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Mechanical Power is the system that turns manual production into automated or accelerated production. A workshop without power still works, but every step is done by hand. Attaching powered equipment either speeds a process up or takes the player out of the loop entirely, which is what lets a settlement scale its output past what its members can personally grind out.
Powered Structures
Each powered structure takes a specific attachment. The attachment is what converts available power into useful work.
Structure | Attachment | Effect |
|---|---|---|
Sawbuck | Powered Saw Mill | Converts logs into planks by powered sawing |
Anvil | Trip Hammer | Shapes iron ingots through automated hammering, improving smithing efficiency |
Forge | Bellow | Heats iron ingots to 100 percent heat, against 50 percent without a bellow |
Heating Vat | Bellow | Heats water faster and allows higher quality boiled items |
Smashing Plate | Stone Trip Hammer | Crushes placed ores into fragments |
Grain Mill | Handcrank Adapter | Automates the milling process |
What Power Actually Buys
The effects fall into two groups. Some attachments remove labour: the powered saw mill, the trip hammer, and the handcrank adapter all take a job that a player would otherwise stand and repeat and turn it into something that runs on its own. Others raise a ceiling: the bellow on a forge doubles achievable heat from fifty to one hundred percent, and the bellow on a heating vat is what makes higher quality boiled goods possible at all.
That second group is the more important one for a war effort. A settlement without a bellow is capped on what it can produce, not merely slowed down, which makes powered smithing a prerequisite for equipping an army rather than a convenience.
Power and the Supply Chain
Powered production sits in the middle of the chain that runs from raw material to finished equipment. Ore comes out of the underworld or off the surface, gets crushed at a smashing plate, smelted into ingots, then worked at a forge and anvil into weapons and armour. Power appears at the crushing step, the heating step, and the shaping step, so a settlement missing one attachment has a bottleneck that shows up further down the line rather than where the equipment is missing.
The same logic applies to food. A grain mill with a handcrank adapter feeds the cooking chain that keeps an army in the field, which makes it a logistics structure as much as a domestic one.