting off and it just makes things less convenient there wasn't anything I couldn't do. 

[Facethief]

Maybe the power generated by any given flowing water could be tied to the amount of rain on nearby water sources’ surfaces. That way, you’re encouraged to find/make a pond in a rainy area, and even then, if there’s no rain or your pond is too small, be it due to freezing or something else, you won’t get much power from your waterwheel.

[Katherine K]

On 9/26/2023 at 6:52 AM, Maelstrom said:

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.

Yeah, you can't simply draw a river from a random noise, like you can with hills and caves. You basically have to do the whole watershed and erosion simulation, which is an iterative process that has to take a huge portion of the world. In other words, you can't just generate it one chunk at a time like you can with other terrain features. If you don't care about them flowing, and just want to make canals, that's different, and that's what Minecraft does, but that's not usable for water wheels or anything like that.

Honestly, world gen will probably need an overhaul anyways. There are parts of it that are really good already, and it seems like a lot of generation does happen at startup, so there's a path forward on this. But I understand why it's taking a while.

You also have to decide how you'll actually handle elevation changes visually. Current system supports 1/16th blocks easily, but that's still a visible step. Probably fine for collision purposes, with some visual smoothing, but it's not "free". This will take some engine adaptations.