Part of Phase 1: First Month
Water in Phase 1 runs through four jobs in practical order: find a source and confirm it’s usable, get water out of it and move it where it’s needed, store or spread what’s extra, and keep the whole system safe and fairly shared once other people depend on it too. None of this is deferrable — the domain’s own description states it outright: water gets located, lifted, stored, and purified before anything else gets built.
Source Identification, Water Assessment, Source Protection, and Springhouse come first. Source Identification narrows the question to three things: where the water is, how much there is, and whether it lasts. Water Assessment then checks the details before a single canal gets dug — dry-season flow, how high the water table sits in summer, and whether mineral content will harm crops. Source Protection covers the physical safeguards once a source is chosen: a spring box needs an uphill drainage ditch at least 2 meters away, a well apron sloped 1.5 meters, and the shaft’s top 3 meters lined against runoff. Springhouse is a specific payoff of a good spring: it holds a steady 8-14°C year-round in temperate climates, chilling dairy and meat with no mechanical cooling at all.
Shaduf, Water Lifting, Chain Pump, Hydraulic Ram Pump, Gravity Systems, Building Gravity-Fed Aqueducts, and Flow Measurement cover getting water out and moving it. A shaduf’s counterweight is set to about 75% of true balance, so raising a full bucket takes only 4-5 kg of pull — enough to move 2,500-3,000 liters an hour. A chain pump scales with labor: one person cranking it delivers 5-15 liters a minute at a 1-2 meter lift, and two people on treadles push that to 20-40 liters a minute at 3-5 meters. A hydraulic ram pump needs no fuel at all — a rigid drive pipe 5-12 times the vertical fall in length pushes 10-20% of the input flow up to far greater heights. Gravity Systems moves water downhill through channels or pipes with no pump or fuel, and the whole design turns on a single number: available head. Building Gravity-Fed Aqueducts is the structure that carries it — an unlined channel can lose 20-50% of its water to seepage, while stone lining set in lime mortar cuts that to 1-5% and can last 50 to 200 years or more. Flow Measurement is how all of this gets checked: the bucket-and-stopwatch method covers flows from about 0.1 to 20 liters per second, and larger streams need a float method or a 90-degree V-notch weir instead.
Cistern Building, Water Storage, Rainwater Harvesting for Irrigation, and Water Wheels for Irrigation cover storing and spreading water once it’s moving. Underground cisterns have stored surplus rain and snowmelt for at least 8,000 years, bridging the gap between when water falls and when crops need it — a 1-hectare field needing a 14-day buffer at 5 mm a day works out to 910,000 liters once the standard 30% margin for evaporation and seepage is added. A water wheel lifts river water into irrigation channels continuously, day and night, powered by nothing but the current, as long as the river keeps flowing.
Water Safety, Water Quality, and Water Rights close the loop once water is actually reaching people. Unsafe water kills more people than violence does — cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and parasites all travel through water that can look perfectly clear. Water Quality applies the same caution to aquaculture: two ponds of identical size and stocking density can produce abundant fish or kill their stock outright, the difference being water quality, not luck. Water Rights stops being optional the moment a community shares a source — the earliest legal codes, Hammurabi’s among them around 1750 BC, already governed who took water and when.
Finding and Assessing a Source
Narrowing down where water actually is, confirming it’s usable, and protecting it once chosen.
Lifting and Moving Water
Getting water out of the ground or a river, and the structures and measurements that move it from there.
- Shaduf
- Water Lifting
- Chain Pump (Dragon Backbone Pump)
- Hydraulic Ram Pump
- Gravity Systems
- Building Gravity-Fed Aqueducts
- Flow Measurement
Storing and Irrigating
Bridging the gap between when water falls and when it’s actually needed.
Safety, Quality, and Rights
Keeping water fit to drink, fit to raise fish in, and fairly shared once a source serves more than one household.