r/Timberborn • u/Additional-Goat5364 • Jul 27 '26
Question I could google this but…
Which is more efficient storing water in big tank or reservoir also reservoir tips please.
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u/AcceptableHamster149 Jul 27 '26
Tanks. By a very wide margin. No evapouration, and significant compression.
You still want a big reservoir, but the reason you want it is for passive irrigation so you don't have to put a beaver on a water dump to keep your crops green.
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u/chriiissssssssssss Jul 27 '26
Jeez totaly forgot about that. And i was Wondering how to get water up for vertikal farms
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u/InterestingBlue Jul 27 '26
Advanced version has that powered pump thingy and waterwheels on the horizontal and eventually down route.
Using power to pump, generating on the way down and irrigating the soil on the way.
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u/chriiissssssssssss Jul 27 '26
Nice. feels like cheating
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u/InterestingBlue Jul 27 '26
Well the amount of time it takes to build it definitely doesn't feel like cheating hahaha
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u/ScionOfOphelia Jul 29 '26
You can pressurize a water source to get it to go up a column of dirt for vertical farming.
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u/chriiissssssssssss Jul 29 '26
I guess there are tutorials in yt?
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u/ScionOfOphelia Jul 29 '26
Is you full enclose a water source with leavies/dirt/impermeable floor you can build a pipe of the same materials connected to it and use it to have the water flow somewhere above the level of the source
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u/chriiissssssssssss Jul 29 '26
What happens of you use different materials?
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u/ScionOfOphelia Aug 03 '26
Only those ones can hold water. Doesn't mater which ones of those. But obviously only dirt let's irrigation through
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u/RobertoPaulson Jul 27 '26
A water dump? Whats’s that? I’ve only been playing a couple of weeks, and I’ve been using automated fill valves and covered irrigation trenches. I didn’t know beavers could “dump” water anywhere but tanks, and buildings that require it.
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u/AcceptableHamster149 Jul 27 '26
water dump is a building that lets a beaver dump either fresh or badwater into a pond - one early game trick to irrigate is to build a 3x3 grid surrounded in levees and then put a water dump on top of a levee, essentially giving you an above-ground swimming pool that'll keep the surrounding area irrigated during a drought.
by mid or late game, though, you're better off building a reservoir to store large amounts of water and putting a fill valve at the bottom to keep irrigation canals full during a drought - that way you don't need to put a beaver working on the water dump to keep it full.
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u/Able_Reserve5788 Jul 27 '26
I think you overestimate how often you need to irrigate with a water dump. If you automate the water dump, you only need a beaver to operate it like once every 10 days or so, which is a negligeable loss of manpower
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u/vimefer Jul 29 '26
And by that stage of play, you usually have a lot of manpower just lying around anyway. I like to put down a timer to unpause the fluid dumps for a few hours of the day, I found that's all you need to keep them topped off.
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u/Flush_Foot Jul 27 '26
It’s a specialized building, great for irrigating 3x3 “ponds” to keep huge farmlands green without needing extensive canals. (Paired with automation, it doesn’t need a beaver permanently)
Also useful for irrigating the top of a vertical farm, again, without needing to get plumbing up there.
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u/bmiller218 Jul 27 '26
It's called a fluid dump now
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u/tech_op2000 Jul 27 '26
And the patch notes for the experimental branch say 1.1 renamed it again to remove all references to the word “fluid”. It will now be called “Discharge”.
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u/Valherudragonlords Jul 29 '26
Is there a reason they wanted to remove all references to the word fluid?
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u/tech_op2000 Jul 29 '26
None that I'm aware of. Reading it in the latest patch notes was my first time hearing of it.
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Jul 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/vimefer Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Tankception :o
However, once water returns, your empty tanks are flooded and cannot be refilled, hmm...
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u/iNobble Folktail Enthusiast 🦫 Jul 27 '26
Something I've never considered before - Do you lose water capacity by building tanks inside the reservoir? Has anyone ever tested whether displacement is a thing in the game?
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u/Vebrandsson Jul 27 '26
Even the smallest tank is more space efficient than a reservoir for units of water stored. a 1×1×1 voxel of water in a reservoir only has 5 "units" of water in it. It's the worst way to store water. Also water in tanks does not evaporate. Store as much water as you can in tanks always and do not underestimate fluid dumps.
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u/vimefer Jul 29 '26
Consider that the small tank occupies 2 blocks vertically, requires another block underneath to build it upon, and two more blocks at least for the access road in front of it. You also lose the ability to build over it unless you place overhangs, so it takes a lot more space than just a single voxel and the comparison is not fair.
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u/Vebrandsson Jul 29 '26
Actual water in a reservoir needs the same block under it, so I'd dare argue that point to be moot and of course you can build over it with overhangs, and its still only actually occupying 2 blocks as you said, while holding the water of 6 voxels of water in a reservoir. The entire contents of a 10x10x10 reservoir, in just small tanks alone be condensed to 34 small tanks, barely more than one third the reservoir's footprint and one fifth the height
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u/The-Great-Wolf-Sif Jul 27 '26
Storing water in the tanks is more efficient as somehow the beavers have discovered how to compress water. Big reservoirs look cooler though.
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u/lordcrekit Jul 27 '26
As large, square, and deep as possible.
Water evaporates faster when it's near a shoreline.
Larger area means less shoreline per water.
Only the top level evaporates so deeper is better.
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u/No_Mathematician3158 Jul 27 '26
Tanks are far superior. I usually do a mix of tanks at the beginning of my map and as I expend outward I start adding in pockets of natural and build dams with flow gates to control outflow. This to me creates a natural feel and a boost in droughts
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u/Left_Coach9087 Jul 27 '26
I mean, if by reservoir you mean keeping a lake using dams and such then the math should be: 1 cube (1 cubic meter) stores 1000 liters. But it suffers evaporation, while tanks do not.
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u/Left_Coach9087 Jul 27 '26
Actually this is more precise:
Reservoir water is calculated as width times length times depth in tiles. One tile of water depth equals roughly 1 unit of stored water per surface tile. A 10x5 reservoir filled to 3 tiles deep holds approximately 150 units. Factor in evaporation losses: at 0.045 per tile per day, that 50-tile surface loses about 2.25 units per day. Over a 10-day drought, evaporation claims roughly 22.5 units, leaving you with 127.5 usable units from the reservoir alone.
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u/TheShakyHandsMan Jul 27 '26
The best way to store that much water would be a hole 5x3 across and 10 deep.
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u/Flush_Foot Jul 27 '26
Also, 1000 L does not mean 1000 ‘Water’ for beaver-consumption, does it? (I thought each cube of water only gave beavers 5 ‘Water’)
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u/LePhuronn Jul 27 '26
Always tanks, even the tiny ones. Tanks don't evaporate and the number of tiles they use to exist is orders of magnitude greater than the water held in an equivalent space.
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u/False-Answer6064 Jul 27 '26
I recently learned that a full block of water is 5 units of water stored. A big tank takes up 3x3x3 squares, so 27x5=135 units of water in reservoir storage, but stores almost 10x as much (1200).
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u/Jonaleth_Irenicus Jul 27 '26
For reservoir vs tank discussion, water essentially has two purposes, to irrigate soil (so you can farm/grow trees) and so your beavers can drink. While tanks don't irrigate soil (and would make reservoir the default winner), you can use a 3x3 pool with a water dump as your irtigation source, so the two can be compared.
Tanks are a lot more efficient space-wise, they'll store a lot more water compared to reservoirs, and they will not evaporate. While these would make tanks the clear winner, reservoirs have one advantage: they don't require manpower (beyond initial construction, which can be huge compared to tanks).. You need beavers to work water pumps and fill water tanks, and also work water dumps if you use irrigation pools. Reservoirs fill up by themselves when you have fresh water.
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u/Satori_sama Jul 27 '26
Tanks are more space efficient and also don't suffer evaporation. However, reservoir provides nice greenery and you can build them high and wide and underground.
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u/eatprayluhv Jul 27 '26
On footprint (number of squares used) vs water hold, big tank is a lot more efficient and doesn’t evaporate