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Mechanical Power
August 6, 2026 at 10:15 PM
Initial version (2026-08-07)
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.
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 |
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.
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.
