What does this mod do?

This mod provides water turrets that can be loaded either with water or with steam. These early turrets are cheap to make and available as soon as turrets have been researched. They are not meant to be used offensively, but are very useful for defense because they can slow down enemy hordes, so your other turrets have more time to kill enemies.

Water turrets that are loaded with water cause only very little damage -- but they can also extinguish fire. On the other hand, water turrets loaded with steam won't care about fire, but they deal more damage because steam is hot. Actually, the damage caused by steam will increase with steam temperature, so hook up your turrets to some really hot steam if you want to give visitors a steamy welcome!

There are also fire-extinguisher turrets that will require more advanced technology. These turrets won't attack enemies at all, but they are much better at fighting fire than the normal turrets. Unlike water turrets, they will rotate in a full circle (360°), so you won't have to build as many turrets to cover all directions.

All turrets may also clean up the puddles of acid spitters and worms have left on the ground. This has to be enabled in the settings.

Start-up settings

Interval to check turrets

Smaller values will give the mod more control about what the turrets attack. You may increase this value if you have trouble with low UPS. However, turrets will only check for new fires and acid splashes in this interval, so if this value is too big, turrets may seem to ignore these targets even though they are right in front of them.

Turrets clean up acid splashes

If enabled, all turrets will look for puddles of acid on the ground within their range -- no matter what fluid they are loaded with. However, when cleaning up acid the same modifiers as for default targets will be applied, so water turrets loaded with hot steam or fire extinguisher turrets will finish the job faster than water turrets that shoot just water.

Water turret range/Fire extinguisher turret range

Increasing the range of turrets will also increase the area that needs to be scanned for fires and acid splashes. The default range of 50 tiles should give sufficiently good results, but if you'd really want to push the limit, you can do so on your own risk!

Choose next target based on enemy health

You can choose to prefer the target with the lowest or with the highest amount of remaining health points. The default is to ignore the health.

Water turret color/Fire extinguisher turret color

If you don't like the default colors of the turrets, you can assign them another color here. You may use RGB codes, either in HTML notation (e.g. "#40adbf" -- the leading "#" is optional) or as a comma-separated list of decimal numbers in the range 0…255 (e.g. "63.8, 172.7, 191.2" for the same color).

Water turret pressure modifier/Fire extingusher turret pressure modifier

Increasing the pressure will make the turrets shoot faster and increase the amount of damage to enemies, fire, and acid splashes. However, it will also drive up the turrets' fluid consumption!

Fire extinguisher turret damage modifier

Fire extinguisher turrets are more expensive than normal water turrets, so they should be better at putting out fire and cleaning up acid splashes as well. Use this to choose how much better than water turrets they will be!

Modifier for steam damage

Use this to change the base value of the damage done by water turrets shooting steam. The actual steam damage is calculated by this formula:

final_damage = water_damage * steam_damage_modifier * (steam_temperature/165)

In case you wonder about the 165: That's the temperature of steam coming out of a vanilla boiler. So, if you use steam with a lower temperature, it will do less damage.

Slow-down factor

Mobile targets hit by water or steam will be slowed down to this value (in percent).

Don't hurt worms/Don't hurt spawners

By default, spawners and worms won't be attacked by water turrets and get full immunity against damage from water or steam.

Use Hardened pipes

This setting is only available if Hardened pipes is active. When it's enabled, you'll need to research hardened pipes to unlock the technology for fire extinguisher turrets because they will be needed in the recipe.

Add support for GVV

This setting is only available if Lua API global Variable Viewer (gvv) is active. When it's enabled, you can inspect the global table of "Water Turrets". You'll probably only ever need this if you want to help debug this mod.

Map settings

Activate logging

This will enable crazily heavy logging that may blow up the size of your log file to hundreds of MB in no time at all if you have many turrets. You should only ever enable this if you want to help debugging this mod!

Extinguish fires in this radius

Adjust the radius around the targeted position within which fires will be extinguished. Setting this to a low value will make things look more realistic. However, you can set this to a higher value if you want to improve performance: more fires extinguished at once will mean less work for the script!

Turrets slow down everybody

By default, if you get into the way of a stream from one of your own turrets, you will be slowed down just the same as your enemies. Use this to give players and vehicles of your own force immunity against the slow-down effect!

Target preferred by Water turrets

Set how you want water turrets shooting water to behave. They can look for fires or for enemies first (if none are found, they still will go for the next target available). However, this relies on scripting, so if you want to improve performance, you should let the game decide what target to look for!

Localization

This mod is available in English and Russian (still a lot missing).

Compatibility with other mods

This mod should work with other mods introducing new enemies, like Armoured Biters, Explosive Biters, Natural Evolution Enemies, or Rampant. It should also work with mods like Wildfire that will ignite fires randomly in the world.

If the Lua API global Variable Viewer (gvv) is active, you can use it to inspect the global table of this mod.

Hardened pipes

If compatibility with Hardened pipes is enabled, making fire extinguisher turrets will become much harder as well: You'll need more research to unlock the recipe, the recipe will become more expensive, and setting up production of the turrets will get far more complicated. So why on Nauvis should you use that mod?
For one thing, you may like the challenge that producing the turrets with hardened pipes will become. If that's not enough to convince you, you may appreciate that using hardened pipes in the recipe will make the turrets more resistant or even immune against several damage types. :-)

Credits

Credits go to DellAquila, who made the original version of this mod. (He transferred ownership to me recently.) As of version 0.18.2, I've changed his prototypes a bit, added new ones, and implemented a control script to take care of targeting and looking for fires.
I'm very grateful to eradicator, who helped me out with great ideas and explanations while I was working on this mod. He also had a trick or two up his sleeve that he was kind enough to share with me. :-)
I'm indebted to Honktown for explanaining why fires behave the way they do. He also found a solution to a particular problem I had with combat-robots (Don't ask what they have to do with this mod!) that I couldn't solve myself, and found some stupid bugs I hadn't noticed before.
Thanks a lot to darkfrei for helping me finally understand how to make graphics!
Thanks a lot to Fr_Dae for providing the French translation, lots of testing before new releases, and some valuable advice for improvements (even if I couldn't implement everything yet). He's also made a blueprint for water and extinguisher turrets production that looks quite interesting. :-)