Irrigation / Water Channels

[Maga 99]

This. Historically you had to save at least 50% of your harvested seeds to re-plant the next year (with modern seeds, for those still re-planting, it's less than 2%). This mechanic would give you a choice -- make more bread to survive the winter, or save the seeds to replant next year.

Absolutely correct. Historically this was a very real concern with farmers and it would be fun if grains posed a little more of a challenge. Without aqueducts enabling larger farms in the early game (as opposed to being limited to lake and river shores) this would make the player's first year miserable, but adding irrigation opens up so many doors with farming

 

Here's another one that just popped into my head as i was typing this: Aqueducts that have no porous segments are considered to be "fuller" by the game and would be able to power a rudimentary watermill that could grind large amounts of grain (nerf the quern so it can't do a stack of grain at a time) BAM! More progressive game play from aqueducts already. Water being the most vital resource to any settlement or town it seems logical that it deserves a feature or two rather than the choices being simply "Build right next to infinite water" or  "Don't build right next to infinite water"

 

[EDIT] Just found a thread that covers this exact idea. I guess I'm still too new to know exactly what has and has not been discussed. My idea for creating aqueduct networks still seems to be unique though

 

In regards to modern times and seed-keeping in many places it's illegal to keep your seeds because they are all GMOs and the patented property of massive corporations. Keeping seeds to plant is theft and you can be sued millions. Usually you are forced to buy seeds from the company that patented the GMO if you want to replant at all. Sad, but true... Though not exactly something that will ever need to go in TFC

[jacob4408 8]

Intriguing idea but finding a proper balance might be difficult.  Optimal would be if the aqueduct removed a water source block from the source side for every water source block that it delivered to the destination.  Then you would have a true aqueduct and not an infinite water generating machine.

 

This probably involves way more coding effort than it is worth though.

[TheHighestKite 2]

I'd love for water to be upgraded entirely and have more realistic properties 

[EternalUndeath 1,208]

I'd love for water to be upgraded entirely and have more realistic properties 

 

They tried that.

Crysyn and crew got to play Noah for a few weeks because of it.

[transcengopher 349]

I was thinking about water channels myself for the time, actually.

 

The way I was imagining it was different though - a big ceramic mold that needs to be placed adjascent to the water source or flow block that serves as a container/pipe to store water flows.

If it is placed by a full source block, it captures water level of eight, if by another mold or flow block - whatever level the mold or flow has (minus one level for the flow, because that's how it works in vanilla minecraft, also, not as much exploitable this way). It also spaws water flow of whatever level it has on the other side of itself. At some point I was thinking about having it drop levels as the distance goes as well, but that would be difficult to do, I think (because I as a programmer find it hard to get it to store the distance properly without turning into the tile entity; to get it to store eight water levels and four possible flow directions is a much easier thing, I reckon.)

Thought saying that, metadata for the block is always actually an integer, if I remember right, meaning there's only four bits used by that "only 16 possible metadata for the block" thing out of 32 it has. Which does mean with some number magic we can have much more data to work with here, which is already shown by WIP Colored Lights mod I probably won't ever shut up about.

 

The mold does not irrigate the ground by itself - to irrigate something you would need a different version of the said mold (with a hole in it, basically) that would lower the water level in the channel by one and act as a normal water irrigating 9x9 with itself in the center. I also like munin295's idea to lower levels if channel splits, but I haven't thought about it - was thinking more like a straight channel that has less (or none an all) level dropoff than normally.

 

You would need a whole pit kiln to fire a single mold, because it's supposed to be rendendered as a block, not as an item. I would also like these to be used in transfering liquid metals, but that would - again - require it to be turned into tile entity to store the temperature of the metal and to provide heat field around it, so I'm on the fence about that last one.

 

To all of you saying moving water before the endgame tech is a bad thing - I strongly disagree - ancient egyptians irrigated their fields using much simpler technology. In fact, moving water should not require that much technology to begin with.

 

 

They tried that.

Crysyn and crew got to play Noah for a few weeks because of it.

Doesn't mean they should stop though. I'm still wondering what exactly was it with the water that they abandoned movable water entirely.

[jacob4408 8]

To all of you saying moving water before the endgame tech is a bad thing - I strongly disagree - ancient egyptians irrigated their fields using much simpler technology. In fact, moving water should not require that much technology to begin with.

 

Valid point. I would support earlier game water movement if it is truly moving water from one place to another and not creating some sort of infinite water machine where I can use a 2x2 pond to irrigate 400 hectares of crop land. Then you would also need mechanisms (rain? metablocks?) to refill naturally occurring water sources like ponds and rivers if they had been drained.

 

I'm not sure how feasible all of that is to code.

[EternalUndeath 1,208]

I'm still wondering what exactly was it with the water that they abandoned movable water entirely.

 

It was a 50-meter tall wall of water that flooded their mountain homes on a server, I believe because some sort of water tried to generate on a mountain and ended up infini-generating over itself through the whole world

[chocmerc 29]

It was a 50-meter tall wall of water that flooded their mountain homes on a server, I believe because some sort of water tried to generate on a mountain and ended up infini-generating over itself through the whole world

i remember that xD 

[transcengopher 349]

Valid point. I would support earlier game water movement if it is truly moving water from one place to another and not creating some sort of infinite water machine where I can use a 2x2 pond to irrigate 400 hectares of crop land. Then you would also need mechanisms (rain? metablocks?) to refill naturally occurring water sources like ponds and rivers if they had been drained.

 

I'm not sure how feasible all of that is to code.

Machines? Dude, water flows. And you don't actually require a slope even, it will still fill the channel up to the pond level no problem. The only machine you need is a pump to get it to go higher than that.

 

Also, what's with that frequent thinking you would drain a river by digging a channel away from it? We are before 1500 AD, remember? Water sources draining because of people is a stuff of industrial age, and even then it's more like a water pollution than anything else.

What good draining your irrigation source would bring to gameplay, anyway?

Making all water drain "on a bad year" is essentially "oh good, all water disappeared and there's nothing I can do; time to die a bunch".

Only water that's been taken for irrigating the fields? Discourage building anything tech-related for irrigation in favour of straight up mindlessly placing your field on a river bank? We should be encouraging building desings, not the opposite.

 

It was a 50-meter tall wall of water that flooded their mountain homes on a server, I believe because some sort of water tried to generate on a mountain and ended up infini-generating over itself through the whole world

I still wouldn't think this one bug is really that unfixable of a thing that broke everything. Bugs are there to be fixed, not to scrap the whole thing because of them.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

The smooth stone idea is interesting. I've always wanted aquaducts in tfc and with rivers becoming more rare in 79 there would certainly be a place for it. I'll ponder on it for sure.

I Love the idea of having aqueducts or water channels.

I don't understand what the big deal is about not letting people move water sources in a canal or aqueduct!!!

Right now water level is around 145.

Since water does not go up, can you imagine how much terraforming and construction one need to do to make a 100 blocks long chanel?

I say if someone wants to go to all that trouble let them have it.

You can hardy call it a exploit. 

[Cricas 0]

We can use boats on the channels for fast transportation.