u/Nifegun

Ive been building "hydration tanks" its a 3x3x2 box of water sealed with levees and impermeable floors. They are the highest point in the system, so theres no extra water storage flowing into them from some other place during long droughts. They are filled by compact mechanical pumps which pull water from seeps.

But after 30 day droughts or badtides, they're still full. Not like still enough to keep things hydrated, still completely full. I knew there was some extra water, even tho that violates physics cause you can't really compress water, but clearly there is extra water in there. My understanding is that you can't dodge evaporation, so theres at least enough extra water in there to counter what a 3x3 would evaporate over 30 days. Which is a lot.

Does anyone know exactly how much extra water there is? Again I guarantee there is no backfilling taking place here and theres hardly any water in the 1x1 pipes that feed into these tanks, so that could be topping it up for a couple days, but not beary enough for them to still be full after 30 days.

I dont use all that much automation in this game. Mostly just depth or contamination sensors for water storage and badtide diversion. But I just realized the gate makes a path stop being a path. Im guessing the answer is no. But if the gate allowed pathways to switch district ownership, you could make haulers load a storage, then switch ownership of that storage. Which is kind of jjst a more convoluted way of using the existing district crossing, but it would also involve less beavers in total, which is kinda cool.

Maybe this is just me, but IMO the beavers eating and drinking out of giant tanks and warehouses is kinda lame. It makes sense in the early game, beavers run in chomp a carrot sip some water and get back to work.

But late game, eating and drinking should be enjoyable for the beavers. We should be able to build restaurants and cafés where you can prioritize haulers to take finished food and drink there and then beavers go there to eat and drink. Ideally they'd actually stay there for a while and have custom animations like biting a thing or sipping a coffee.

It would cut into their work day a bit, but it could provide a buff to work and movement for a for a short while to make up for that. Or not even, just let it be less efficient. End game beavers move and work really fast anyway, losing a couple minutes to see them actually enjoy food and drink would be worth it IMO.

What do you think? End game buildings for eating and drinking as wellness buff? Or should they forever just eat from a warehouse and drink sips of water and coffee from giant magical tanks?

4K science is a lot to try to get together early game, but it is so worth it. Even if you cant fully power it for its full cms, you can can vertical water storage or vertical flow anywhere on the map.

Thats huge! Ive often found myself in debates about the fluid dump /discharge, and how it trivializes the game and is insanely unbalanced and overpowered. Now this new pump actually allows us to pressurize water, filter only good water, and make it flow to an area that can withstand hard mode droughts/bad tides to keep all our crop and tree farming safe. But this takes a substantial amount of treated planks, gears, and metal blocks, as well as 4k science. That is an appropriate cost for such a powerful solution!

Now more than ever before, I encourage you to try a run where you dont use the fluid dump. Instead try to use the compact mech pump for a similar solution. Its far simpler than tapping all the way at the source for most maps, but gives an appropriate cost for irrigated land anywhere you want.

It still can't be done nearly as early as the discharge, but that powerful of a mechanic shouldnt be available as early as the discharge tbh. But holy crap its powerful. You can place it in running water and just divert up to .25cms into a tunnel or levee shaft. Its such a great item, very well designed, well balanced. If you wanna rush it, you need to be very organized, make sure you've planted or saved some pine trees to treat some planks ASAP, work through the metal tech tree, but the payoff is huge! Anything you can do with the discharge, you can do with the compact mech pump, but when you do it with the compact mech pump, it doesn't feel like cheating lol

In my world I have a full crops->critters->fish pipeline which is cool, but it makes for a very big, clunky build.

When I designed it, I intentionally planned for it to overproduce critters, so I could build much smaller simplistic fish farms in the biomes with specific fish. But this got me thinking, why did I even connect them all? Critters and fish catch at like 1 every 2.5 mins. Its not hard to accumulate their inputs, put a few hundred in there and it runs automatically for many hours.

This is kinda similar too how much automation is the right amount for boulders. I know some players send all the ore back to base, I think thats a bit nuts, some players smelt at the boulder, personally I just put down drills, thats it lol.

So the question is, just how automated do you make your base? Do your woodfarms automatically make planks? Did you build a machine to manage cooking? Did you build a super smelter? Or do you do everything manually? Or do you use semi automatic systems like my semi auto fish nets?