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40d:Water flow
Water Flow (Why isn't my waterwheel turning?)
What is water flow? The obvious answer would be water that moves. Water in a brook moves doesn't it? Oddly enough, it seems it does not, at least not fast enough to satisfy a water wheel. And since the vast majority of maps feature a brook, not a river, this leaves you with no natural water flow. It seems that in order to satisfy a water wheel, there must be a difference in the water levels. i.e. 7/7 6/7 5/7 . . . If all three tiles under a water wheel are the same level, the water is not flowing. If a brook is not moving enough to satisfy a water wheel it makes me wonder if it is flowing fast enough to prevent stagnant or murky water either.
Can a brook become stagnant? murky? Can a closed loop of 7/7 water pushed by a screw pump become stagnant? Or does the water level need to change to lower levels (6/7, 5/7 etc..) in order to prevent stagnation? how long does it take before water will become stagnant? All good questions, and currently, I have no idea. Thus far all I can say is I have not yet noticed a brook to become stagnant.
If we do want to make sure water is flowing smoothly, how do we do so? The only tool we really have available is the screw pump, which is quite efficient at filling any number of tiles straight up to 7/7 without any difficulty at all. For the purpose of simply satisfying a water wheel, it seems the simple answer is to simply put the water wheel before the pump. The tiles the pump sucks water up from drain quite quickly, and water quickly flows in to fill this void thus insuring a steady area of flowing water which satisfies the needs of a water wheel. As for making larger areas of steadily flowing water, this seems to be trickier.
Some thoughts for experimentation. A screw pump dumping to a one wide channel instantly fills to 7/7. What about a 3 wide channel? five? seven? How far can we generate flowing water without needing a new screw pump?
Hopefully some people smarter than me out there can help shed some more light on the subject of water flow.