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[technist]

While building a set of Windmill stacks I have encountered some odd altitude related behavior (which possible could be a bug).

As you can see this windmill placed on 157th z-level works just fine, producing steady amount of 20 Urists of power.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now here is there it gets funny. Non of the windmills placed on 158th or any level above 157th generate any power at all, while all of them have atleast their central tiles marked as Outside and Light .

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, the question is — Is it just me being stupid and there is a perfectly logical reason why non of my windmills work, or am I really encountered a bug?
Keep in mind though, I use 42.05 with alpha version of DFHack as well as some minor mods.

[Rain At Dawn]

According to the wiki, a windmill "generates 40, 20, or 0 power, depending on wind level". Is it possible that your windmills are in different biomes with different wind levels?

[PatrikLundell]

As Rain At Dawn indicates, it's been reported before that the power provided can differ at different altitude, although what I've seen indicated there was still hope even if there was 0 power at ground level. in the real world wind generally increases with altitude, but DF (current) simulation is quite crude when it comes to wind power.

[gchristopher]

This could be related to a bug where the biome changes above a certain Z-level, as others noted. Usually it's mostly observable if the high-altitude biome is evil and rains blood on you, but maybe this is another observable effect.

Is the magic dividing line somewhere around 2 z-levels above the highest point on the map post embark? That's as far as the game allocates memory at that point, and only allocates more top z-levels as needed if you build higher.

[technist]

According to the wiki, a windmill "generates 40, 20, or 0 power, depending on wind level". Is it possible that your windmills are in different biomes with different wind levels?

Not as far as I can tell, since visible variation between two presented bioms is good 20-30 tiles away from nearest windmill. And even if that is a case, other biom still providse 20 Urists of power as well.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Is the magic dividing line somewhere around 2 z-levels above the highest point on the map post embark? That's as far as the game allocates memory at that point, and only allocates more top z-levels as needed if you build higher.

And magic dividing line is on same 157th z-level, which actually is highest natural point on a map, at least as far as I can tell.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[PatrikLundell]

The "evil rain above a certain level" oddity is a rather clear indication of a different biome (or something else entirely), unrelated to the biomes at ground level (in my case I didn't have any evil biome at ground level). I have, however, encountered a case where it seemed the ground biome boundary was shifted further up where a farm plot two or so levels above ground seemed to belong to the mountain biome bordering the working farm plot straight below.
It's been mentioned there is some kind of DFHack ability to get an obscure biome number for a location, so it might be possible to locate that command and see if the number at the no wind level differs from that of the wind one.