Aqueduct Tower
Overview
Aqueduct towers transport water across the landscape, providing many benefits to the areas they reach. A built aqueduct contains a single Aqueduct Pump that pumps fresh water into a chain of many aqueduct towers. Building a useful aqueduct is the challenge of the Test of Life.
Aqueduct towers are built in an Aqueduct Construction Site. They can be built at fixed locations in a hexagonal grid with 20 coordinate spacing. That is, you cannot build directly to the north or south, the tower must be directly NE, NW, E, W, SW, or SE of the last tower. To build a tower, there must be a suitable aqueduct tower or Aqueduct Pump adjacent to the new tower that can supply water.
The top of the "upstream" tower or pump must be at least 5 feet higher than the top of the new tower. If it is not high enough, you must raise the upstream tower (and possibly any towers further up the chain in turn) before the new tower can be built.
Each tower in a chain has an individual cistern that holds 2,500 water, and is fed via upstream towers from a pump. Water evaporates from towers at the rate of 1 water per minute, or about 1440 water per tower per day.
Building Requirements
To build a tower requires the materials for an Aqueduct Construction Site (1 canvas, 4 rope, 50 straw) plus:
- 1 Cistern
- 5 Copper Pipe
- 20 Tar
- 200 Black Raeli Tiles
- 100 White Raeli Tiles
- 50 Yellowish Raeli Tiles
- 50 Reddish Raeli Tiles
- 50 Greenish Raeli Tiles
- 50 Blueish Raeli Tiles
- 100 Concrete
Raising the tower
A newly built tower has a height of 0 feet, i.e. the top of the tower is the same height as the ground. To support additional towers, the top of the tower must be raised. This requires variable amounts of:
To raise a tower, select "Raise the Aqueduct" and select how many feet to raise the tower by. You cannot raise the top of the tower to higher than 5 feet below the top of the next tower upstream. You must have all materials for the upgrade carried - the upgrade does not behave like a construction site. If you have sufficient materials, the tower is immediately raised to the new height. If you have insufficient materials, you'll get a popup telling you exactly what you need.
To raise a tower by a large amount, you will need carry food, or baskets onsite, or a helper to bring you materials, or do the raise in several steps.
The cost to raise a tower from its initial height of zero to a height n is:
- Bricks(n) = Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle 2000 + 50*n}
- Concrete(n) = Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle 2*n}
- Cut Stone(n) = Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle [0.5 + 1.5*n]}
- Pipe Segments(n) = Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle 5 + [n/50]}
Where the [] square brackets round down. The cost to raise a tower from a non-zero height is the difference in costs of raising from zero.
For example, raising a tower from height 0 to height 155 requries:
- Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle 2000+50*155} = 9,750 bricks
- Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle 2*155} = 310 concrete
- Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle [0.5 + 1.5*155]} = 233 cut stone
- Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "/mathoid/local/v1/":): {\displaystyle 5 + [155/50]} = 8 pipe segments
Benefits
Aqueduct towers provide a number of useful benefits:
- Drinking water from a tower gives a 24 teppyhour +3 boost to one stat, which stacks with other bonuses from food, incense, etc (but not other towers). A particular tower always raises the same stat.
- They act as a source of water: you can fill jugs at a tower.
- Moss can be harvested from towers. Moss is required for some types of research, e.g. Herbiculture.
- Some towers give a large (3x) bonus to vegetable yields for one random type of vegetable when grown near the tower. There is a list of towers with known bonuses.
- Towers allow the growing of herbs from herb seeds, given the right ecological conditions.