Tips and tricks

[aaror]

A few tricks that I've seen some folks using that might not be obvious to new players (others feel free to add!)

1. You can move your starting base. If you are not playing on hard, your starting base will have resources in it, so maybe don't move it until your beavers have used those resources, but if you are a bit short of a woods/dam site/metal site you can just delete your base and move it! Side note, the base can be built on platforms. Both of these are really useful on the 1000 islands map.

2. You can surround a square on 4 sides by levees/buildings/natural terrain and put a water dump to fill it with water. The game considers all area within a certain number of squares of any open water as "has access to water" regardless of size. You can fit a large farm in the area thus watered (or a tree farm). Note the part about natural terrain/buildings. Why spend 48 logs on 4 levees when you can spend 24 logs on 2 or 12 logs on one. Note, your path to the water dump has to be the elevation of the levee/building not the level of the water, so you may need a stair.

3. Windmills can't be placed next to a building. Buildings are mostly 1 "square" high. Place a windmill on a platform and you can put buildings next to the platform. Also, consider running your gears on platforms and letting your workers scurry below, or vice versa. You can build a big "industrial zone" with just paths surrounding buildings getting power from somewhere, but you can make it bigger with this trick.

4. Mid game plant some Chestnuts, Pine, and Maple with the intent to not cut them, each has a resource either needed for building (pine resin) or food (chestnuts for baked chestnuts, maple syrup for maple pastries). You want to plant them before you need them, rather than waiting 30 days for maple pastries once you have all the other foods. You can cut them in an emergency.

Other tips people have?

[Val]

1. The general anti-flooding rule of thumb is your downstream's dam bandwidth shouldn't be more narrow than the upstream bottleneck. Sometimes it's safe to make it one tile less

2. On Hard your reservoirs need to be deep. Like, at least 3-4 tile deep if you're tapping water from them. Wide half tile deep lakes don't cut it past few early cycles.

3. Map boundaries act as water sinks, so if you want to flood the whole level you need to prevent water from flowing into them. It can be very resource intense though.

[aaror]

Originally posted by Val:

2. On Hard your reservoirs need to be deep. Like, at least 3-4 tile deep if you're tapping water from them. Wide half tile deep lakes don't cut it past few early cycles.

Ack, great point. Some folks don't realize that water loss is based on the area of water, not the volume. A wide shallow lake loses water quickly, but a deep pool lasts forever. I think you lose about .1 water height per day during drought, so if you have a 1 deep water supply it will be gone 10 days into a drought no mater how wide or whether you take water from it.

[aaror]

Place a platform over paths, then place a statue or bush on the platform. You can affect 4 buildings (2 on each side of the path) with the bush and get all the folks who run under it.

You can place some buildings in water if their entrances are on the second floor (e.g. some of the homes). This acts as a dam and saves you land space. (playing 1000 islands so this is useful as is the moving base).

[aaror]

Beavers can swim! While bridges or dam roads are faster, you can place a stair on both sides of a river and a path connecting them, this still counts as a path for where you can build. Since 2 stairs cost 8 planks and 2 logs and 5 dams cost 100 logs it can be a big savings in early game.

Levees are a lot cheaper (12 logs vs 20) than dams. Know what each does, but if you can build part of your water blocking structure with levees, you will save logs. Even if you are just replacing the two end posts of your structure that is 16 logs (8 pine trees) saved.

[ziplip]

You know I think you can move starting building I deleted mine by mistake in game one day and was able to replace it down,now the beavers went all crazy till it was placed back and this was on the main district

[Wuik]

I just tried to be enought clear ..
Beavers may cut trees far away in a flooded zone if you put the lumberjack flag on a platform with a stair links to the path underwater.
Every buildings have an aera effect zone limit on the path like the districts ..
So if in the map "the plain" beavers be able to collect the scrap metal if you put the flags on some big platforms after transformed the zone in a big reservoir ...
That does not works everytime..builders beavers may built deeper stairs or others but
Scrapers bevears can't dive deeper than the others even if the line path was green ??
Bad joke ..
Everybodies know (i think!?) that made a trench with platforms and paths to irrigate the ground .. but you may "hide" the gears in the same trench ... not easy to do but funny ! ;)

[Wuik]

@ziplip30 ,
Yes ! that was said in the first post ..Noticed that is possible for every other district but don't forget to look for the bevears lost in an other( generally homeless!! )and put anew the limit in the dropp-off of the distributions post before to get a bad surprise..
Keep the aquatics ferms in a normal game was not always easy but impossible to use in a hard game ..i think.

[aaror]

Downside of deleting base-if you have more than one... I deleted my main base to move it and all my beavers automatically moved to my tiny construction base-massive homelessness!

Also, it looks like there is a limit to how far down you can dynamite. I wanted to make a 4 deep reservoir and got a notice that I couldn't detonate because it was too far down. Didn't notice until I'd placed about 20 spots.

[Val]

Originally posted by aaror:

Place a platform over paths, then place a statue or bush on the platform. You can affect 4 buildings (2 on each side of the path) with the bush and get all the folks who run under it.

Looks ugly though, and isn't it better to stack everything around places where beavers visit frequently, like water tanks, recreation and housing?

Originally posted by aaror:

You can place some buildings in water if their entrances are on the second floor (e.g. some of the homes). This acts as a dam and saves you land space. (playing 1000 islands so this is useful as is the moving base).

Um, really?
I vaguely rememeber trying it out way back on release and if I remember correctly my conclusion was that buildings can't act as dams as they aren't waterproof. If that's not true then wow, I'm building my dams out of mini-lodges from now on...

[Holce]

@aaror you lose 0.25 volume per square. A square of one depth contains 5 volume of water. So you lose one depth in 20 days. If you have a river with dam it will keep about 0.7 high of water. You will loose it in 14 days. if you use explosive to dig a hole (one depth) in the river, you will trap the water in the hole for 20 more days. This will irrigate the land for 34 days on 10 width. You don't have to worry about your forest or farm.

A 2 deep hole blocked by a dam contains 1.7 heigh of water and 1.5 will evaporate in 30 days, you will keep 0.2. If the block is 3 deep, you will keep 1.2 or 6 times more. That is why in hard 3 deep is the minimum if you want to pump water from. But you want more idealy.

With ironteeth you can pump up to 6. But it is not always possible to dig enough. You can use a mechanical pump linked to water wheels to replenish a container when the water is running.

With the other faction you can create a five deep reservoir with a small part that is 2 deep for your pump and use a mechanical pump with widmill to pump from the deeper part of the storage to the pumping area. The pumping area have to be big enough to keep enough water when the wind stops.

[Val]

Originally posted by Holce:

@aaror you lose 0.25 volume per square. A square of one depth contains 5 volume of water. So you lose one depth in 20 days. If you have a river with dam it will keep about 0.7 high of water. You will loose it in 14 days. if you use explosive to dig a hole (one depth) in the river, you will trap the water in the hole for 20 more days. This will irrigate the land for 34 days on 10 width. You don't have to worry about your forest or farm.

A 2 deep hole blocked by a dam contains 1.7 heigh of water and 1.5 will evaporate in 30 days, you will keep 0.2. If the block is 3 deep, you will keep 1.2 or 6 times more. That is why in hard 3 deep is the minimum if you want to pump water from. But you want more idealy.

With ironteeth you can pump up to 6. But it is not always possible to dig enough. You can use a mechanical pump linked to water wheels to replenish a container when the water is running.

With the other faction you can create a five deep reservoir with a small part that is 2 deep for your pump and use a mechanical pump with widmill to pump from the deeper part of the storage to the pumping area. The pumping area have to be big enough to keep enough water when the wind stops.

Dude, thanks for the hard numbers. I more or less know this from experience, but it's always nice to just be able to estimate it.

The only thing I'd like to nitpick is fields are safe only if they are more or less at the same ground level as the bottom of your reservoir, which is why I usually try to raise the reservoir water level above the ground level.

It's a bummer you can't give us a better method for Folktails than using mechanical pumps, because given that you look like you know your stuff that method probably doesn't exist. Personally I just use cascaded pumps and call it a day. Mech pumps are expensive stuff, being able to casually use them for such trivial matters means you've pretty much already won.

In theory it should be possible to just tap the bottom of the reservoir if there was a method to reduce the pressure, but alas, timbertech isn't there yet.

[Gorlos]

Originally posted by aaror:

it looks like there is a limit to how far down you can dynamite. I wanted to make a 4 deep reservoir and got a notice that I couldn't detonate because it was too far down. Didn't notice until I'd placed about 20 spots.

There's no limit on dynamite itself. Map has limits which has effect on that how deep you can go with the dynamite. Solution is to build levees on the top when you reach the bottom of the map.

[Gorlos]

TIP: at the start of the game especially on hard. Set the working time to 24h (beavers will sleep as needed).

[aaror]

Reminder, water irrigates a certain number of squares at a certain level or lower. It doesn't go nearly as far if you go up. If creating a levee/water dump to make green land, aim for higher elevation as needed.

Also, if you are willing to spend a bit more water, making the pool thingy (the 3x4 recreation area that has to be placed in water) can be placed in the middle of dry land you have housing in. Note you need an extra square for the water dump to dump the water.

[killedinaction47]

why use levees and pumps and not just blast a stream through your land with explosives?
Is it just to get water to higher elevations?