Calling All Engineers/Architects/Etc! Tech tree creation!

[lunasmeow]

So, I'm considering starting a Dungeon Core/Lord style quest, but the MC is going to have a decent background in needed things to try and out-science the local population.

As such, what kind of designs do you think you could come up with to assist without going full modern day tech?

Meaning, getting clean water for his dungeon without filters, nice repeating crossbows instead of guns, best way to make a smithy in a dungeon... hell, even a tank would be allowable if it is like the type in Assassin's Creed but actually feasible - some big monstrosity made of wood that could feasibly be invented and used without an engine.

Basically, the challenge is to come up with as many modern replacements for tech using only old-world materials... but you have full modern world knowledge of science, engineering, mathematics and the like.

Al for example, making clean water by channeling the water through semi-natural filters, an artificial sand filter or somesuch, then putting it into an aqueduct.

Consider that the dungeon can expand - it might start as a typical cavern, but it can grow to encompass any area. Forests, towns, plains...

The world is your oyster, you just can't have gunpowder, electricity, or engines of any sort, due to keeping fantasy vibes. Steampunk will probably be a big nono as well, though limited exceptions may be allowed. You're more likely to get away with it if you make it a magical enhancement instead - say eventually unlocking electricity with lightning magic instead of actual generators.

Magi-tech is for the future though, late term stuff. For now we're starting with low-level tech. I'm trying to build tech trees and such.

Any tech can be enhanced - the player will need to create farms for food, deal with animal husbandry, mining, forging, monster taming and breeding...

Basically, all the tech you'd want to have if you got stuck in an isekai. Modern clothing tech just so you aren't always itching being one of many. Ways to keep the place cool or warm as well as bug and pest free being another.

 

[Cybork]

Not an engineer, but I've watches enough primitive technology stuff to chip in.

Water can be filtered using a pot with a hole in the bottom. Place a thin piece of cloth over the hole and put crushed charcoal on top. Add a layer of sand for removing small sediment, then a layer of gravel for larger bits. Run some water through it a few times to wash out the microscopic dirt before using it. You'll still need to boil the water.

An automatic crossbow is either going to be very heavy and awkward or so weak you might as well not bother. If you're in a dungeon or cave environment the static version would work well for shutting down access to a tunnel as anything coming down it gets a couple of crossbow bolts a second coming their way. You want several people running the crank keeping this running in order to have both lethal energy and decent rate of fire. Something like an oversized crankshaft with half a dozen guys turning it as fast as they can, maybe a backup team so they can take a break.

The design might have something like two parallel chains between two pairs of cogs, each with a single tooth that draws back the string. Once it goes back far enough, the tooth is pulled down over the cog and the string is free to release the bolt. Have another pair of teeth halfway around the chain ready to meet the string just as it goes taught and start on the next shot. A slowly rotating cylinder can regulate the bolts being dropped. It has a hole cut down one side and is placed beneath a magazine that is directly overhead the trough the bolt goes in when firing. As it turns, it collects a bolt from the magazine when the hole it facing up, then drops it as the hole turns to face down, just in time for the string to release. You'd need a way to transfer power from the crankshaft to the cogs, but something like a bicycle chain might be rigid enough to avoid slipping. You can mount it on a wooden turtle-tank for mobility and protection. Maybe have the crankshaft turn its wheels when not operating the crossbow. Or have two crankshafts for redundancy when firing and one to turn each sides wheels when moving. All of these parts would have to be very heavy, bulky and over-engineered compared to modern stuff.

This would all require good metallurgy. Crucible steel can get quite good once you get the hang of it. You need a high temperature crucible - something made of fireclay (clay typically found under coal seams can be a good source of this). Add ore, charcoal to remove oxygen, and flux for other impurities (you can use limestone, ash, glass, sand, etc). Exact ratios will vary. Place it under a chimney next to a furnace, then pump air over the furnace. Partially blocking the chimney can reduce the heat lost at the cost of a less intense fire, but that's a matter of experimentation. For springier steels you'll want a little more silicon in the end product, for harder steels, moderate amounts of carbon.

The spinning wheel would be a huge improvement for fabric production and can be partially automated with waterwheels. You can find diagrams of how they work online easily enough. Same for mechanical looms.

The four field system is a big part of population growth during the industrial revolution. Wheat > turnips > barley > clover. The turnips and clover reintroduce nitrogen into the soil after the previous cross depleted it. Turnips can feed both livestock and people easily enough. Clover is good for grazing.

Really, creating a tech tree amounts to 'summary of the industrial revolution, minus steam and gunpowder', neither of which were completely necessary (though gunpowder made mining massively easier).

 

[lunasmeow]

Not an engineer, but I've watches enough primitive technology stuff to chip in.

Water can be filtered using a pot with a hole in the bottom. Place a thin piece of cloth over the hole and put crushed charcoal on top. Add a layer of sand for removing small sediment, then a layer of gravel for larger bits. Run some water through it a few times to wash out the microscopic dirt before using it. You'll still need to boil the water.

An automatic crossbow is either going to be very heavy and awkward or so weak you might as well not bother. If you're in a dungeon or cave environment the static version would work well for shutting down access to a tunnel as anything coming down it gets a couple of crossbow bolts a second coming their way. You want several people running the crank keeping this running in order to have both lethal energy and decent rate of fire. Something like an oversized crankshaft with half a dozen guys turning it as fast as they can, maybe a backup team so they can take a break.

The design might have something like two parallel chains between two pairs of cogs, each with a single tooth that draws back the string. Once it goes back far enough, the tooth is pulled down over the cog and the string is free to release the bolt. Have another pair of teeth halfway around the chain ready to meet the string just as it goes taught and start on the next shot. A slowly rotating cylinder can regulate the bolts being dropped. It has a hole cut down one side and is placed beneath a magazine that is directly overhead the trough the bolt goes in when firing. As it turns, it collects a bolt from the magazine when the hole it facing up, then drops it as the hole turns to face down, just in time for the string to release. You'd need a way to transfer power from the crankshaft to the cogs, but something like a bicycle chain might be rigid enough to avoid slipping. You can mount it on a wooden turtle-tank for mobility and protection. Maybe have the crankshaft turn its wheels when not operating the crossbow. Or have two crankshafts for redundancy when firing and one to turn each sides wheels when moving. All of these parts would have to be very heavy, bulky and over-engineered compared to modern stuff.

This would all require good metallurgy. Crucible steel can get quite good once you get the hang of it. You need a high temperature crucible - something made of fireclay (clay typically found under coal seams can be a good source of this). Add ore, charcoal to remove oxygen, and flux for other impurities (you can use limestone, ash, glass, sand, etc). Exact ratios will vary. Place it under a chimney next to a furnace, then pump air over the furnace. Partially blocking the chimney can reduce the heat lost at the cost of a less intense fire, but that's a matter of experimentation. For springier steels you'll want a little more silicon in the end product, for harder steels, moderate amounts of carbon.

The spinning wheel would be a huge improvement for fabric production and can be partially automated with waterwheels. You can find diagrams of how they work online easily enough. Same for mechanical looms.

The four field system is a big part of population growth during the industrial revolution. Wheat > turnips > barley > clover. The turnips and clover reintroduce nitrogen into the soil after the previous cross depleted it. Turnips can feed both livestock and people easily enough. Clover is good for grazing.

Really, creating a tech tree amounts to 'summary of the industrial revolution, minus steam and gunpowder', neither of which were completely necessary (though gunpowder made mining massively easier).

Click to shrink...

All true, but there are doubtlessly things we could invent now using basic materials that never got used, simply because by the time we had the knowledge, we had already gotten better materials.

What kind of improvements might we give a town or castle wall, for example, if we had all our current knowledge and we still used them because planes, bombs, and missiles weren't a thing?

 

[Cybork]

There's a limit to how far modern knowledge will help when technology is still limited. Medieval people weren't stupid and they generally made the most of what they had. For the available tech, a castle wall is about as good as it gets for defense. Portland cement is an improvement on lime mortar and that's from the early 19th century. Maybe the PC might remember to use pozzolan in place of sand for Roman cement. Crucible steel and the four field system are all doable relatively quickly for better materials and eventual manpower. Some basic farming tools like a cradle scythe can be done immediately. Other, more complex machines like a horse-drawn harvester will take time to build and test, but would reduce manpower requirements once introduced (and probably kick off a luddite-like movement). Semaphore towers might be doable depending on terrain and population density.

Unless gunpowder is a thing or magitech becomes somewhat widespread, battles are still going to come down to columns of men hammering each other. Basic technologies will help with the equipment and logistics, but the nature of the game won't change much. Better steel means better armour and heavy crossbows can become more widespread, but are still heavy and so will have mobility issues. Better farming means more, larger men and horses. Better roads and canals means you keep all this supplied (until you hit enemy territory). Less manpower needed for farming might allow a standing army of professionals.

The big technological ones would be the agricultural revolution (the four field system + some mechanisation) allowing population growth, the production line, improved communication and administration allowing changes to be rolled out rapidly and economy of scale to be implemented. This can be supplemented with farming machinery to free up more workers for factories, mines, armies, etc. Without explosives mining is going to be an issue. Without trains, canals will be the biggest help with logistics but are dependent on terrain.

Social and economic reforms will help speed things along. Make capital easy to access for major projects. A reliable banking system so people trust it enough to allow the banks to invest their money. Social mobility that isn't dependent on the nobility (they might need to be destroyed, or merely quietly displaced by the new tradesman classes). Merchant 'lords' were already a thing in much of medieval Europe anyway.

 

[lunasmeow]

Magi-tech is definitely a thing, it is the only way for me to allow true advancement over time while still keeping the fantasy feel.

 

[Ranma Kusanagi]

So, I'm considering starting a Dungeon Core/Lord style quest, but the MC is going to have a decent background in needed things to try and out-science the local population.

As such, what kind of designs do you think you could come up with to assist without going full modern day tech?

Click to shrink...

Okay, buckle up, cause this is gonna be a long one and I don't use TLDR's.

Let's look at what you're wanting in a list, shall we? We have here, in order:
-getting clean water for his dungeon without filters
-nice repeating crossbows instead of guns
-best way to make a smithy in a dungeon
-a tank would be allowable if it is like the type in Assassin's Creed
-can't have gunpowder, electricity, or engines of any sort, due to keeping fantasy vibes
-Steampunk will probably be a big nono as well, though limited exceptions may be allowed
-Magi-tech is for the future though, late term stuff
-will need to create farms for food
-deal with animal husbandry
-mining, forging, monster taming and breeding...
-all the tech you'd want to have if you got stuck in an isekai
-Modern clothing tech just so you aren't always itching being one of many
-Ways to keep the place cool or warm as well as bug and pest free

Now, let's group these into Tech, and Settings (cause my OCD like to stab me in the brain with a rusty spoon sometimes and I can't help myself), and go over each of them.

Tech:
-getting clean water for his dungeon without filters (modern ones, you mean?)
-nice repeating crossbows instead of guns
-best way to make a smithy in a dungeon
-a tank would be allowable if it is like the type in Assassin's Creed
-will need to create farms for food
-deal with animal husbandry, mining, forging, monster taming and breeding...
-Modern clothing tech just so you aren't always itching being one of many
-Ways to keep the place cool or warm as well as bug and pest free

This one is pretty self-explanatory and is covered by this entire post, so I'll leave it here and drop it.
-all the tech you'd want to have if you got stuck in an isekai

Settings:
-can't have gunpowder, electricity, or engines of any sort, due to keeping fantasy vibes
-Steampunk will probably be a big nono as well, though limited exceptions may be allowed
-Magi-tech is for the future though, late term stuff

Okay, first in the Tech group. Water. As Cybork implied (thanks!), it's not very difficult to create natural filters for getting clean(ish) water for drinking and other purposes. As long as you have a consistent source and the right materials (sand, charcoal, etc...) you can make a primitive, yet functional water filter. Making sure it's clean beyond that would take boiling it at minimum and ways of storing it in clean, sterilized containers. Without modern chemical treatments or magical handwavium, getting truly clean water in a medieval setting is impossible. However, since this is a Dungeon setting, I would imagine the water source is from the dungeon itself and could have some amount of magical handwavium built into it's very nature. If that's not the case and the source is from outside, then unless you've got magic cleaning the water, a natural filter is the best you're going to get. Side note, sometimes you don't want completely clean water precisely because of what's in it (i.e. mineral water for drinking, medicinal purposes, forging high quality steel and so on...). In addition, having a handwavium water source can lead straight into one of my later points...

Next we have repeating crossbows. You don't necessarily need a massive or cumbersome device for it to be deadly. The chinese repeating crossbow from the 4th century BC is small, hand-held, and very weak. However, it may have been used with poison-tipped bolts, so just breaking the skin was enough to potentially kill. Poison dart traps are practically a staple of D&D, so why not? For something with a bit more punch, I'd suggest looking into JoergSprave on youtube for inspiration. His "Instant Legolas" design is really something and completely possible to build in a medieval setting.

Next we have the smithy. This is one of my favorites, as I personally came up with a mobile forge design I used in a D&D setting that was entirely self-powered with very little magic involved. Needless to say, the DM didn't like me single-handedly introducing the Industrial Era into his low-magic fantasy setting! So, when it comes to a smithy for crafting things, the heart of the entire operation is the forge. A working forge needs 3 things in order to be useful: Sturdy construction, raw material to craft, and a heat source. A real forge is usually built from stone to withstand the heat, but since this is a dungeon I'd imagine that's not too much of a problem, hmm? Finding a source of raw material means either getting some from the outside, or using a dungeon-sourced ore vein, and if the ore is in raw form, you need a smelter to process it into any kind of usable material like ingots. The heat source is the most critical part, since without heat, you ain't forge'n nuthin! This can come from a wood/coal fed fire, which means wood/coal for fuel, or a magical heat source. I prefer bending thermodynamics over a barrel, but if you care to include some real-world logistics into your system, then by all means! This is where that fancy water source comes in real handy. Handwavium water source means things like forever powered water wheels, which means never-ending mechanical power, which means automatic bellows, forging trip-hammers, water-driven wood saws, grain mills, looms, water pumps... Basically, with a infinite water source, it means: Congratulations! You've entered the Industrial Era: Hydraulic Edition. Now, on the other hand, if you had a magic-powered perpetual HEAT source...

(Side note to the smithy, water wheels with early geared mechanical systems have existed since the time of the Greeks in the Classical Era. They have historically been used for damn near every version of industrial production of goods ever devised, then and now. Wikipedia has a good list of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watermill#Applications)

Sadly, the next item on the list is Leonardo's tank. Which, by your own specifications, can't exist because you've ruled out gunpowder. Of course, even with gunpowder, the tank from the game is entirely ridiculous in terms of what it was shown it could do. Unless every single one of those guns was a fully-automatic breach-loading weapon, you'd get precisely ONE full volley. Period. No, the game version is utterly useless IRL, and only even remotely feasible with magitech. What I would suggest instead would be some lightly modified Siege Engines. Take something like a armored cart or a really short siege tower, and put a ballista or catapult on a rotating base on the top of it, and use draft animals or people to move it. There you go, early medieval tank.

Traditionally, farming is done on the surface, which dungeons tend to not do, but who am I to naysay someone bucking tradition? Aside from stuff like crop rotation and the four-fields method brought up by Cybork (thanks again!), farms need sunlight and irrigation (oh look, infinite water source~!). If you can pull off an artificial source of sunlight in the dungeon, great! Maybe steal a few ideas from The Gamer, ala bounded fields/instant dungeons? And as long as you have that, and a good source of water (INFINITE!) to use for you irrigation, you can keep your crops happy and healthy, ensuring productive harvests for as long as you want.

I'm not much for things involving ugly giant bags of mostly water, so animal husbandry, monster taming and breeding are a bit outside my wheel house. At a glance, I'd say you could probably roll those three things together. Capturing and taming creatures, domesticating and breeding them, and finally putting them to use as either food, producers of food and goods, and muscle power. This can be done to nearly any creature you can imagine, just like how we did it IRL with dogs, horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and so on. As long as you avoid the squicky side of the idea, like involving humans and other sapient beings, you should be good to do what ever you want. Not that you can't do stuff like that, just that fantasizing about having/being sapient livestock and actually having it happen are two entirely different things!

Mining is a interesting subject. IRL, it's been going on for literally ages and has massive amounts of information of the subject, which I would have to spend another literal age properly explaining though my limited understanding, so internet is your best friend? In game terms, like with dungeons, I tend to lean toward the Skyrim style of things. You pick up a pickaxe, stand next to a ore vein, whack at it a few times, and a chunk of ore lands on the ground/in your inventory. Making it more realistic involves breaking down the steps of how the ore gets from point A to point B, oftentimes the wall to the forge.

Example scenario: "Valuable ore in the wall? Go grab a pick and murderize the wall until it falls out. Now get that shiny good stuff over to the smelter so I can make even more shiny good stuff, so pick it up and carry it. Eh? Too heavy? Well then, dump it in a wheelbarrow and scoot! What? That's too much work? Well then go slap down some track, build a cart and use that! Oh? Now you want a easier way of murderizing that wall? Fine! Here's a digging machine powered by (INFINITE!) water that does all the murderizing for you. Now what!? The wall is too far away for the digger to murderize? Well just move it closer then! ...What do you mean it's too heavy to move? OF ALL THE...grr, fine! Put the digger on wheels and use the tracks to move it closer, you lazy lump! Hmm, that hole in the wall is looking a little unstable. You! Get some supports in there before the whole ceiling falls down and crushes anything important, namely me!". See what I mean?

Next we have clothing, another interesting subject. IRL, cloth in the medieval age seems to have been of a higher overall quality then many modern thinker have previously thought. It wasn't always itchy, like many believe, and in some cases it was superior to the modern version. Case in point, Linen. There is new evidence that medieval linen was in some cases actually superior to any modern version produced today. It was one of the most widely used materials for non-metal armor and was surprisingly effective for it's weight and cost. Even when better armor was created, they still used cloth armor as a padding layer underneath chainmail and plate armor. Everyday clothing was often more comfortable then typically thought of and peasantry were not always filthy and covered in dirt and mud like hollywood likes to claim! They DID in fact know about hygiene and would bath every day if they could! And the high-quality cloth was even better! Linin, cotten and flax were all well known in the middle ages and silk was a prized material for nobility and the upper classes. There's a reason people use the phrase "smooth as silk", and it ain't because of silk panties! Nearly everything they made back then was hand made and, because of that, they learned how to make cloth in a quality that we in the modern age take entirely for granted with our modern manufacturing, and even to this day, some of the techniques and methods they used back then have been lost and are yet to be reproduced! Of course, if you really want "modern" cloth for stuff to wear, I'm sure you can make (INFINITE!) water-powered looms and such to make modern-style material, right?

Ways to keep the place cool or warm? Oh, GODS, there is SO MUCH information I could share about construction and architecture that your ears would be bleeding before I was even HALF done, so instead I'll point you at a few web links and share a (paraphrased) story my mom told me about when she was living in Germany. At the time, my parents where living by a US airforce base where my dad was stationed near Bitburg in the 1970's. They were staying with/next to a local family who had been there for a long time and the houses were all of a older style. One of the things my mom noticed was that the walls of the house were really thick, and I mean like 'thicc', and were made of dirt or stone or something instead of wood framing like most modern houses. She asked why and was told that is was for managing the heat/cold of the house. It turns out that building houses in an old way like that actually kept the internal temperature at a nearly constant even level, regardless of the season (the Earth shelter and Thermal Mass links can explain a bit more on it). They also had these really nifty water-based heaters they would use when they needed them that had rocks inside them. When you had hot water inside them, they would heat up the rocks, which would retain the heat and radiate it for a long time. Younger me thought this was one of the coolest things ever and helped spur my interest in architecture and building design. Here's a few links to look into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_shelter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_mass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_turf_house
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattle_and_daub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_architectural_styles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_construction

Now, with this primarily (presumably) being a dungeon, a lot of the advantages with 'earth sheltering', and few if any of the disadvantages, will be in play. Especially the more magic you have involved! So heat/cold wise? Even with little-to-no magic, I'm pretty sure your covered, and that's not even begining to cover things like geo-thermal taps!

(Side note, if you want some ready made or easily modified material for research purposes, just check out the D&D 3.5ed Dungeon Masters guide (LOL!), and the Stronghold Builders guide. Both are perfect for ideas for dungeon/castle building!)

As being bug and pest free? Well...it's a capital-D dungeon, right? Can a sapient murderizing meat-grinder in the shape of a building even have a bug/pest problem? Pretty much any non-adventurer life form that exists inside the dungeon is already part of it, and if it isn't, it will very quickly get brutaliciously murderdeathkilled and become part of it anyway, right? Otherwise, I'd say just dig into the bag of GM/Author Handwavium tricks and just say...magical bug repellent spell rune array thingamadohicky? I don't know, it's the whatsit that does the thingy that makes bugs and pests say "NOPE!" and NOPE the feck out of there?


Okay! Now we get to Settings stuff (woo!).

You're wanting no "gunpowder, electricity, or engines of any sort, due to keeping fantasy vibes". Here we run into a few sticklers for people like me who love munchkining the feck out of things for shits and giggles. In order to avoid confusion, I would have to ask: Fantasy vibes? Define "Fantasy", please? Any hardcore D&D player (like my big bro!) would tell you that gunpowder, electricity, and engines of various kinds have all been part of D&D since the very beginning of the franchise. Take Eberon, for example. They have steampunk tech, skyships, the magic equivalent of robots, even a continent-spanning magical "lightning rail" providing high speed transportation! Magical bullet trains! The core guide books have rules for gunpowder weapons, both early and modern versions, and even non-magical energy weapons. There are rules and settings for robots, spaceships, and even interstellar travel! Heck, one of the campaign settings is exploring a crashed starship, which is the origin of the Clone spell. Seriously, I'm not making this up. The 8th level necromancy spell "Clone" was developed by studying the technology found on a crashed starship from the City of the Gods adventure in 1976 with Dave Arneson being the DM for Gary Gygax and Robert Kuntz. This is not mentioning ANY of the literally thousands of other fantasy books in existence that range in technology levels from Stone Age to damn near Post-Singularity Futuristic. Everything from living emodiments of Clark's Laws to "I sneeze and a planet blows up" without a speck of tech in sight. (Seriously, fecking Cultivation light novels...)

So with "fantasy" being a very, very loose subject, you might want to narrow down what your after in your setting by juuuust a little bit.

So how do we keep a MC, presumably from a modern era with knowledge of modern science and technology, from brute-force hacking his way into gunpowder shooting, electricity zapping, engine roaring goodness? Well, the first thought that comes to mind is a tried and true limiter that is a bane to munchkins everywhere. Research and Development time. Unlike dirty, rotten, cheating PA Commander/SI's, fantasy MC's tend to not have things like handwavium Progenitor-clarktech bullshit to just "scan" something and somehow magically know exactly how something works, how to use the thing, how to make the thing, how to make all the parts that make up the thing, and how the science behind the thing works, and all without having to do any of the actual research it would take to actually know all that stuff about the thing. Seriously. Feck. You. ALL. (*pause. strangles OCD, beats it to death with a rusty pipe, buries it in the backyard, pisses on it*) Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, R&D. See, anyone who isn't a FiLtHy No-gOoD--ahem, who doesn't have handwavium excuses as to why they can miraculously build whatever the thing is, is going to have to do things the hard way. Pure, untainted, factual, scientific, research.

A fair amount of people can tell you that gunpowder(black powder) is made of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter/potassium nitrate, but...is this MC going to know off the top of their head the exact ratios that make up the proper stuff? Even then, modern smokeless gunpowder is another thing all together, in what it's made of, and how you make it. Black powder was first invented in the 9th century in China, Europe didn't get it until the 13th century, and early versions of the modern stuff didn't even exist until the 19th century, and the stuff we use today was developed in the mid-20th century. That's something around 1,100 years of R&D with who knows how many people working on it. Is this MC really going to do any better, starting from scratch? Without a feck-ton of magic and a very helpful dungeon-master/core-user-interface, I kinda doubt it.

The same can be said of electricity, by which I'm presuming you mean things like light bulbs (which were not invented by Edison and don't you DARE TRY TO TELL ME OTH-calm, calm, inner peace...), and electric motors. Is this MC going to know every little detail of crafting and manufacturing components of electrical devices? Granted, a lot of cheating can be done with magical lightning and basic copper wires, but nothing like modern stuff without a lot of R&D.

Engines on the other hand? Well, there I'm going to have to disagree a smidge. See, water-powered anything could technically be considered as "engine powered", and the conceptual understanding of what steam is has existed in some form since the 1st century AD. Just take a look at the Aeolipile. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) This thing was made back when people still thought that the Earth was the center of the universe! Now, if you can make something like this, and add wheels on the sides of the central ball-thing so you can run a rope/belt/chain around? That right there, my friend, is a 1st century Steam Engine, and you can bet any isekai'ed MC worth his munchkin badge is going to min-max the FECK out of that thing. Especially if they have access to magic.

Case in point, that mobile forge thing I mentioned earlier? All it took to break the game was one wonderous item to create a free, limitless source of mechanical energy, two spells to turn the thing into a steam engine, a third spell to create unlimited mechanical energy powered purely by magic, and a fourth spell cast repeatedly if I couldn't be arsed to collect the materials to build the fecking thing myself. The entire thing fit into the back of a standard wagon, that could power itself, drive like a car, AND attach to other thing to power them as well. I gave it extra armor and added a steam-powered cannon in a turret on the top, just to add insult to injury. That GM hated me after that. You don't even want to KNOW what my bro did to a Folding Boat.

"Steampunk will probably be a big nono as well"? Well...I think I've made my point. Once that genie's outta the bottle, there's no way you're stopping that without handwavium or author fiat. Just make it take longer to research/develop the really good stuff. Steam engines didn't reach their true peak until after the 1930's.

Magi-tech being for future, late term stuff? Yes, I agree completely. There is some wiggle-room for really basic stuff, but magitech is really just another name for clarktech. Magic already breaks reality on some level or another, depending on your setting. Get it high enough? You break multiverses of realities. So yea, spoon feed that shit, drop by drop. Remember, R&D times are the biggest handbrake you're ever going to get as a GM/Author.


Well, that's about all the advice I have for now and...holy shite this is over 3700 words long! I can practically feel my brain oozing outta my ears, so I'ma gonna go now. Good luck with your stuff, I hope I was helpful in some way. I'll be around if you'd like to chat, but I'll be trying to not think very hard for about...a week or so? Meh, cheers and seeya.

 

[Motorata]

Not an engineer but i have courses about water depuration, an easy way to depurate water withouth any technology is using lakes to decant solids in suspension
First take your flow of water (i am asuming an underground river since this is a dungeon) and make it pass trought some kind of grating to stop big solids (sticks, big rocks, trash from whoever lives on the dungeon) from coming into the water, after that to clean out solids in suspension like dirt and things like that you can use a natural lake, if the lake is big enough(depends of the flow of water that you want but i wouldn´t consider necessary to expecify this isn´t a formal project the water would have several days beteween entering the lake and going out to continue the flow so all the dirt and things like that would decant to the bottom of the lake, the outflow of water should be at water level, after that the lake would also eliminate most of the microorganism but you must also boil it so the water its completly safe.
Another big thing its that you must never ever trow trash/excrement in a place that it is above where you get water, this is a thing that people didn´t know before and it caused countless deaths.

Another thing its to make a wheelbarrow, as the son of a farmer i can´t tell you how many times this thing have saved my back, in china had then in the 5 century but here in Europe we took until the 12 century to invent it if it is early medieval tech they may don´t have it, it is a tool that can save you hours of work easily.If your setting doesn´t have it your protagonist will be the hero of workers all around the globe when they heard of it

About farming animals i can only give you advice based on the pig farm of my family so this isn´t really technical but a few things that you should know
You should have cows for milk and leather and chicken for eggs but if you want to produce meat the pig has a efficient grain to meat ratio and they are easy to take care of ,they are resistant to sickness, they can procrate in stressfull conditions, they can and will eat anything that they can bite, his ideal temperature its 23 ºC just 2 grades above us and their skin and meat its so similar to humans that you can use it to train medics in suturing wounds with that.

For making the farm i would recomend a enclousure down stream of your city, intensive farming would be more efficient but you can´t recreate an intensive farm withouth the means of providing water to the pigs and i don´t think that plumbing its technologycaly feasible ( if it is we can do it withouth any more technology) so a big space near a river and to not endanger the pigs we would build something similar to an irrigation dich so the pigs can drink withouth risking being near the river.His diet would be high density grain like corn, if they eat pasture they will fatten slower, in modern times we have and efficiency of going from a piglet to a 117 kg grown pig in 3,5 months more or less but we also use modified grain that have a 21% of protein(the same as cow meat) so lets say that it will take your pigs like 5 months to fully grow.
Another thing to remember if you somehow get new pigs to what you have in your farm and the pigs are grown DO NOT MIX THEM, they will literally kill each other and eat the body.Also thats another thing if you don´t retire the bodys of dead pigs they will eat the body in a few days, the italian mafia used pigs to dispose of bodys because they don´t leave anything behind.