Water flow

[Palladin888]

So water can only be split.

Is there any way to combine two water flows into a single flow?

[fosley]

I've been having fits figuring out the water myself, so I'm not much help right now. However, I did figure out a couple things.

For Dew Collectors, you can run like 10 of them in series, so the output of 1 goes to the input of 2, etc. The combined collection rate seems to stack in the final couple collectors. I was able to keep 4 sprinklers running constantly with 17 of them, though fewer would probably work. Of course, it would likely be easier to simply run one or two collectors per sprinkler instead of trying to merge them all then split them all again.

For Intake Pumps, this doesn't work. You can run them in series (the intake is underground, so you have to just point around until the tooltip says you found it), but it doesn't increase the flow rate of the final pump at all. I had them running through a Small Tank, but they couldn't keep up with the demand of 4 sprinkler heads, let alone any large operation.

The Pressure Pump doesn't seem to help much. It lets you bring water up an incline, but can't force water through or from any kind of tank. And you can't run multiple pumps in parallel to dump them all into the same tank.

I also noticed that the sprinklers really only seem to work if the water tanks are physically higher than the sprinklers. I tried using a Pressure Pump to pull water from a tank and push it up to my roof, but it wasn't working. It does push the water up to a tank on the roof, which then allows draining with gravity into the sprinklers.

I would really like a couple additions here:
- Water Bypass should either allow opening/closing each output individually, or should simply default to keeping unconnected legs closed. Using them as repeaters currently requires dumping the unused leg into an extraneous container.
- Water Bypass should be updated to say it only splits two ways, or it should allow splitting three ways like the tooltip says.
- Water Collector should exist to combine multiple sources into one output, like the electrical Coupler. Then we could combine Dew Collectors and Intake Pumps to fill the same container, or group of containers. And use a Bypass followed by a Collector as a repeater.
- Repeaters would themselves be useful. I'm sure there's a good reason to limit the length of each pipe, but something to extend the run is needed if you're not right on top of the water source.
- Objects in general should be movable, but especially the electrical and water devices. It's rather frustrating wasting a bunch of resources on trial and error instead of just moving the device two feet to where I want it now.

[Palladin888]

I put like 30 dew collectors in series then piped it to a large tank then piped that to a valve then to two sprinklers in series. My garden building is 3 stories with the dew collectors on the roof/ pipped down to the tanks on floor 2 then the sprinklers on floor 1. Each floor is 2 blocks high. When I turn the valve on the sprinklers work but the small garden plots are not getting any of the water.

Gravity bases water flow does seem to work. I think my sprinkers need to be closer to the small plots for them to work.

[Palladin888]

Originally posted by Palladin888:

I put like 30 dew collectors in series then piped it to a large tank then piped that to a valve then to two sprinklers in series. My garden building is 3 stories with the dew collectors on the roof/ pipped down to the tanks on floor 2 then the sprinklers on floor 1. Each floor is 2 blocks high. When I turn the valve on the sprinklers work but the small garden plots are not getting any of the water.

Gravity bases water flow does seem to work. I think my sprinkers need to be closer to the small plots for them to work.

edit:
It seems that light and water sources need to be within block of small plots.

[fosley]

I ended up putting one light 1.5 blocks above the plots and several along the edges to get to 40 illumination on a 3x3 grid of regular-sized plots. I made the room 2 blocks tall, then used half-height walls attached to the bottom of the ceiling, then more floor tiles to fill that in. Putting the light 1 block above seemed to be overkill for whatever crops we were doing (I think ferns). 4 sprinklers at that height in a corner also seemed to work, well enough the squad mate had to turn them off after a bit when it started flooding the corn.

I think it does depend on the crops though. So I was experimenting with multiple circuits to get more or less light depending on the crop, though I don't have that in place right now.

[Palladin888]

MY above setup is on one of the public servers which makes it a pain when burning through materials while experimenting,

I am going to start a solo game with tweeked resources setting to experiment with.

Love games like this where we are only limited by our imagination.

[Palladin888]

if you are on a public server I would love to check out your setup

[Palladin888]

it seems that 30 dew collectors are good at keeping my large tank full with ease.

[fosley]

I'm running a dedicated server with friends. It's nothing fancy at this point. I destroyed and recreated for like two hours, but couldn't make fancy stuff work.