Artesian Well Field

Most idle games hand you a bottomless well. Artesian gives you one real aquifer — a single shared water table, drawn in cross-section — and dares you to pump it hard without drying it out. Every well you sink draws from the same basin. Pumping lowers the table; recharge slowly lifts it back. You watch the blue waterline move live in the section as your pumps run. The catch is depth: a well only lifts water while the table sits above its intake, so deeper wells keep pumping when the table falls — and your shallow ones grey out and run dry the instant the water drops below them. That is the whole tension. Pump faster than the basin recharges and you are in OVER-DRAFT: the reales pour in now, but the table is falling and your cheap shallow wells will die first. Balance it with catchment galleries that boost recharge, deeper pumps that lower every intake, and deep cisterns that make the basin bigger so each barrel is a smaller sip. Grow the works: sink deeper wells, widen the bore for more barrels a second, lay pipeline and filtration for more reales per barrel. When a basin is finally spent, Sink a New Basin to bank deeds — a permanent multiplier on every barrel's price — and choose where to sink next: the survey offers three sites, and their geology matters. An Alluvial Fan drinks the rain but holds little; a Fossil Aquifer is a vast sealed battery that barely recharges — over-draft it on purpose; Karst Galleries pulse with surging springs; Fractured Shale lets every intake sit deeper; Salt Pan Deeps sell their brine dear. Master all five and the surveyor's bonus compounds forever. Then spend your deeds at the Land Office — if you dare. Each deed held lifts every barrel's price, but a deed spent buys a permanent water-rights charter instead: the Doctrine of Capture rewards pumping a falling table, the Conservation Easement means a basin can never be fully spent — and each bars the other forever. Claim a ninth well site, a toll aqueduct, a homestead grant. Your charters, your doctrine, your desert. And the sky is never still. Every basin turns through a weather year — a MONSOON that floods recharge in, an easy GREEN season, a tightening DRY, and a DROUGHT that starves the table until only your deepest wells hold. The season strip forecasts what's coming, so you learn to pump hard in the wet and hunker down in the dry. To ride out the droughts, build a STORM CELLAR: it quietly banks the monsoon's surplus while the table runs high, and when the drought bites you open the sluice and pour it all back at once — drought insurance you earn yourself, not a handout. It runs while you're away: the pumps keep lifting, the seasons keep turning and the table keeps recharging, and the field pays you on return. And every dawn brings a cloudburst — a once-a-day claim that floods the table back to full and banks a gift that grows with your run of mornings. • One shared water table you can actually draw down — and dry out • Wells at real depths: deeper bores outlast the falling table • Over-draft tension you can see live in the cross-section • A living weather year: monsoon, green, dry and drought all bend the recharge • Build a Storm Cellar: bank the monsoon's surplus, release it in a drought • Catchment, cisterns and deeper pumps to keep the basin in balance • Idle-friendly: the field pumps offline and pays you on return • A Dawn Cloudburst every day: flood the table full and bank a streak-scaled gift • Sink a New Basin prestige banks permanent deeds and a larger aquifer • Survey five geologies — alluvial fan, fossil aquifer, karst, shale, salt pan — every basin plays differently • The Land Office: spend deeds on permanent water-rights charters; rival doctrines bar each other forever • Fully offline, no account, nothing collected Sink deep. Pump wisely.