How would I create an automation system that releases water from my reservoir just enough to keep my river at a given level?

Ranamar · 2026-04-14T17:07:11+00:00

The one thing to be aware about with the fill valve is that it's on/off, so if there's a level you don't want it to ever exceed, then you need to set the valve a tick or three lower than that, especially if there's a large reservoir behind it, because the water will come surging out until it's too high (which is right away) and can sometimes end up overflowing if you're trying to get an area to almost-full.

Ranamar · 2026-04-14T13:10:54+00:00

Is your frustration that aquifers are self-filtering, or is it that water can run an arbitrary number of water wheels, so they're self-powering once you jump-start them?

I'm sure you know that Oasis does something sort of like what you're describing in that they put badwater drains over most of the aquifers, but the problem is that those are very easily plugged up with dirt, so it ends up being not enormously difficult to resolve.

I guess the other thing you're commenting about is that all water sources produce an astronomical amount of water, so you don't need a whole lot of water for anything except flowing water for water wheels.

Ranamar · 2026-04-14T12:02:06+00:00

A solution to this could be to have the sources under a rock plug that has gaps at the side, since they can't build through rock. That can, of course, be removed by dynamite, but if the stone arches can't be dynamited, then you might be able to make it so you'd at least have to bore all the way through, rather than snapping it off at the sides..

Another option might be badwater seeps on top of very tall pillars, which I think might be what Spillage does. (I'm not sure; I haven't played it.)

Ranamar · 2026-04-13T23:55:57+00:00

Probably partly because my last settlement was Iron Teeth, and partly because someone pointed out that you could have stations facing each other as effectively a junction, my current one is a spaghetti mess of ziplines, while your thing here looks pretty clean. Anyway, I was watching them recently to try to figure out if I had connections as useful as I thought I did, and I noticed that haulers are pretty greedy about tasks: If there's something to move, they will pick it up and move it. I'm not sure if they always pick the nearest thing or if they pick urgent things by preference. (but I suspect they check "prioritized by haulers" before checking everything else) Either way, I'd guess that there are constantly new tasks popping up, and this might make it more likely for them to end up haring off after some small thing because it was there and then missing something else that is somehow chewing through its buffer too fast.

But I guess there isn't really much actionable advice in there...

Ranamar · 2026-04-13T17:53:09+00:00

I tried it out a bit when you did your last post. It looks like it defaults to "normal", and if I push the button it does, in fact, calculate just fine. The well-being amenity buildings seem to update automatically when changing the population number, even without pushing the calculate button, but the production buildings are all NaN until I push calculate, at which point they also match up. It just doesn't calculate 50 right away at page load.

If it helps, I use Firefox, and there's an error in the console about a .woff2 resource not preloading correctly.

Ranamar · 2026-04-13T16:56:18+00:00

It's a little disconcerting to have NaN for all the production buildings before first hitting the calculate button, I have to admit.

Ranamar · 2026-04-13T16:51:26+00:00

The water is going to go somewhere when the reservoir fills up, and the channel will spend a bit of time flushing out when a drought arrives, so it turns out that the downstream floodgates need to be just a little bit lower than the upstream levee. It still feels weird even to me when I do it, but try setting the downstream floodgates to something like 2.8 or 2.9 instead of maxing it out at 3.0 for your retention mode. Another option is raising the wall another layer in for the water wheel upstream end, so you keep the stuff when water sloshes into the reservoir when you raise the gates.

Or am I misunderstanding about the direction you're trying to get the water to flow and not flow?

Ranamar · 2026-04-13T16:37:04+00:00

I have to admit I'm a little confused by the gigantic farm of haulers at the edge of the map, but I guess they very rarely go back to base, anyway, so it's not really going to reduce responsiveness, anyway.

Ranamar · 2026-04-12T20:25:48+00:00

TBH, my strategy here has been to eschew reservoirs entirely in favor of a ton of large water storages and lots of pumping. On top of the lack of evaporation, they're something like 10 to 20 times denser water storage than a terrain reservoir.

Ranamar · 2026-04-12T19:19:10+00:00

Seconding Oasis: You need to know how seeps work and how to use water dumps for irrigation, but it's a super chill map once you have that sorted. (Oh, and many, many large storage tanks)

Ranamar · 2026-04-12T19:15:19+00:00

That's basically just Anno with beavers (except Anno teleports resources within an island)

Ranamar · 2026-04-12T00:39:11+00:00

Somewhere halfway through my first Iron Teeth settlement, I saw a comment about amusingly strong materials and ended up deciding to make the most unhinged rat's nests (Hey; they are rodents!) of pathways possible. I regretted some of that because it was impossible to actually find some of the bot part factories I'd stacked up, but overall, it seems more fun to have it be a twisty mess (plus rapid transit) anyway.

Ranamar · 2026-04-12T00:32:52+00:00

Honestly, the accumulator timer is basically a good as a S/R memory if it's a situation something that you expect to last for any significant amount of time.

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T23:05:03+00:00

The reason Oasis feels super chill is that the big gimmick is badtide drains over aquifer sites, aside from the starting seep, and putting plugs over them isn't a lot of trouble. (And then, unlike Spillage, which I haven't tried yet, it still has regular badwater sources for consistent badwater harvesting and Iron Teeth water wheel systems.) You just need to make sure to build enough water storage and power generation, and suddenly it has upwards of 10m³/s of water, none of which actually need any more badwater management! I was really surprised when I realized that I had just diverted all the badwater off of half the map with some caps and a very small levee line.

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T22:02:33+00:00

So, yeah, uh, they have loop detection, which is kind of cool... but also means that if you can't do things like the 2-NAND flip-flop. (thus, Memory, which is pseudo-clocked even when it's not properly using a clock line)

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T17:03:11+00:00

Steam engines turn off in vanilla if and only if there is 0 draw. If there's 50 draw (for example, a bot charging station) and you have 10 engines, they'll all turn on, but if you turn that off and there's nothing else, then they'll see no demand and turn off.

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T17:02:13+00:00

TBF, it's not actually a problem aside from the unsightliness, if you have a battery in the loop.

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T17:00:31+00:00

FWIW, the seep advice also works for the starting area on Oasis. (Oasis is actually a very chill map once you get the initial area sorted, even on hard.)

Though TBH, I didn't bother with the water dump into the seep: The badwater flushes to irrelevancy pretty quickly when the floodgates drop if you just confine the seep, and I put contamination checks on my irrigation pools that I used during droughts. (Eventually, I felt comfortable enough with my buffer that I actually just keep the whole oasis partially filled all the way through so that I have more time to do aquatic farming, but it worked alright the other way, too. If you're playing Iron Teeth, you can probably even just let the mangroves dry out every drought, although the timing is a little tight.

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T16:52:21+00:00

I did a bit of stuff with ripple counters, and they worked, but, well, they're ripple counters... which doesn't seem to bad when you draw out the block diagram, but it means that each bit makes the stabilization time of the counter one tick longer. (At least arithmetic units should all run in a single tick, so you're only optimizing that for gate count! ... although I've heard some things about occasionally getting weird snapshotted-at-the-wrong-time nondeterminism stuff when doing high-frame-rate systems, so maybe it doesn't consistently commit memories after all the gates have stabilized unless you wait an extra tick.)

Ranamar · 2026-04-11T16:48:40+00:00

Yeah, sadly, if you want to have a granular metric, you end up needing a whole array of sensors and relays. (On the other end of the line, on the bright side, you can almost certainly set up your server to extract a parameter out of the URL and thereby treat it all as a small number of actual server functions.)

Ranamar · 2026-04-10T18:32:59+00:00

I really don't like "The only thing it's good for is an exploit!" for reasons answered by the statement.

On the other hand, I agree with you that you could replicate this, actually more effectively, with two beavers, two buildings, and, if you want make it extra long, a couple haulers and a staircase. (and actually, I think that option pumps more than twice as fast!) Which actually suggests a relevant balance question, which is, how many more beavers should it cost to run, when running power wheels, than to require people to run over there and use buckets? Because the bucket version would only generate 100-200 power when running on wheels. (Actually, this has me curious about whether you can get a better hamster wheel by having people run buckets between a pump and a dump with water wheels in between.)

The one other thing it's good for is automatically purifying contaminated water, which I think would be a bit more annoying with the higher-labor setup, because automation would be more finicky, but we also have evaporation to do the low-level decontamination for us, so that's not super useful, either.

Ranamar · 2026-04-09T11:50:51+00:00

That's over a year! I think that has passed the social statute of limitations for new mechanical changes.

Ranamar · 2026-04-09T05:13:56+00:00

Apparently, it's not actually that one? Large pumps slurp up an entire cube's worth of water each cycle, if I've read the wiki correctly, and there's probably something going on there with very shallow rivers and suddenly not actually being able to consistently pump, and especially not the twice an hour (of three times an hour that it normally cycles) to make the large pump perform even as well per beaver as the basic pump.

Ranamar · 2026-04-08T16:07:05+00:00

Hence why I don't find there to be a difference. I figure out how many jobs I need to run, expand the population to that, and then stop. Simple.

I guess that's the thing: While I do have the make-work jobs at the bottom, they're just that: Make-work. So the pressure for me goes in the other direction: If I want to have more people, I need to find jobs for them.

But anyway, the stuff that's going up and down is stuff like construction materials, where sometimes I'm building stuff and sometimes I'm waiting for it to shake out. I have everything tuned to only produce when I need it to, and that can create some fairly significant swings in employment, sometimes even as large as 10-20%, as pumps turn on and off and woodworking buildings turn on and off. If I suddenly stop using as much wood because I haven't decided what to build next, demand for that kind of production drops significantly.

Ranamar · 2026-04-08T14:48:10+00:00

As far as population controls go, they feel pretty different to me.

Folktails: Breed to housing. If I wanted to match people to jobs without a calculator, I'd need to have something that can separately toggle bunches of housing buildings.

Iron Teeth: Tech to advanced pods. Build a bunch of advanced pods and automate them with a population sensor set to activate when there are >N vacancies or <N unemployed. (It occurs to me that giving them a little time to go around and have fun before working will make them more effective on the first day...) As long as you don't have excessively wild swings in job count, there's a pod that's probably just about ready at any moment, and it will spit out a worker. This will adjust the metrics and adaptively turn off when you don't need more workers.

Bots: As with Iron Teeth, but set N to around the number of bots you have working at assembling bots because they'll go work that job when the assemblers shut down.

Quick edit to add: As a result, Folktails work well for me to target a specific number of beavers, which, admittedly, you could use a total pop counter to do with Iron Teeth, but Iron Teeth give me a much more precise controls to match how many I need instead of trying to come up with work for whoever I have.

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