So there’s one problem i keep ruminating over: “what do you do when mining and hit a water source?”. Well, my solution is the engineer! Just have that lean, mean, crafting machine make a pump and displace the water to another location! This leads to the topic of being able to make artificial lakes. Also the settlers can pump water from underground when in an arid map (or wells) for irrigation. Also, if there’s the possibility of aqueducts, this would help with the dispensing of water. I’m not sure what type of pump it should be though; maybe steam???
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Do like 
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Steam seems too advanced for vanilla Stonehearth; however there’s no reason you can’t get a water- or wind- powered pump (or even a hand-cranked one). Wind should be the easiest if you can slap a windmill down above it, whilst a water mill would require finding a river somewhere and laying a lot of mechanism down between the water mill & the mine pump.
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The first thing that came to my mind, (badly represented) is this:
The small tunnel in the video of the mining update, if one of your settlers hits a water source, would get filled with water and the poor things will drown. I couldn’t help imagining this 
(they have never seen water, so they can’t swim)
But I agree, maybe the engineer could make use of it. It could be a source of water in case you started far away from rivers. 
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Seems to me that it would be easier from a coding standpoint to make some sort of pipes
that move water from point a to point b. However to make it make since you would need a windmill or
something like that, which would be a huge undertaking given the current building idea…
Maybe the magmasmith could make some sort of engine (coal powered?) to move the water,
without the need of large specialized buildings?
I would love to see water being movable, as its been a pet peeve of mine to hit water in other games, as it usually results in large scale destruction of my carefully planned out stuff…
also Hey everyone, been lurking for a while but just made an acc just now…!
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Hence the hand-crank option.
Still, I think the mechanical aspects would be a very welcome addition to the game in general. For example, a windmill could be designed using parts like this:
- Gears
- Shaft(s)
- Windmill hub
- Blades
Then…
- You attach the blades to the hub - the blades are by default quite short, so you can attach more to their ends to make them longer, but that will require a taller building.
- The hub connects to the gears via the shaft(s).
- The gears translate the mechanical energy provided by the blades moving into energy your hearthlings can use for stuff, be it pumping or mechanical computer mega-projects.
If you want an even more complex model, you could make the building floor the windmill hub is built into rotate about its centre like some windmills do - note the smaller blades at the back here, to make the windmill rotate so it can always be spinning no matter where the wind comes from.
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what im thinking about that idea, however awesome it would be
is that its just not possible to do… I do think they could make a windmill,
but I think the way to do that would be to have the wings-part be like a thing the carpenter could make
and shove that onto the side of a building.
I would be awfully surprised to see that they had thought of the possibility of having rotating buildings…
Another problem would be to translate the mechanical energy in some smart way,
you would need to be able to move it, if a mine got a water leak, you wouldn’t want to have
to build a windmill over the leak to fix it…
And having mechanical energy movable isn’t something I see them doing (Don’t want batteries and such!).
That said, a windmill would be really cool. and the guys probably could make it rather easily, having
a windmill hub like a window and a single part for the wings that would only attach itself to the hub…
Would love to see that in the game, I just don’t see it as a solution to the water problem.
Just to add to this, I think it would be cool if you could build certain things in modules.
E.g.
Power modules:
Hearthling crank
Animal crank (thing of a donkey/mule walking around in a circle turning a large crank)
Waterwheel
Wind turbine
Dwarven steam generator
etc…
Action modules:
Grain Mill
Sawmill
Pump
Escalator/mining transport (cart on a cable?)
etc…
So let’s say you have a nice river, you can harness it and get 2 “energy” out of it. If you don’t you can use wind power and get 1 “energy”. If you’re quite advanced, you can build a dwarven steam generator that puts out 4 “energy” but needs coal and water. The energy output is linked to how fast/how much you get from the action module.
Anyways… It’s probably too early in development to be bringing this up. 
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TBH the real issue would be pathfinding into / out of the rotating section.
Simplest way would be pipes or shafts - either the windmill’s gears pull/push/rotate the shafts, or they pump air/water through pipes, and you use that to power a machine nearer the mine. See Dwarf Fortress or Gnomoria for how you can use great big shaft/pump/etc mechanisms to transport mechanical power over long distances.
Agreed.
Well, having a hand crank option also makes sense. In terms of the mine being flooded though, DF has a swimming skill for its dwarves so they can avoid drowning, so it might not be the end of the world if you hearthlings bump into an underground water source.
Another thing DF does is tell you when it finds warm (and wet?) rock - indicating magma (or water) on the other side. That way you can quickly halt the mining and see about opening it up carefully, or digging around it etc.
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Sorry, i meant the magma smith can make some sort of “magma cell” under a boiler to power a steam turbine. I don’t see an issue with steam since the engineer and magma smith are meant to be rather intelligent units. The engineer upgrades into the magma smith and he/she already knows how to make gunpowder> Albeit a few centuries apart, i see this working. Just might need to make a “steam furnace”, that compresses all these processes into one item.
Maybe just a hand crank for the pump though. My only problem with this is that there might be a sheer massive volume of water that’ll need something bigger with more power.
yea, I would love a simple (but expencive ingame) solution of a cheap but really inneficient hand cranked pump, and a more advanced steam powered thing.
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Why not go the whole hog and have wireless electric power beamed from the nuclear reactor down the road then 
?
Point is, I think steam and medieval (or near-medieval) aesthetics are very different. Steam means railways, Victorian architecture, ironclads, soot, and all the rest, not to mention all the steampunk stuff you get out there.
Since when O_o ? Seriously, I can’t recall seeing anything about firearms etc for vanilla Stonehearth.
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New Class - Engineer: Fiendishly complex traps. Steam pumps. Black powder. In his moments of genius, this Master Craftsman boosts your town’s productivity with miraculously advanced tools and weaponry. In his other moments…
“With steam, human ingenuity, and enough pipes, anything is possible!”
Okay, maybe steam is too hahaha. I agree with your point though; i guess we can’t really nitpick what bits we want and disregard the rest.
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Oh I dunno, Radiant seem to like listening to us a fair bit .
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Personally, I wouldn’t mind the steam technology implementation–the framework could certainly manifest with the classes we know about, plus it just offers more genre diversity in the game–something the community is already showing in their ideas and mods, and seems like it’ll work well in the eventual game. I think the important thing would be to balance the “Steampunk” with the “Medieval/Fantasy” elements, and allow the players to choose which elements they like without a huge amount of sacrifice. Case in point, the water and fuel requirements for a boiler system, and overall limiting “tech” to a certain degree (though I still would like some flying crafts…).
And this might just be me, but a voxelized steam wagon/tank/train sounds very fun–even adorable. But then again, what ISN’T in the Stonehearth style so far…
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