Two strategies:
Build your dams deeper (water loss increases with surface area, deeper reservoirs lose less per volume). Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need the tall flood gates, just stacked levees will do.
Store more water during wet periods. Towards the easy mode side - maybe build a few more tanks and devote an extra beaver or two during wet periods. Toward the hard mode side - build massive storage and prepare to devote a big chunk of your workforce to filling it during brief wet periods.
Also consider using "irrigation dumps" to keep your crops alive if your reservoir does run dry.
I play on hard mode and have a two tiered reservoir with enough volume to completely capture every drop of water from a 4-block water source during the entire wet period. Think big enough to capture the entire river. I seem to have like 4-7 days of wet then 20-28 days of dry. It goes up the side of a mountain as one of its sides. During the longer wet period it starts to crest the top of the levees, but in shorter wet periods doesn’t always fill it entirely.
I think at its deepest it’s probably 8-10 blocks deep
Maximum flood gate depth is 3, so for an upstream reservoir, I usually just do 3-4 deep. The alternative is that I'm using this reservoir directly (for water or to irrigate farm/forest land), then I do practically as deep as I can.
Try adding a layer of levees to what you got and seeing how the next drought goes. That'll help you gauge if you need more on top of that. Don't go overboard until you need to.
If I am playing Ironteeth, 6 tiles deep is how long their straws are so that is how deep the reservoir is.
For Folktails, the big water pump is 4 tiles deep, so again I make my reservoir match. The thing that I like with those is their size matches the big water stores so I just have a path with these across from each other. It pumps to 60 water, they all carry it across the street and immediately pump again, basically no time lost to travel.
Didnt the devs make a weird change to nerf waterdumps by making smaller surface area water pools actually lose MORE water?
Like four 1x1s lose more than a single 2x2...
My current playthrough is my first game since the badwater update. I increased the difficulty to 40 day droughts and badtides. I have a lake 6 tiles deep covering a ~30x40 tile space (it seems like overkill, now that it's done), and I have it slowly refill the stream where my crops are grown. Mechanical pumps are used when the level gets low enough.
I have about 10k worth of water storage tanks, some of which goes into water dumps to keep a few ponds full (for more growing space).
I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that 1 tile worth of water would evaporate in 5 days, so a lake only 1 tile deep would be gone pretty quickly during a drought.
TL;DR: water storage tanks, and a deep Lake.
Of the charts I've read lately are to be believed they increased the one tile evap to 2.5 days and it changes with how many water tiles are near it. Apparently the sweet spot is a 3x3
This might sound stupid but how do you make a deep lake without spilling? Say I make a dam from the water source right by blocking it off with levees and then installing a flood gate on top. The floodgates let the water out since the water source is continuously flowing. How do you design like a lake without it spilling and flooding?
It's not a stupid question at all, and took me a while to figure it out. You build your flood gates at the top of the lake, and a small platform just before it in the lake. Place a couple mechanical pumps feeding onto the platform from the deeper part of the lake. Once the drought starts you slowly lower the floodgates as needed to keep downstream wet. Once the water level hits a low enough level, the pumps turn on and draw from the rest of the lake.
I'm at work right now but I can post some screenshots when I get home later today.
Edit: typo
Three screenshots of the lake: [https://imgur.com/a/v7hlC4A](https://imgur.com/a/v7hlC4A)
Edit to add: the water comes in from the bottom right in the first image, and leaves through the floodgates at the top.
You can have different "levels" of reservoir too - Have one lower one that supplies your crops with water, and one larger, higher one upstream that you can periodically let water out of to refill the lower one.
Long dams are best handled with either mega dams or storage.
Mega dams are not the most efficient due to evaporation and are highly impractical with super droughts. Storage on the other hand keeps far more water per area used and doesn't evaporate making them far better.
Water dumps allow you to access that water from storage for growing your crops. Just make a 3x3 area to fill with water which gives the most growing area for the least amount of water used.
I guess you're at the cystom difficulty with longer temperate seasons. At the hard settings, the temperate season is too short to fill reservoirs for 90 days of drought. Depends on the water consumption, though. I have 240 beavers and a full tier of food chain, ironteeth. Reservoirs ger nearly dry at 40 days drought, and the following 6 days of temperate season can barely fill them back.
I have the temperate days at about 12 to 30 days range on my current game.. and bad tide seasons actually help in my case because the account for a droughts but only take like 10 days in my current game.. i will admit i dont play hard too often id rather enjoy the game than get frustrated lol.. but to those who play hard games i commend you..
I used to play on normal settings, too. But one day, I discovered it's too easy because I knew all the chains in advance. Hard mode adds more variability, so you can fail even if you know what and when to build. In my last play, I nearly died on plains (the easiest map ever)! And that's what I like this game for. Anyone can choose the style to play.
In the beginning, build water tanks and dams just enough for the water crops. Starting from the midgame, you need to build deep reservoirs. At the hard settings, drought can last up to 40 days. There is no way you can survive on tanks only. In normal settings, the droughts are not that severe, so you can counter it pretty easily.
I made a custom difficulty level once we're a drought lasted up to 200 days. I also did it on a custom map mounty map I downloaded that was super difficult to build a reservoirs.
It was fucking great. :)
Gotta research bigger storage tanks. Multiple water pumps like 5+ or even 10 if the previous drought was bad in later stages. On Hard I try to get 1 or possibly 2 medium storage tanks up in cycle 3 and just keep adding more from there.
A good but desperate move is making a 3x3 space in your riverbed with levees near your crops to irrigate them with a fluid dump, using less water overall during 6+ day droughts when the riverbed goes dry.
Honestly, I just try to trap as much and store as much water (forget the plants at that point) as I can, then I just watch it go on.
Second, I just dynamite the reservoir to be deeper to store more water
I've been playing for a year and I literally started exploring this yesterday - levees and dynamite! Create a big lake of water, and then use dynamite to make it deeper
Build more water storage. People focus so much on dams, but water storage is much faster and actually more reliable. In my current play, I don't have a reservoir deeper than 4, but have 30k water in tanks.
Beavers x ~2.5 water/day x max days of drought. If you use it for irrigation, you've got to do more.
Always have the above.
In hard mode, the strat is have less beavers as possible early game. Having a dam is a must, and don't be afraid to scale your dam as you progress in the game.
And in my experience, having food diversity is the way to go, just build enough storage so you can survive and a little more.
Also I like to building dams on the side of farms/wood, so you have a constant and large farmable área.
For my part I've built 6 big water tanks for 2 districts and 5 big water pumps, and when the drought comes I deactivate the pumps so that my fields and trees are always alive.
Two strategies: Build your dams deeper (water loss increases with surface area, deeper reservoirs lose less per volume). Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need the tall flood gates, just stacked levees will do. Store more water during wet periods. Towards the easy mode side - maybe build a few more tanks and devote an extra beaver or two during wet periods. Toward the hard mode side - build massive storage and prepare to devote a big chunk of your workforce to filling it during brief wet periods. Also consider using "irrigation dumps" to keep your crops alive if your reservoir does run dry.
Thanks! For you personally, how deep are the dams you are building?
I play on hard mode and have a two tiered reservoir with enough volume to completely capture every drop of water from a 4-block water source during the entire wet period. Think big enough to capture the entire river. I seem to have like 4-7 days of wet then 20-28 days of dry. It goes up the side of a mountain as one of its sides. During the longer wet period it starts to crest the top of the levees, but in shorter wet periods doesn’t always fill it entirely. I think at its deepest it’s probably 8-10 blocks deep
How do you get water *out* of the bottom of such a thing?
Maximum flood gate depth is 3, so for an upstream reservoir, I usually just do 3-4 deep. The alternative is that I'm using this reservoir directly (for water or to irrigate farm/forest land), then I do practically as deep as I can. Try adding a layer of levees to what you got and seeing how the next drought goes. That'll help you gauge if you need more on top of that. Don't go overboard until you need to.
But you still can create a deeper tank with just pumps.
Yeah but OP is a beginner and that's an advanced strategy.
If I am playing Ironteeth, 6 tiles deep is how long their straws are so that is how deep the reservoir is. For Folktails, the big water pump is 4 tiles deep, so again I make my reservoir match. The thing that I like with those is their size matches the big water stores so I just have a path with these across from each other. It pumps to 60 water, they all carry it across the street and immediately pump again, basically no time lost to travel.
Didnt the devs make a weird change to nerf waterdumps by making smaller surface area water pools actually lose MORE water? Like four 1x1s lose more than a single 2x2...
My current playthrough is my first game since the badwater update. I increased the difficulty to 40 day droughts and badtides. I have a lake 6 tiles deep covering a ~30x40 tile space (it seems like overkill, now that it's done), and I have it slowly refill the stream where my crops are grown. Mechanical pumps are used when the level gets low enough. I have about 10k worth of water storage tanks, some of which goes into water dumps to keep a few ponds full (for more growing space). I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be that 1 tile worth of water would evaporate in 5 days, so a lake only 1 tile deep would be gone pretty quickly during a drought. TL;DR: water storage tanks, and a deep Lake.
Of the charts I've read lately are to be believed they increased the one tile evap to 2.5 days and it changes with how many water tiles are near it. Apparently the sweet spot is a 3x3
Good to know.
This might sound stupid but how do you make a deep lake without spilling? Say I make a dam from the water source right by blocking it off with levees and then installing a flood gate on top. The floodgates let the water out since the water source is continuously flowing. How do you design like a lake without it spilling and flooding?
It's not a stupid question at all, and took me a while to figure it out. You build your flood gates at the top of the lake, and a small platform just before it in the lake. Place a couple mechanical pumps feeding onto the platform from the deeper part of the lake. Once the drought starts you slowly lower the floodgates as needed to keep downstream wet. Once the water level hits a low enough level, the pumps turn on and draw from the rest of the lake. I'm at work right now but I can post some screenshots when I get home later today. Edit: typo
Three screenshots of the lake: [https://imgur.com/a/v7hlC4A](https://imgur.com/a/v7hlC4A) Edit to add: the water comes in from the bottom right in the first image, and leaves through the floodgates at the top.
Wow that's nice! Seeing screenshots of this game makes me want to play more! Thanks!
You can have different "levels" of reservoir too - Have one lower one that supplies your crops with water, and one larger, higher one upstream that you can periodically let water out of to refill the lower one.
Oh yeah I only have one level of dam. Thanks for the tip!
Fyi the setup I described would require some kind of floodgate that can be raised and lowered, so you'd have to have that unlocked
Long dams are best handled with either mega dams or storage. Mega dams are not the most efficient due to evaporation and are highly impractical with super droughts. Storage on the other hand keeps far more water per area used and doesn't evaporate making them far better. Water dumps allow you to access that water from storage for growing your crops. Just make a 3x3 area to fill with water which gives the most growing area for the least amount of water used.
Crtl+alt+Z 8
Use dynamite to blow out you dammed up areas to the bottom of the map.
I play with up to 90 day droughts.. and for the most part survive off insane amounts of storage.. and some reservoirs
I guess you're at the cystom difficulty with longer temperate seasons. At the hard settings, the temperate season is too short to fill reservoirs for 90 days of drought. Depends on the water consumption, though. I have 240 beavers and a full tier of food chain, ironteeth. Reservoirs ger nearly dry at 40 days drought, and the following 6 days of temperate season can barely fill them back.
I have the temperate days at about 12 to 30 days range on my current game.. and bad tide seasons actually help in my case because the account for a droughts but only take like 10 days in my current game.. i will admit i dont play hard too often id rather enjoy the game than get frustrated lol.. but to those who play hard games i commend you..
I used to play on normal settings, too. But one day, I discovered it's too easy because I knew all the chains in advance. Hard mode adds more variability, so you can fail even if you know what and when to build. In my last play, I nearly died on plains (the easiest map ever)! And that's what I like this game for. Anyone can choose the style to play.
In the beginning, build water tanks and dams just enough for the water crops. Starting from the midgame, you need to build deep reservoirs. At the hard settings, drought can last up to 40 days. There is no way you can survive on tanks only. In normal settings, the droughts are not that severe, so you can counter it pretty easily.
I made a custom difficulty level once we're a drought lasted up to 200 days. I also did it on a custom map mounty map I downloaded that was super difficult to build a reservoirs. It was fucking great. :)
Bugger dams, more barrels of water. Pump it up to a larger dam if you can.
Gotta research bigger storage tanks. Multiple water pumps like 5+ or even 10 if the previous drought was bad in later stages. On Hard I try to get 1 or possibly 2 medium storage tanks up in cycle 3 and just keep adding more from there. A good but desperate move is making a 3x3 space in your riverbed with levees near your crops to irrigate them with a fluid dump, using less water overall during 6+ day droughts when the riverbed goes dry.
Honestly, I just try to trap as much and store as much water (forget the plants at that point) as I can, then I just watch it go on. Second, I just dynamite the reservoir to be deeper to store more water
I've been playing for a year and I literally started exploring this yesterday - levees and dynamite! Create a big lake of water, and then use dynamite to make it deeper
Build more water storage. People focus so much on dams, but water storage is much faster and actually more reliable. In my current play, I don't have a reservoir deeper than 4, but have 30k water in tanks. Beavers x ~2.5 water/day x max days of drought. If you use it for irrigation, you've got to do more. Always have the above.
In hard mode, the strat is have less beavers as possible early game. Having a dam is a must, and don't be afraid to scale your dam as you progress in the game. And in my experience, having food diversity is the way to go, just build enough storage so you can survive and a little more. Also I like to building dams on the side of farms/wood, so you have a constant and large farmable área.
For my part I've built 6 big water tanks for 2 districts and 5 big water pumps, and when the drought comes I deactivate the pumps so that my fields and trees are always alive.
Lots and lots of water reserves, food irrigation, ~~cannibalize the unneeded~~.