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[Drecker]

Hi,
I have a basic question regarding windmills. I have built my first windmill ever so I may have made some stupid mistake. I have built it somewhere above ground and outside, but it generates 0 energy and is shown as "Inactive" I have even tried to build (out of 8 walls) 1x1 "room" outside with gear assembly in it, and on top of this room I have built another windmill with same energy with the same result (just requiring 5 energy for the gear assembly). Is there anything I may be doing wrong or is it just that there is no wind and I can not make windmills work in my map at all?

Thank you

[Grand Sage]

IIRC windmills produce energy relative to the latitude of your fort in the world map (thats from the wiki). so a fort with no wind is infact possible. otherwise, have you connected everything with axles? I havn't really played around with this stuff, but thats what i gather from the wiki and the forums.

[Starver]

I've not built a windmill in ages but, yes, I think if you're in the doldrums where a stand-alone windmill (built without regard of linking its power via mechanisms) gives zero power then there's nothing more to be done 'right' with gears, etc.

For the record, I think my old process for constructing windmills (assuming there was power) was to build the bottom of the power-train first (either a distributive gear, to be later side-linked to things-to-power or other in/out distributive gears, or the pump/millstone I was dedicating this mill-tower to) with vertical axles atop it as necessary per intervening Z and a 3x3 (or larger, especially when basing a whole windfarm) walled perimeter to proof against building destroyers, atop of which walling I'd (by way of temporary ramped access) put enough floors down to obscure all but the central power-routing, then set the windmill built square upon it(/each) to grant the (hopeful?) power. More minimalist "sky-planks" could be made to adjoin multiple mills jutting out from an invader-proof tower base (this was before hostile fliers or climbers, so additional refinements would have to be made these days) if power rating needed boosting against losses.

Not sure if it was necessary, but if I ever wanted to lever-disengage the power (usually connection to a pump, either necessarily disconnected per plans or "just in case I'm an idiot" with my 'fool-proof' self governing pumping station) the minimal design change would be a 3x4 tower-base, permanent mill-base gear in one half of the internal space, lever-disengagable gear atop the prebuilt onward-power link requiring a floor on the wall-top gap above it.

Mechanics may have changed, but if you build:

Code: [Select]

......
.WWW.. W:wall
.W*W\. *:gear
.WWW.. \:ramp
.........on flat open ground (get the gear in before you build the last corner wall, for obvious reasons) then build a mill atop that, via the ramp without any further construction, and the gear is definitely stated as not powered then you're windless and may need to invest in a water-wheel system (standard or self-feeding once primed) for your energy.


If you get power, you have some deconstruction and other ground-work to do before this mill can be used, but it's one of the minimal stepping-stones needed to get a reassurance (either way) about having built a mill correctly, other than a sole, completely disconnected stand-alone mill-top (which maybe changes to power-transfer have messed about with while I haven't been paying attention).


I really should check the wiki, I suppose, but this is my over-the-shoulder suggestion to double-check your situation, if I'm not horribly out of date key myself.

[Larix]

Code: [Select]

......
.WWW.. W:wall
.W*W\. *:gear
.WWW.. \:ramp
......

Even better - build a floor above where the gear goes, i.e. obscure the central power routing: windmills can transmit power through unbroken floor. Build all windmills on solid (natural or constructed) floor, put in the gears after the mills are finished and you have a power plant that offers no incursion route to the fort proper and where gearboxes underneath the mills can be freely switched without causing collapses - the mills are held up by the floor and not the mechanisms underneath.
The worst thing that can happen is that invaders topple your windmills, denying you power. Walls/chimneys can mitigate the risk of that happening.

[Starver]

I don't know if it's changed, then, but transmission through floors never seemed possible to me back when it was an issue I'd have to face. And these days with fliers and climbers I'd perhaps have spent time making an intruder-handling power-tunnel. Sure, if it's now a thing (and isn't likely to create problems to a new-to-wind player) then let it be done that way. But not much use if there's no wind anyway.

[feelotraveller]

As previously said, windmills produce power relative to the latitude of your fort.  You will have either 0, 20 or 40. 

However more precisely windpower is not a full (embark) map property but tied to each biome's latitude (presumably the latitude of its reference square).  So if you have more than one biome on your map try building a windmill in each - you might get lucky, I definitely have on occasion. 

[PatrikLundell]

As previously said, windmills produce power relative to the latitude of your fort.  You will have either 0, 20 or 40. 

However more precisely windpower is not a full (embark) map property but tied to each biome's latitude (presumably the latitude of its reference square).  So if you have more than one biome on your map try building a windmill in each - you might get lucky, I definitely have on occasion. 

And note that due to a bug, the biome of the air a few Z levels up from the ground is the biome of the world tile to the NW of the embark world tile, and that difference might be sufficient to provide you with a different amount of wind (and there's a further bug that causes patches of the air to randomly take on different legal biome references (the own world tile and the 8 world tiles surrounding it)).

I don't know if worlds without poles (and thus, without latitudes) have any wind, and, if so, if it's fixed or random.

[Schmaven]

Say you wanted to power a 40+ z level pump stack, but have no river, and no wind.  Is it just down to dwarf labor at that point?

[Starver]

Or Perpetual Motion

[Grand Sage]

if you have some water, somewhere, i think you may be able to "exploit" watermills to generate an infinite powersource. otherwise, minecarts might be a viable option to pumpstacks?

looks like starver got here before me

[Bradders]

Ah yes the Dwarven Water Reactor, directly converting FPS into energy and flooding.

[Schmaven]

On the Wiki there's another version of a power generator using minecarts that looks interesting.  Totally unclear how to setup though. 

[PatrikLundell]

On the Wiki there's another version of a power generator using minecarts that looks interesting.  Totally unclear how to setup though. 

I'm not aware of any way to use minecarts to GENERATE power, but impulse ramps can be used to propel them, thus negating the need for power to move minecarts around, but there is no way to transform that movement into power that can be used for other purposes, as far as I know.

Personally I induce flow in aquifer slits to provide perpetual motion for water wheels. However, that requires you to have an aquifer. While it is a cheat of sorts, you can achieve the same thing with water wheels powered by a flow from the aquifer to a fortification exit at the map edge, but with less of an FPS impact.

[Schmaven]

Somehow it uses the mine carts and impulse ramps to transport the water to power the water wheel.  But the Wiki page lacks a key to what the symbols are in the diagram, so it's very mysterious.  It claims to generate more power with less space though. 

If only water wheels could be powered by magma flows...

But back to windmills.  I just came across tercicatrix's invincible windmill farm thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=144966.0

If there is wind, that seems like the way to do it.

[PatrikLundell]

Well, you can replace the pump of a dwarven water reactor with impulse ramp driven minecarts, which increases the gain of the reactor as you don't have to "pay" for the pump, but it's still basically the same thing, just using different components. It's probably more efficient to just have more reactors, though.

There are ways to make wind farms that cannot be targeted by building destroyers, yes.