!!Science!!

[Shas'O O'Kais]

I've consulted with top beaver scientists, and we've been researching and experimenting with a few things and wanted to share the findings. All experiments were done on Folktail beavers on Normal difficulty. Hopefully some of this information may be useful to someone out there.

First of all, each full cube/tile of water is equal to 5 "water" resource.
Beavers consume 2 water per day.

When you first start the game and build your starter dam across the river, it's going to trap a good deal of water. On the map I was experimenting on, I was able to secure a piece of river that was 6 tiles wide and approximately 40 tiles long. This results in roughly 240 tiles of water. (Close approximations, not exact due to shores being jagged)

This would equal 1200 water resource. However, dams only block 65% of water, allowing anything beyond that point to flow over. As a result, this starting dam actually only contains approx 780 water resource.

Because beavers drink 2 water per day, this is 390 total beaver survival days that is then divided by your population. So if you have 30 beavers, the water supply should last about 13 days. However, pumping and drinking water isn't the only way it disappears...

Next consideration is evaporation. I have experimented with this using pools of varying surface areas as well as depth. More surface area results in more evaporation while more depth does not, which is about what you'd expect, but I wanted to test to confirm. Water evaporates at a steady rate of approximately 0.045 depth per day. That doesn't sound like much, but because it is affecting your entire dammed off river area, it adds up quickly. At that rate, you lose approximately 10.8 full tiles of water each passing day, approximately 54 water resources at the sample dam size of 6x40.

Now back to our sample colony of 30 beavers with a 6x40 dam 1-z deep dam, it means you're now losing 54 water per day to evaporation and an additional 60 per day to drinking. So your water reserve will only last approximately 6.8 days. With 60 beavers, you'll only last 4 and a half days.

Other considerations: This assumes your water reserves are full when the drought starts, and are only being replenished by water from the river as it is being drank. If you have a lot of storage that is empty. Each Large Water Tank holds 300 water resource, and as your entire reserve is only 780 water, you could deplete your entire river in practically a day if they are having to fill up those reserves from zero at the start of the drought. And while you still have that drinkable water to sustain the same length of time, the lack of water in the river could hurt you by having multiple days without crops growing which could potentially screw you over just as badly.

So in conclusion, if you're playing on normal, the longest droughts are approximately 10 days at most. That means you need 4 full water block tiles PER BEAVER in your colony to survive, and that isn't including the water that will evaporate. With a population of 100 beavers, thats 400 water block tiles you'll need. A single 10x20 reservoir would only need to be 2 tiles deep to hold sufficient water to last, and a third tile of depth would more than account for evaporation.

If you want to survive a drought that is 30 days long, you'd need 12 water block tiles per beaver, before accounting for evaporation. A 100 beaver colony (requiring 1200 water block tiles in total) could obtain this using a 20x20 reservoir, 3 tiles deep. Add a fourth tile of depth to account for evaporation and it should be a sufficient size to last 30 days without water.

As for keeping the river wet for the sake of crops, it would take approximately 22 days for it to dry up on its own assuming NONE of it is being taken out by any other means. So to survive 30 days of drought in a row, you'd simply need your river to be a depth of 2 tiles and you'd be fine.

As an alternative to building reservoirs for drinking purposes, you could instead simply build more Large Water Tanks. A 100 beaver colony could have water for 30 days with 20 Large Water Tanks. I don't think i'd go this route because of the extra beaverpower you'd need to fill those tanks between each drought, which would then also have nothing to do during the drought, but I thought i'd mention this as an option because i'm sure someone, somewhere, would like to try it.

So the biggest takeaways and useful info is to survive a 10 day drought, you need a little more than 4 water tiles per beaver and to survive a 30 day drought you need a little over 12 water tiles per beaver, so you can design your reservoirs accordingly.
As a side note, this also brings to light the biggest advantage the Iron beavers have over folk tails: The DEEP pumps. Folktail reservoirs (at least THIS type) can only be 2 tiles deep to get water from them in any sort of automated sense, though you could always build a bigger reservoir and then a smaller 2 tile deep "feeder" reservoir that is managed by a floodgate, but would require manual messing around which i'm personally not keen on.

Anyway, these are just observations and results of experiments i've performed in my extensive playing of the game, so take from it what you will. My results were consistent in my own experiments but it is possible something could be wrong. If you have anything to add to the Beaver Science here, post away.

[Prometheus]

Normal's highest drought is 9 days. You can see this when you select the custom settings its a safe assumption the default is the normal settings.

The longest drought I've seen reported by hard players is 29. I have personally seen 28. Plan around 30 to be safe so your target numbers are spot on there.

Here is an example of a district that can survive on hard with zero further input (yes its mine, yes I am proud of this).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2606817466

You can make buildings under water. So you can fully automate Folktails by having pumps that are flooded at the start of the season and get worked as the reservoir is used up.

[Bobucles]

Good stuff! I guess the folktails suffer a bit due to their max 2 depth. That's not enough to last the hard mode droughts, and trying to design an automatic solution will take some effort.

[Prometheus]

Originally posted by Bobucles:

Good stuff! I guess the folktails suffer a bit due to their max 2 depth. That's not enough to last the hard mode droughts, and trying to design an automatic solution will take some effort.

Not exactly. You can make pumps under water. They won't run until the water level dips but you can do it. So its just a bit space intensive.

[TLHeart]

All that human work. Just do what the beavers do, always build big, cut trees, build bigger, and when the kids are old enough, kick them out to go up or down stream to start the next settlement. No need to min max, just keep chopping trees, and storing water.

The beavers always build more of a damn dam than needed.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Water Source Tiles produce 50 units of water per hour, this equates to 10 full tiles of water.

That is 1200 water produced every 24 hours or 240 full tiles of water.

To fill a 20x20 reservoir that is 6 tiles deep (max pump length for iron beavers), it would take 10 full days of flow. But this is per river source tile. If you had 4 of them, it would only take 2.5 days or 6 of them just under 2 days. A 20x20x6 reservoir would be able to supply water to 138 beavers with no additional water input for a full 29 day drought, that is including the amount of evaporate that would happen over the 29 day period which would account for basically the top 2 z-levels of water being lost and only getting the bottom 4 as usable water. (Because you lose about 1.5 levels of water over a 29 day period, and if your 6th level had dams to handle spill over, the water level is only around 0.65 instead of a full 1)

So 20x20x6 seems to be the ideal size for me because my target beaver population is usually just over 100.

Now I have to figure out how much water is spilled through 1 tile wide cracks over cliffs to calculate what size reservoir you'd need to maintain continuous flow of water for 29 days.

This is tricky because the bigger the reservoir's surface area, the more water you lose to evaporation, so depth will certainly be the winning stat.

A single pump can sustain approximately 20 beavers, but this assumes working full time and available storage space for water. This is baseline, without any modifiers for additional +work % buffs.

[allocater]

If 0.045 depth per day evaporates and 1 depth is 5 water, then 0.225 water evaporates per surface water tile. Which means the water dump needs 1 water every 5 days to keep a 1-tile 'bucket' alive for irrigation.

Now compare 1 water every 5 days with the Irrigation tower water needs over 5 days.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Originally posted by allocater:

If 0.045 depth per day evaporates and 1 depth is 5 water, then 0.225 water evaporates per surface water tile. Which means the water dump needs 1 water every 5 days to keep a 1-tile 'bucket' alive for irrigation.

Now compare 1 water every 5 days with the Irrigation tower water needs over 5 days.

You are correct, I actually made this point in another thread when telling someone to replace irrigation towers with water dumps surrounded by levees XD

[Dravkwn]

Originally posted by Shas'o O'Kais:

Water Source Tiles produce 50 units of water per hour,

This referring to base strength 1? Water Sources can have a strength of 1 to 8 with far more water gushing out on the higher settings.

I'd also like to point out that a a large water tank holding 300 units of water is roughly a 2x4 on the map. A dug out 2x4x6 trench at 5 water per block would only be 240, if each water tile is 5. Sounds like it's far more space saving to have more tanks.

Now if we're saving all this water in some large source to keep draining down a canal during a drought so you can run water wheels? I'd say go for it. Currently I feel like our inability to put levee on top of platforms limits more desirable water storage designs.

[Prometheus]

Every base game map uses almost entirely strength 1 tiles. I know Plains has a single 1.5 strength tile.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Originally posted by Dravkwn:

Originally posted by Shas'o O'Kais:

Water Source Tiles produce 50 units of water per hour,

This referring to base strength 1? Water Sources can have a strength of 1 to 8 with far more water gushing out on the higher settings.

Arooooo??
What do you mean? Water sources have different intensities?

The 50 units per hour was for a single water source, if you're referring to the fact some maps have variable numbers of water sources (ranging from 4 to 11 from what i've seen), then I get you. But if you mean individual tiles have different settings, i'm unfamiliar with this. Can you elaborate?

[Prometheus]

Originally posted by Shas'o O'Kais:

Originally posted by Dravkwn:

This referring to base strength 1? Water Sources can have a strength of 1 to 8 with far more water gushing out on the higher settings.

Arooooo??
What do you mean? Water sources have different intensities?

The 50 units per hour was for a single water source, if you're referring to the fact some maps have variable numbers of water sources (ranging from 4 to 11 from what i've seen), then I get you. But if you mean individual tiles have different settings, i'm unfamiliar with this. Can you elaborate?

Go into the map creator and look. The UI is self explanatory.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

After re-testing a few times, it seems water generation was higher than I thought. It is closer to 20 tiles of water per hour per water source at an Strength of 1.

I also experimented with draining through a 1 tile gap technique that i've built all my dams around thus far. They seem to drain at a steady rate of 1200 tiles of water per day. This means you need a minimum of 3 water sources going into such a reservoir before its water level will actually increase, increasing water to the reservoir by only 7.5 tiles of water per hour, so about a third of one source while the rest of it and entirety of the other 2 are being poured through the gap.

So to fill a 20x20x6 reservoir with a gap in it, it would take more than 13 days with only 3 water sources, but with 4 water sources it would take just over 4 days. It would then run completely dry 48 hours after the water stuffed.


A reservoir to run constant for a full 29 days without the flow ever stopping would need to hold 34,800 cubes of water. If it were 50x50 it would need to be 16 tiles high (taking evaporation into account).

At 75x75, it would need to be about 8 tiles deep. At 100x100, about 6 tiles deep.

I suppose it really doesn't matter how big your reservoir is as long as you always assume you'll lose the top 2 z-levels worth of water from a 29 day drought, and you can just calculate the water tiles beneath that.

A 100x100x6 reservoir, assuming no natural terrain offsetting construction costs, would require 734, 472 logs. But of course, I can't imagine anyone wouldn't use whatever natural terrain around them to their advantage.

Also, a 100x100x6 reservoir would take 333 days to fill with 3 water sources, 93 days with 4 water sources, 54 days with 5 water sources, 38 days with 6, 29 days with 7, etc, etc, 15 days with 11.

But this is assuming it starts dry. As it would be losing 1650 tiles of water per day (evaporation included), if wet seasons were at least 25% of the duration of dry seasons, you'd only need 3 x 1650 water per day input to ensure you never went dry. That would mean needing 11 river tiles. But that is of course assuming maximum length dry and wet seasons. I suppose this is why my megadam in Waterfalls works so well without ever going dry even during 29 day droughts, it actually has 12 water sources. That is why it is so easy to sustain permanent water flow, even during 29 day droughts.

Interesting stuff.

[Prometheus]

Droughts cap at 30 on hard. I have personally witnessed one now.

[Drinkcup]

Haven't finished reading it yet but as to evaporation, I haven't thought of it as evaporation so much as the water draining down into the ground. Maybe a little of both but mostly draining, which admittedly plays by different rules (seemingly[?]) when droughts are ongoing or not. I'm not sure how it works but I always thought if it as draining more than evap.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Originally posted by Drinkcup:

Haven't finished reading it yet but as to evaporation, I haven't thought of it as evaporation so much as the water draining down into the ground. Maybe a little of both but mostly draining, which admittedly plays by different rules (seemingly[?]) when droughts are ongoing or not. I'm not sure how it works but I always thought if it as draining more than evap.

Well calling it draining vs evaporation is just semantics really, it doesn't change the mechanics at all. If you'd rather call it that, be my guest.

However, the rate is constant whether it is wet or dry season. That was one of the first things I tested: if drought caused it to disappear faster, but it doesn't.