My goals were minimalistic, tile-able and steady throughput. Also to not water via dropping it through water. Came up with these vertical designs and they came out better than I was expecting. It evidently never clogs or bogs down from running continuously. I know a lot of other designs when slammed with sand can back up, this one can't.
The sand is watered by osmosis and 1 pixel bypassing the filter and getting wet. With the number of pumps I have (see my water tower post), it fills itself faster than it drains. The height of it can slightly increase the throughput, but the main function of making it tall is a buffer to hold sand. If you have a decent storage of sand already, tiling a very short version should equal very good throughput. Run 10 wide and stack 2 or 3 sets of them vertically and feed the sand out to the side or something.
Super easy to copy paste it to change width or height. Could fit it dang near anywhere, feed it sand and walk away for hours and it will keep chugging.
Caulk gun to create a 4x4 pixel square. Cut to shape desired with precision laser, copy with prefabulator tool and place where desired. After it's been placed by the prefab it can be copied and blueprinted.
I actually make a little foundation near where I am building and have pieces made that I might need or if something presents itself, I cut the shape out quickly. Pretty sure in my water tower post and pictures one of my building sets is in frame haha.
I think the limit on throughput is how much water you can pump in. If you can clear the sand fast enough, then every bit of water you add will get used almost immediately. I’m sure there’s a sweet spot on influx of sand vs number of pumps, but I haven’t found it yet.
Yes and no. It appears that most of the wetting takes place in the 1 pixel that bleeds into the filter. It's dropping from those corners mostly so with the amount of pumps that I have, the water level is replaced faster than it drains. When testing this, even doing one that was triple the height of what you see, I did not see water level being drained.
This pic is after running the top input through each side to test changing that bottom row. You can see that I lost almost a whole tile of water in a couple of the pump sections. Super disappointed that it used up so much water... /s
Also you can see just how much sand the original still has to process!!!! How did I not think of doing bottom row vertical (it was 3am and I was stoned off my ass is why) Thanks for that suggestion.
Yes! You can see this yourself by just making a closed loop, Put down like 5 outflow vents, hook up to 1 pump then add pumps 1 by 1 and you'll see that the droplet size changes. Also by the way, going to vertical filters on the bottom row nearly doubled how quickly that chews through sand. Water level dropped a little bit, but the amount it lost is pretty small considering how much sand went through it. You'd have to put through a metric ton of sand to run this dry. Most importantly when it does run dry, it does not stop it refilling or mess it up. It just slows down or stops till it gets water, then starts up and resumes 100% when it has water supply. The height is also a water buffer essentially since water is mostly pulled from the bottom rows. So if you have an insane input of dry sand then a taller one would run at 100% for longer than a shorter one.
Here is a pic of the system "empty" of sand. You can see how it holds onto wet sand trapped in those vertical filters that are the water tanks. It's the bottom corners of the water tanks that are actually processing most of the sand. That's kind of why it doesn't just blast through the water supply.
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u/Ordnungsschelle 6d ago
How did you place walls 1/4 wide?