droughts

[Fenrir]

HOW THE ♥♥♥♥ DO YOU SURVIVE THE 8-9 Day droughts

[🐺Blue Wolf]

1. Have a dam, and then eventually a second damn above your first (floodgates > dams) to store plenty of water, then if/when your first dam dries out, release a little water from your second. This is ideal for keeping crops and trees going.

2. Have plenty of pumps and storage for water BEFORE any drought comes, also try turning some pumps off during drought until you get a proper reservoir in place, or deep enough dam system that can support having the pumps running.

Research is super important early on (I always have 2 before the first drought) to unlock these things. Assuming you are playing on normal, 9 day droughts don't (or haven't for myself) come until at least Cycle 4 (usually 5), which gives plenty of time to unlock and build dams, pumps and water storage...and to have a carrot garden in place with a good stock pile of carrots.

[M(i)ech]

If you are worried about keeping plants alive, it seems that if they get "watered" status for even a second, their death timer gets reset, so even if you don't have reservoir large enough to keep all your area watered for full season, you can string supply along by lowering floodgates for a short while, just enough to reset timer on plants you care about.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Having less beavers helps.
I only play on hard mode now so those long droughts come very early. It isn't unusual for me to only maintain a population of around 12 beavers without any growth until I have built the proper infrastructure to sustain expanding later. You have got to put up your simple 1 tile deep dam tiles across the river asap and that river can hold enough water to support you for a long time with a smaller population.

But more beavers = more drinking = faster depleted water stores, including the water dammed in the river during a drought.

I make sure I have enough water storage before expanding and it helps a lot.

Also, exiling beavers is a valid tactic for colony survival. If it becomes apparent that you will not survive a longer drought with the resources you have, do the math to figure out how many beavers you can keep alive for the duration and exile the rest of them. Create a new district somewhere they can walk to and migrate them to it. They'll all die, but your colony can survive. This has saved my bacon a few times on Hard mode. I have never had to do it on normal though, you generally have such short droughts early on that it isn't a big deal, and by the time you have big droughts you could've built much larger dams.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Originally posted by M(i)ech:

If you are worried about keeping plants alive, it seems that if they get "watered" status for even a second, their death timer gets reset, so even if you don't have reservoir large enough to keep all your area watered for full season, you can string supply along by lowering floodgates for a short while, just enough to reset timer on plants you care about.

One thing you can do that will help immensely in this department is to separate the water used for farming from the water you drink. I have run experiments and determined that if you have a water source that is only being lost by evaporation, it takes approximately 22 days to evaporate from 1 tile of depth. So preparing for a 30 day drought, you'd only need 2 tiles of depth to keep that water there for the full duration with no worries. It should be noted however, that dams only fill water to a height of 0.65 so water at that depth would dry up in just over 14 days. However, if you use dynamite to blow up just the edges close to your farms to make your river 2 tiles deep in those specific locations, the 1.65 depth of the whole river will last for duration of even maximum length droughts on hard mode.

Now, in Normal mode, droughts cap at like 9 days, so even a 1 tile deep dam in the starting river can ensure your crops will NEVER die as long as you aren't pumping water out of it to drink (which most people do).

If you instead build a different reservoir either up stream or down stream from your crop water, you can pump from that.

Water evaporates at a constant rate of 0.045 per day per tile exposed to the air.

[M(i)ech]

Originally posted by Shas'o O'Kais:

Originally posted by M(i)ech:

If you are worried about keeping plants alive, it seems that if they get "watered" status for even a second, their death timer gets reset, so even if you don't have reservoir large enough to keep all your area watered for full season, you can string supply along by lowering floodgates for a short while, just enough to reset timer on plants you care about.

One thing you can do that will help immensely in this department is to separate the water used for farming from the water you drink. I have run experiments and determined that if you have a water source that is only being lost by evaporation, it takes approximately 22 days to evaporate from 1 tile of depth. So preparing for a 30 day drought, you'd only need 2 tiles of depth to keep that water there for the full duration with no worries. It should be noted however, that dams only fill water to a height of 0.65 so water at that depth would dry up in just over 14 days. However, if you use dynamite to blow up just the edges close to your farms to make your river 2 tiles deep in those specific locations, the 1.65 depth of the whole river will last for duration of even maximum length droughts on hard mode.

Now, in Normal mode, droughts cap at like 9 days, so even a 1 tile deep dam in the starting river can ensure your crops will NEVER die as long as you aren't pumping water out of it to drink (which most people do).

If you instead build a different reservoir either up stream or down stream from your crop water, you can pump from that.

Water evaporates at a constant rate of 0.045 per day per tile exposed to the air.

Cool. Thanks for details. So far I'm on my first colony on Normal so I don't need those special tricks just yet, but it's good to know.

Do you know what's the watering range for water? Freely flowing river, or river blocked with a dam (not floodgate) seems to irrigate 10 tiles in each direction, so It should be possible to convert dry land into arable land by blowing up irrigation trenches 20 tiles apart. Do I have that right? I haven't tested it yet.

Larger height difference between land and water level seems to decrease irrigation range, but I haven't tested specifics yet.

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by arthur_pendragon:

HOW THE ♥♥♥♥ DO YOU SURVIVE THE 8-9 Day droughts

I was asking myself too. Then I remembered that the devs are beavers.
And I have to think like they do. :)

[Shas'O O'Kais]

The water has a set range that it affects, but Z-levels are taken into account for that range which is why if the water is lower than a cliff for example the distance up there is shortened.

And yes, building irrigation ditches can turn a lot more land green. I do it routinely, not only for farming purposes but also just to make my city look nicer. :)

If you really take the time to terraform the map, you can make some wickedly efficient designs.

I've done a lot of math and calculations on water stuff, but today i'm going to be investigating farming. Exactly how many crops each farmer can sustain by himself for each type of crop. Stuff like that. I love figuring this stuff out.

[Morocka]

i am pumping out 9k water and 15000 bread. I survive 9k drouts easy I've damned up the river u just gotta go big or die. I have a population of 390 rodents and can't play anymore because the game literally crawls.

[Nargon]

My last drought was 22 days long (hard difficulty). My water reserves was enough for only 14 days or something that. There was only one drastic solution for my situation. I created a new disctict and sent half of my beavers there to die :( But the other half survived!

[dinosaur]

i really enjoyed lurking this discussion. thank you all.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Originally posted by Nargon:

My last drought was 22 days long (hard difficulty). My water reserves was enough for only 14 days or something that. There was only one drastic solution for my situation. I created a new disctict and sent half of my beavers there to die :( But the other half survived!

Haha, welcome to hard mode. I've one that before too. Sometimes early game you just gotta. :)