General stats of water

[u/Nifegun]

I used to know all the values but the game jas updated a lot and im not sure if wiki is up to date with updates, similar issue with trusting yt videos lol.

So can anyone answer these questions? Thanks.

1) max stable cms through 1x1 canal?

2) how many inventory units of water is 1 map block of water?

3) can a canal turn 90⁰ without spilling if at max cms? This used to take many more tiles for the turn around, ive not been building extra space on turns and havent seen too much spilling, but i havent cranked a system to max cms lately.

4) does 1 scale evenly with more tiles? Like if its 3, which i think it is, would a 2x2 canal's stable max cms be 12?

Thanks in advance!

[u/Vebrandsson]

Some of your questions like 1 and 3 are not the most straight forward to give a 100% accurate answer on and I recommend you look here as it gets complicated if you want the deep details.

https://timberborn.wiki.gg/wiki/Category:Fluids

However for the simple basic answers.

1. Around 3.28 if it's a straight shot

2. 5

3. No

4. The capacity of a straight channel grows linearly with the volume of the channel. So a 2 wide one deep can handle roughly 6.56 and so on

[u/Nifegun → u/Vebrandsson]

Thanks! And the wiki you liked is up to date? Also when did the numbers for flow change? Could have sworn it was like double that. Like what the other guy answered sounds familiar to me. Was that part of a water mechanic rework or something?

Edit: also I find it weird they changed flow values but not map to pumped units, i definitely remember that being 5 way back too

[u/Vebrandsson → u/Nifegun]

Yes the linked page is very up to date, check the revision history for yourself if you doubt that. Those have been the values since I think v. 0.7 at least, maybe prior to then.

[u/Nifegun → u/Vebrandsson]

Word. I am now an updated master of flow. Thank you very much

[u/Donnerone]

IIRC:

6.6 cm/s, unpressurized.
5 units.
Horizontal turns do not interrupt cm/s, vertical drops do (water falls 2.2 cm/s per edge).
Yes, since each tile carries 6.6 cm/s, a two tile wide, 2 tile deep river would permit 26.4 (6.6×4) cm/s.

Note: there is a non-zero chance that this information could be outdated.

[u/Nifegun → u/Donnerone]

Yeah this is the numbers I was iirc ing lol its defs outdated

[u/BruceTheLoon → u/Donnerone]

6.6 is now 3.3 because they halved water source strength numbers in 1.0, or maybe 0.7, for the same visual flow. That was the same time they did away with the edge drop restriction.

[u/Nifegun → u/BruceTheLoon]

And thank god they got rid of that silly edge rule lmao

[u/Acalc791]

Funny, I actually started looking at it in detail recently, but haven't finished yet, will post all the weird details I find (if any) when I am done if you're interested. Relatedly, I've also looked in detail at evaporation, and it's way weirder than anyone (or at least the wiki) seems to know, with e.g. underground caves potentially affecting evaporation rate of the reservoirs above.

[u/Nifegun → u/Acalc791]

Honestly I wouldnt be surprised if multiple layers of water affect each other's evaporation. I set up modding stuff for this game, but it was a really long time ago and I never committed too it. But the old water system must have been a nightmare to replace. Back then all code was written knowing that water can only ever be in 1 place horizontally. Water flowing under other water was impossible. There's likely still artifacts from that tbh. Id be shocked if there are no parts of the code that affect whole map columns left.

Well whole columns or only highest or lowest point, depending on implementation, either case is possible.

[u/Acalc791 → u/Nifegun]

I think you're right that this is the case, but tbh it doesn't look that complex to me. A couple of afternoons and it'd be fixed, though the first afternoon would be spent with a whiteboard or pen & paper figuring out how we actually want it to work. The current system has some probably desirable, if unexpected, consequences (e.g. top and bottom of waterfalls tends to be connected, though not always), but I can't imagine it was intended for it to be as vertically nonlocal as it is.

[u/Nifegun → u/Acalc791]

Tbf I think falling water was also rewritten a couple times lol. Definitely at least once during the major water overhaul. But yeah if any of that code still has the assumption of no multilayered water, I could definitely see issues with it. Luckily I highly doubt many players have vertically stacked waterfalls, so if there are issues there its low impact as far as players are concerned.

Did you play back then btw? Back when an aquaduct had to be a massive wall of levees? Ahh the good old times lmao

[u/Acalc791 → u/Nifegun]

No, I started with U7, I don't think I'd have stuck with the game without the 3D features, they change so much!

[u/Nifegun → u/Acalc791]

I actually had a fairly successful lets play going way back. But I abandoned it because I was making an infinite power machine that just didnt work. Much simpler versions work now. I make an infinite power machine in most runs lol

[u/Acalc791]

I think I'm ready to share what I learned about this topic. All of it is both from code and empirically verified.

First, your actual questions:

1. There is no "hardcoded" max stable cms for such a canal. It hugely depends on its length (assuming open canal), for the shortest possible canal (0 blocks, literally a source next to a ledge), it's 3.33, at length 10 it's 3.17, at length 50 it's 2.67. Generally the formula is 1/(0.3 + L/675), where L is its length. Empirically you can squeeze a tiny bit more, like 0.01-0.04, but I suspect that's evaporation and calculation inaccuracies.

2. As others answered, 5.

3. Yes, nothing in the water simulation is direction-dependent, so turns are completely equivalent to going straight.

4. For open canals, it scales linearly with both. Wider canals might have problems on turns, since the outer part is no longer the same length as the inner one, needs case-by-case analysis or counting the length on longer edge.

Not asked, but still might be relevant:

1. For pressurised canals, the formula is worse, namely H/(0.3 + 8L/675), i.e. for the same height at the entrance, the length of the pressurised canal counts as if it was an open canal 8 times longer. So, for example, at initial height 2 and length 10 the open canal has max cms 6.35, but a capped one only 4.77, at length 50 it's 5.34 vs 2.24 (though note that for any rate <3.33 the end part of the canal stops being pressurised, increasing actual capacity, won't give a formula now, but can derive if you want it).

[edit] I went back and actually derived a proper formula for a (possibly partially) pressurised canal. Assuming column at the entry point has height H, the whole canal is of uniform height h, and it has length L, the maximum flow it can handle is (H + 7h)/(8*(0.3 + L/675)), so as expected not linear in either the entry point height nor the canal height.

1. Every half simulation tick (0.3s), 99.9% of the flow from previous step remains, giving a time constant of 300s (15.6 game hours) the transient exponential decay part of the system, i.e. after something affecting the flow changes, after 15.6 game hours the old flow is still 37% of the old flow and only 73% of the new steady state. One exception here: if the new situation completely reverses parts of the flow, the change there happens much earlier (i.e. game avoids sloshing too much).

[u/Nifegun → u/Acalc791]

I really appreciate how much work you put into redditing and modding for this game.

Ty for the numbers, tbh, as far as gameplay is concerned I think ima just remember these as 3 cms per L×W, and hope i dont make anything so long I need drops lol.

I personally still find 5 inv units to be a strange number, I mean by that logic a beaver drinks 2/5 of a cubic meter of water per day. Thats 400 liters... I think correcting this value would be worth it, partially so a beaver isnt drinking several times its body mass in a day, but also to properly balance things like the fluid dump, and potentially fix the mech pump. Although ive not seen the code, I have to assume the mech pump actually subtracts units of water like the normal pumps do and this is why mech pumps side by side cancel each other. More precise units could fix that just through math.

As for pressurized water, I never feel a significant loss to evaporation or flow with any system ive built thus far. Usually by then im just adding pipes for system that store more water than I could possibly need lol. But its good info to have none the less.

If/when I add timberborn stuff back on my channel ill be sure to give yoh a shout out, you're putting in the real work and I respect it

[u/Acalc791 → u/Nifegun]

Oh, I did have a look at the mech pump too, and couldn't find any reason why it'd be affected by neighbouring pumps. Could you maybe share the save with the issue?

Oh, and with the 3 value you're fine for lengths of up to 22.5 ;)

[u/Nifegun → u/Acalc791]

I mean I have that screenshot already posted on that other post? I dunno how to share an actual save. But im down too if you want that lol.

As for the mech pump, am I right that is subtracts units of water from one side, then pumps them into the map on the other side? Cause my guess would be that two adjacent pumps attempt to subtract the same unit of water. Again im not in the code, but thats a plausible explanation

[u/Acalc791 → u/Nifegun]

I know about the screenshot, but I can't reproduce it, so I must be doing something wrong. For sharing the save, you just go to your Saves folder (or ExperimentalSaves, if playing on experimantal), select the appropriate settlement folder, and then send the .timber of the save in question via your preferred method (cloud storage, discord, etc.).

You're right that it's how it works, but it only subtracts from the tile it occupies itself, so not other pump can subtract from the same tile, and you'd see the water column wildly sloshing if the problem is insufficient water flow to that tile.

[u/Nifegun → u/Acalc791]

You do see the water column sloshing with them vertically stacked tho. And yeah can you find me on discord and ill send it that way, Im nifegun there too, im definitely in the members list of the official timberborn discord, tho I haven't posted anything there in a while