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[Firnagzen]

I'm thinking of trying to build a timer that will cycle once a year with as little drift as possible, or at least some way of adjusting the drift. The mist generator/repeaters seem to be a good sart, but they barely last any time at all. Anyone have any ideas?

Oh, and as a side note: has anyone found a map with a low elevation, forested area on the left side and high elevation on the right side, with a magma pipe and underground river?

[Starver]

I'm thinking of trying to build a timer that will cycle once a year with as little drift as possible, or at least some way of adjusting the drift. The mist generator/repeaters seem to be a good sart, but they barely last any time at all. Anyone have any ideas?

Try a map with a freeze-thaw cycle on the outside and an aquifer (or having prepared a sufficient supply of water within an internal cistern).

Have water drain from the internal water-source down a short shaft and to the outside.  When the outside freezes, this will form a plug and stop the draining, the shaft will fill and overflow into a mid-level side-shaft which contains a pressure-plate that can detect this and do 'something'.  And/or detect when the thaw occurs, the plug melts and the water drains out.

Design to taste, local geography and other conditions.  (While I'm envisaging draining out of a cliff face and the water wandering into a handy river-bed, it could even work on a perfectly flat map, if you drain into a deepish pit and make sure that the warm-weather flow to the outside is pumped up and out.  In fact, that could be the perpetual source (whilever water is draining outside) to keep the internal cistern supplied, though watch out for evaporation if there's no other means of replenishments.

If you're really short on water, you could modulate the cistern flow with a shorter-term on-off gates ending pulses of 'test' water, and lose a bit of resolution (but not miss the change of season as and when it happens).  The problem of 1/7th evaporation might be an overriding factor in that, though.

[Firnagzen]

Hmm... I'd really rather not the freeze/thaw cycles, though I suppose that's a solution.

[Shakma]

I was thinking of doing something like this using the mini-repeater with bridge/FG producing a steady but slow stream of water down a tall thin cistern.  At the top is a pressure plate that would trip and trigger whatever yearly thing + drain the cistern.  Working out the timing would be difficult but you could adjust it pretty easily by increasing the cistern with digging or opening/closing FGs to size.  I'm not sure if the water flow would be steady enough for clockwork like precision.

The mist repeators in a long enough series will work.  Each additional will double the time, but fine tuning will probably be needed and a way to reset. 

[Eidalac]

Hrm.

Odd thought:

IIRC, you can pre-set the planting of a farm for each season.  In theory, you could have it setup with only 1 planting season (if not, you could set the other seasons to a product you have forbidden/used up).  So, if that is doable, you'll have a seasonal 'trigger' which will cause farmers to path to this plot.

Now, if that plot is accessed via a narrow path, with a pressure plate, you could set-up a device that will trigger after the season changes and a certain number of dwarves have walked to the farm.

The drift of the system would be a factor of how many farmers you have and how many plots the farm has.

Not the most perfect trigger, but has less setup than anything else I know about.

[Martin]

Not the most perfect trigger, but has less setup than anything else I know about.

Pretty good, actually. If the farm had only a single plot with a long grow cycle such that only one planting got in during the season and there was no stockpile to receive the crop or the withered crop so nobody harvested, that might work well as a trigger - one walk in, one walk out. With a 2nd trigger and a floodgate, you could even force the planter to path out a different way than in.

[Eidalac]

Hrm.

Also, if there is no seed or foot stockpile on the farm side of the plate, then it comes down to the # of farm tiles, not the # of planters/farmers, since you'd have one trip per tile for planting and one for harvesting.

And if you exclude the produced plant from all stockpiles, as Martin suggested, it's simplified even further, though I'm not sure how long a withered plant will remain before it rots and clears the spot for another planting.

[Martin]

You could always mod the growing time for a crop such as muck root to require a full season to grow. Then the whole thing would work quite straightforwardly.