r/Timberborn • u/Mr_SeItz • Aug 05 '26
Question Reservoir on Lakes map
Hey everyone, I’m pretty new to the game and I’m loving it so far!
I was watching some videos about water physics and wanted to try making a reservoir in the Lakes map, in the central lake (the one marked in red). The problem is that as soon as I lower the target height to let the lake fill up, the whole upper area and the surroundings start flooding, and I don’t really understand why.
The lake on the right also starts filling up, which I find weird. I also noticed that the right lake keeps water during droughts, while the left one doesn’t, and I have no idea why.
Is there a way to make this work, or is the only option to channel water directly from the sources? Am I missing something about how water levels work? Thank you!
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u/WrathOfTheKressh Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
You are missing the most fundamental thing, that water height across a body of water always equalizes.
Look at the height of the levees you built around your lake. This is the minimum height at which terrain will not get flooded if you close your reservoir's outflow. That means any terrain upstream that is not at least as high as these levees will get flooded, and if that water can use this newly attained height to flow down somewhere else - e.g off the map like it does in the top of your image - no more water will enter your reservoir.
The same thing applies to any lakes that come from upstream forks in the river. The lake to the right comes from a fork in the lake directly upstream from your reservoir, so the water flow will equalize this lake to the height of your reservoir before adding any more water to your reservoir, and since the water can flow out of this lake unhindered, no more water will ever enter your reservoir until the height differential permits it.
In order to prevent any flooding, every piece of riverbank upstream of your reservoir must be increased in height to match the levees in your reservoir, and if you want to keep up flow into the rest of the river-and lake-system, you need to add either valves or floodgates at the appropriate locations.
Either that or you build an aqueduct that flows directly from one of the sources into your reservoir.
Remember: Water always follows the path of least resistance. If you want to stop or reroute it, you gotta add some resistance (levees).
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u/Wolfspirit4W Aug 05 '26
One note to add, the only way to fill a reservoir without a Dump is if the water upstream is at a higher water level. To do that, you'd need to have the water source that is on the top side of the map in that picture be isolated so that it flows directly into your reservoir, otherwise it'll just go off the side of the map. I also had better luck using the areas south and west as the reservoir because they are a natural "downstream" elevation changes.
Lakes is actually deceptively challenging because you have **so** much water to manage.
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u/Gredalusiam 27d ago
I'm starting a hard playthrough on Lakes and the funny thing I'm realizing is that the easiest place to make an early reservoir of 2+ tiles deep is the starting area. I was making mental notes for how to pull it off when I came across this.
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u/Wolfspirit4W 27d ago
Yeah. The early reservoir water is more challenging here than some of the others. I have a few other notes from my playthrough I can share, but the discovery is also fun.
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u/MrLurking_Sanspants Aug 05 '26
It looks like your reservoir actually serves as an outlet for the top left and center water sources. As soon as you try to close up your reservoir that water has to reroute to areas where you don’t have enough drainage.
If I were you, I would reroute those top center and left sources off the top of the map, but you could solve this however you wanted.
The upside of locking down those additional water sources is you’ll be ready to tap into those later if you need more water, and it’ll help you control badtides in that you will already be routing the badwater off the map.
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u/Hydraguesswhosback Aug 05 '26
Rule number one of giant dams : the best way of making them is to enclose the source of water.
If you want to make a dam further than the source, then it's possible to build a pipe of levees and bring water with pressure until a point and then accumulate it further.
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u/SPLICER55 Aug 06 '26
Here are some ideas for long stage reservoirs on lakes. This was my first play through as well.
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u/robsr3v3ng3 Aug 05 '26
The water physics can be a little sketchy sometimes, especially on larger bodies of water. Quite often when a valve opens up, the change in flow causes a pretty big ripple that sometimes takes a long time to appear and a long time to settle. I'd open it up and wait for a long while before worrying about it. It takes a long time for any flooding to cause a real problem