Water Path favors inside corners and leaves deadzones to outside of river corners.

4 votes

The path water takes through filled bodies of water seems to take the shortest route, in my experience cutting inside corners and leaving deadzones with no flow on the outside curve of the river.

In the center of the attached image, I have constructed a bride of 6 platforms. The small dam to the right has an opening 4 units wide. Water flows through the innermost 2 squares of the platform bridge very quickly, has a slight backflow in the center 2, and is completely still on the outside 2 squares, which left this portion of the stream unusable for waterwheels

The path of flow is more of a nitpick as it contrasts how water flows in real life, (Water has inertia too!) but the deadzones are a bigger issue.

Under consideration Game mechanics Suggestion Suggested by: Philostic (25 Sep, '21) • Upvoted: 17 Feb, '22 • Comments: 2

Comments: 2

26 Sep, '21
Kiranos
Actually your dam is restricting the flow too much and by putting some levee on the side you are changing the flowing path.
A bit upstream you could see that there is an elevation change in the river bed. This change is helping the flow by giving some speed to the water.
Your dam is negating some of this effect.
Try to built it more upstream.
27 Sep, '21
Philostic
First off, this doesn't really address the issue stated. The issue is that when unobstructed (as in the case of the bridge in middle of screenshot) the water flows around the inside 2 at a very fast rate, but leaves stagnant areas on the outside.

Second, rate of water flow is also increased given a smaller area and the same volume - if the source is pushing the same volume of water consistently, it will move slower in wide areas and faster in smaller, similar to a nozzle or jet. The volume of water being moved is roughly the area (width of stream) times the rate of flow. (Volume = Area * Rate) so assuming a static volume, a restricted path will give an increased rate of flow. This can also be reproduced ingame - if you have a river 6 blocks wide and restrict it to a smaller area (4, or 2 for exaggerated effect) you will notice the water flowing faster. If the river were flowing faster than the dam would allow, the reservoir behind it would overflow, but it does not.