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[uran77]

do lakes flow?

[Flaming Dorf]

As in water currents in the lake?

[Quietust]

From what I recall, no, they do not flow.

There's actually a very easy way to check if a body of water is flowing - just turn off SHOW_FLOW_AMOUNTS in init.txt, and any flowing water will alternate between ~ and ≈ (while nonflowing water will appear only as ≈).

[uran77]

damn got to power my machinery by windmills then.

[SquirrelWizard]

no so fast there, with some planning and a bit of work you can make a perpetual motion power plant to power machines, the trick is trying to find a design that works reliably.

course you can use windmills if you want, nobody is forcing you otherwise.

[martinuzz]

7/7 water does not flow, to save processor power. So, If your lake is full with 7/7 water, there will be no current. If water evaporates from / is added to the top of the lake, there will be a current in the top level of the lake. Undercurrents do not (yet) exist in DF.

I think you could power your waterwheels with channels filled from the lake..

~~~~~~
~~~~~~
_
_
_

where  ~ = lake
and     _  = channel, place the waterwheel over the channel (attached to a gear ofcourse)

See if it works

[uran77]

the game is forcing me to to use perpetual motion machines map doesn't have ind, damn.

[Quietust]

7/7 water does not flow, to save processor power.

If it's connected to a river, it most certainly will flow. The sort of flow that powers water wheels doesn't take any extra CPU power, since it's seemingly just a single flag on the tile of water that says "yep, it's flowing".

In an experiment I performed a while ago, I created a 3-wide cistern adjacent to a murky pool and filled it using a screw pump. Even after the water level had reached 7/7, the water was consistently flowing. Doing another test with a lake, I filled a 5-wide tank and about half of the tiles were still flowing afterwards while the other half had stopped.

The whole "perpetual motion machine" construct may be far simpler to build than most people realize - done properly, you don't even need to keep the pump running.

[smjjames]

Also, I'm not sure, but I THINK you might be able to use the waves to power a waterwheel. There was one time where I had a waterwheel on a channel that was leading from the ocean and it was powered. It was a long while ago, so I don't remember the layout.

So, if you do it right, using wave power might work. I don't even know if it's documented or not, I haven't seen any reference to wave generated power. Although, given the time scale, it's probably more akin to using tidal forces.

[Quietust]

In an experiment I performed a while ago, I created a 3-wide cistern adjacent to a murky pool and filled it using a screw pump. Even after the water level had reached 7/7, the water was consistently flowing. Doing another test with a lake, I filled a 5-wide tank and about half of the tiles were still flowing afterwards while the other half had stopped.

...of course, when I drained the tank and refilled it (again, from the lake) to try again, the result was zero flow. It would seem that there's some odd behavior with screw pumps and flow - further experimentation may be in order.

[Kanddak]

Try making one of these: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1073-perpetualpowerfromalake

Quietust, there are indeed some crazy things that happen with water wheel behavior. If you poke around my movies on DFMA you'll find a few examples of different things that did or didn't work.

[uran77]

thxs for the clip quietust but for some reason my dwarves pathfinding has screwed up

[SquirrelWizard]

yeah my perpetual motion plant works fairly well. I can erk out 3k of 4.8k power reliably. I did find that once both my resevoirs filled up, both the upper Flow resevoir and the lower Holding Resevoir, my power production dropped drastically. of course this could just be a design problem, but i dont know enough about how to rectify it.