If you've got a lot of wood you can try the MORE POWER version.
1: Set up a lot of water wheels, windmills, whatever you want, you need enough power to power two screw pumps per width of the river.
2: Have your carpenters start cranking out enormous wooden corkscrews and pipe sections, to build all these pumps. You can make metal ones too, if you're crazy.
3: While your mechanics are busy with that, your masons need to build two bridges out of constructed floors all the way across the river. These two bridges need to be two spaces wide, and one space apart. These have to be built out of constructed floors, not conventional bridges, because you're going to put screw pumps on them. Then the masons can make blocks for the screw pumps.
4: Mine a little ramp down into the gap between the bridges.
It'll look like this, top down view.
code:
.....▼......
~~~++~++~~~~
~~~++~++~~~~
~~~++~++~~~~
~~~++~++~~~~
~~~++~++~~~~
............~ = river
+ = constructed floor
. = riverbank
The space between these two bridges is where the dam's going to go. Once the bridges are done, and you have the screw pump components built, build the screw pumps on the bridges. You want water pumped out of the gap between the bridges and off into the bulk of the river. Some will splash onto the shore. This will be pretty.
5: Once these pumps are set up, hook the top pump in each bridge up to the power grid. Since all the pumps on each bridge are adjacent to each other, they'll all transmit the power down the line, you won't need any fancy gear assemblies next to them or anything.
6: Throw the Dramatic Lever(tm) (you did hook up a Dramatic Lever right?) and start all the screw pumps. The water will be flung out of the space and away at a ridiculous rate. Ridiculous enough to build stuff in there, even!
7: Have someone expendable run down the ramp with a rock and start building the dam from the bottom, working backwards to the ramp. Once you're done with that, you're done!
EXTRA CREDIT: Recycle all those screw pumps into an impressive flooding-chamber trap, or put all those corkscrews into a horrible horrible goblin-skewering trap.
Here's what the mess will look like from the top.
code:
Power Grid
| |
...←%%▼%%→...
~~~←%%.%%→~~~
~~~←%%.%%→~~~
~~~←%%.%%→~~~
~~~←%%.%%→~~~
~~~←%%.%%→~~~
.............
Arrows indicate the direction of water flow out of the screw pumps.
