Hey guys, I have a town I’m building and I wanted to put a canal running through the center of the town. So I dug it out, built all the foot bridges for the streets and then had my hearthlings dig out the final soil wall between the trench and the lake. And it filled up. Just not that impressively. It’s only partly full so that it looks more like some kind of sewage ditch that’s running through the middle of town as opposed to a scenic canal. What’s more the adjoining lake is a lot less impressive now too since a good deal of it drained into the ditch. In short I need some more water. Does anyone know if there’s a way to spawn a quantity of water or manipulate the volume of a currently existing body of water on the map?
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Does anyone know if the new unstable build might address this problem btw? Also if there isn’t a way currently, would it be okay to request one?
First up, the developers should be aware by now that we (“we” being pretty much everyone who ever mentions water) are dying to have sources and sinks so that we can play around with flows – it’s always good to have another voice supporting the suggestion, but from the devs’ perspective it’s a matter of priority. Right now they’re working on complex changes which take up the whole team’s efforts; water sources and sinks shouldn’t be too massive of a project (the engine should already support them, they just need to be hooked up properly)… the issue is, then what? I’m sure there are a couple of hundred players who would be over the moon right now just to have water sources, even without a sink/drain to go with them, but Stonehearth has thousands of players and most of them would rather have a whole feature than test out a fragment of one. For water to reach its true “fun potential”, there needs to be in-game things to do (e.g. irrigation, make traps, restrict which entities can swim so that moats become a tactical feature, etc…), and all of those things take development time/effort. So for the dev team right now, there are more pressing matters; but we can rest assured that the devs do want to have all these cool water functions to play around with, so they’re going to try and make it happen.
For right now, there are some tricks you can use to “squeeze” more water out of the existing pools and lakes; but you can’t add any extra water to the map yet. The best place to start is with filling in the bottom of overly deep ponds/lakes to force that water up. If you’re doing that, I’d recommend using the medium blue stone colour to create the optical illusion of deeper water. You can also drain other pools into your main one, and it’s a lot easier to do that now that constructed blocks interact properly with flowing water. Finally, if you have a really large lake/shore at the edge of your map, try allowing some of that water into the canal system (assuming it’s on the right level to do so) – the larger a body of water is, the less its level drops when it drains into other streams/canals/bodies of water; since only a tiny fraction is taken from each of the surface blocks.
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Don’t the debug tools come with a Lua console? I wonder if there’s a command to add water buried under all the code that we’d somehow be able to use.
I notice that this post was Years ago, But. There is an item in the LUA debug tools that can add water, and one that can get rid of water. they’re the wetstone and drystone. I use them all the time, they’re very convenient and great with for the ACE mod if you dont wanna deal with their Irrigation system
Indeed, this thread happened not all that long before we got wet and dry stones.
These days, they’re a convenient solution for any kind of water manipulation, and make it easy to clean up any mess too!