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[doublestrafe]

I've got a stack of pumps ready and waiting, and an artificial river built from my aquifer that drains into the caverns and almost completely fails to provide power. If I build a water wheel in it, it occasionally kicks in, then dies for days at a time. It's incredibly frustrating. And I really don't want to have to use the perpetual motion exploit.

Does anyone have a design for an artificial river that is known to work? I've gotten a lot of advice from theorists before, and what they come up with has a tendency to work...in theory. I'd like to see something that's been done in practice.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I'm not sure since I am a windpower guy by habit, but in community forts I've played the trick to generators seemed to be having 3-4 levels of water gliding back and forth over a 7/7 level of water.  This gliding cause the wheels to move.  Dunno though how your design is set up

[Nan]

The trick, as far as I know, is the water needs to flow rather than move by pressure (pressurized water, that is, water falling from a higher z-level, "teleports" through 7/7 water, thus 7/7 water doesn't actually move). Thus you should build a "stepped" river and build the waterwheels a few tiles back from the edge, ideally where the water quivers between 4 and 6 deep.

You can build fairly wide channels - the wider the channel is, the more volume of water you need to fill it to deep enough. You can easily adjust this by increasing or decreasing the area of aquifer being drawn from.

I'm not really sure why it's not working for you, because it's pretty straightforward. I just made a mockup which works flawlessly:

The water flows along a 5 wide channel, being fed from one hole, and draining down one downstairs:

Waterwheels constructed the level above in the red rectangle, produce full power 100% of the time.

The aquifer feed is as follows:

I adjusted its size by channeling from above until the water volume was right.

Also, by building 2 rows of waterwheel instead of 1 row, the power isn't 100% consistent (because they aren't over consistently perfect depth), but it doesn't fall below 800, so you get about 50% more usable power by doubling the number of wheels. Obviously, once you've refined the design, you can stack as many of these units on top of each other as you like.

[doublestrafe]

Ah, thank you, Nan! That's exactly what I needed. My problem is definitely the 7/7 teleport thing, and since I made a very long river that branches at the end, I'm not going to be able to use it. (It falls through my dining room in strategic locations, and it's full of fish, so it's still useful.) But that's fine, I can make another one now that I know what to aim for.

I'm going to shoot for about 2000 power, so I'm thinking the way to go is switchbacks. Give the river about 10 tiles of running space, a 2z drop, and head back the other way. It'll just be a question of making sure the bottom floor has enough drainage off the edge of the map. I'm thinking I'll probably go way overboard on the number of floodgates and hatch covers involved so that I can fine-tune both the aquifer output and the drainage--I'm guessing it'll take more influx and more than one square of drain, like you have, to achieve this on multiple levels.

I mean, sure, I could just make five of what you just demonstrated. But what ‼fun‼ would that be?

[Nan]

With drainage, the way that water teleports through 7/7 water, it's generally best to make your entire drainage system 1x1, especially if draining off the map edge. The less opportunity you give water to flow, the more it teleports, and teleporting is good for drainage rate, fps and such.

[blue emu]

I just channel out a seven-tile-wide ditch directly into the Aquifer, floor over the two outer edges (leaving a five-wide ditch), build a block of five adjacent water-wheels, and have them pump the water out from under themselves. It immediately flows back in from the other side... creating flow to power the wheels. It's quite a compact arrangement, and works very well.

It also has the advantage that you can pump the waste water straight back into the Aquifer.