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[Mokomakin]

<quoted stuff>

I'm imagining a clock fueled by elves being sacrificed in a pit of lava. Then you encase their corpses in obsidian and, I don't know, use the obsidian blocks to crush invading goblins. Your clock is incremented by the accumulation of 'narrow giant cave spider silk socks'.

..and minced with tastefully arranged soapfactory.

[Mechanoid]

Build a long series of alternating floodgates/pressure plates so that each pressure plate triggers the floodgate in front of it to open, and then once it reaches the "end" of the series the last pressure plate opens floodgates on the side(s) of the small 1-tile rooms where the pressure plates are to drain and reset them (including the end plate) while simultaniously closing a bridge at the begining of the series to stop the pressurized water from getting dumped out while this is going on. And yes, it is pressurized water, preferably an amount greater then what's used to flood 2 tiles (the floodgate tile and pressure plate tile) instantly.
Top-down view. No side-view necessary.

Code: [Select]

##############
#EX5X4X3X2X1B< [SOURCE]
#D#D#D#D#D#D##
 [DRAIN AREA]B< is a bridge that raises to the left when "E" pressure plate is hit with water
D are the "drain" floodgates that open when "E" pressure plate is hit with water
1 through 5 are pressure plates that activate the floodgate in front of it (in the order they activate) allowing the water to hit another pressure plate in a series.

This by itself will run one iteration and reset itself over a fairly reliable time frame (since pressureized water moves insanely quickly if there's enough of it) but there's nothing there to allow it to "be smart" and record how many times it triggers the end-plate.

So, just make it really really long. [Edit - Then, when the end pressure plate triggers, make it trigger a water-covered hatch over a 1-tile pit with a pressure plate inside. This activates what you want activated for a period of time AND a second floodgate series, which will open the drain for the 1-tile pit once it activates, thus closing everything off. Needless to say this second floodgate series should be shorter then the first one.]

[Martin]

There's another oscillator that you can control - a filling magma pipe. How long it takes to fill of course depends on the size of the pipe - it's height and how much you are willing to excavate around it to create additional volume, but I can attest from Morul's fort that setting up a pipe to take a year to fill is entirely possible. Then you just need a pressure plate at the top to detect that it has filled, open a door, turn on the pumps to drain it, and once drained have it trigger another plate to turn the pumps off. Once the top z-level is cleared, the plate would close the door.

The trick is that the year cycle isn't just the filling, but also the draining. That makes is more likely that a stock pipe will work, and powered pumps are pretty reliable, but you'd probably need 3-5 pumps directly tapping off of the pipe to do it that fast, and that's a really damn hard tap to do (trust me, I've done it). Personally, I'd dive into one of the modding tools to do it.

As for a counter, you can (possibly) set up a series of floodgates along a channel that would receive water. Use the annual timer to trigger the release of one tile of 7/7 water into the channel. Pressure plates set before each floodgate in the series would wait for 6/7 water and then open the next floodgate, lowering the water level, but not to evaporation level. Way down at the end, after the appropriate amount of math has been done, have a pressure plate that once the last floodgate is opened, triggers the 10, 100, or 1000 year door, opens a drain, resets the floodgates, and starts the system over again. For the 1000 timer, you'd need to hold 7000 units of water. A channel winding across an embark tile would hold about 1100 units, so you could even fit it into a 3x3 embark with different timers on different z-levels.

You could also use the same system on an abacus type arrangement, with the 10 year counter triggering a 7/7 release into the 100 year counter which after 10 releases triggers a 7/7 release into the 1000 year counter. So long as the water stays uniformly at 2/7 or higher, it should be reliable.

There's lots of pressure plate junk to deal with and getting all the settings right for opening/closing/resetting stuff can really add up, but it's easier than dwarf computing for something of this scale and I think this might be close enough to viable to take a real stab at.

Edit: Heh, I see Mechanoid had a similar idea while I was typing. My plan didn't consider pressurized water, just regular water sloshing around.

[shadowform]

I think you'd need some sort of freezing map in order to pull this off.  Idea something along the following lines:

A surface reservoir holds water during the summer.  In winter, it freezes.  When frozen, this halts the flow of water over a pressure plate - and this drops a floodgate that seals the reservoir.  When the summer thaw comes, the reservoir thaws and empties into your counter mechanism, recording 1 'unit' of water (however you choose to measure it) and thus that 1 year has passed.  Eventually, the thaw also allows water flow to resume over the pressure plate that controls the reservoir emptying, which stops the counter and refills the reservoir for the following year.  You'll probably have to do a lot of experimentation to get the distance between the control switch and the water source that triggers it in order to get the amount of water you want out of the reservoir.  The good thing about this setup, though, is that depending on the size of the reservoir and the size of the drainage door, it'd be fairly easy to alter how much flow you get per cycle.

All of this is under the assumption that all water freezes/thaws either instantly or in a consistent pattern, though...  which I'm not sure of.

From there it's just a matter of getting the counter working.