The past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with water devices. I’ve found ways to filter out puddles while preserving larger and deeper automatic lakes using Composite Type devices or Taps. I’ll share some of my results and many of the macros I created in the process. Through it all, I found myself wishing that the Create Water device (and to some degree the Flow Restructure device) had evaporation parameters. I tried to apply the idea using the Precipitation Map but I can never tell if it’s doing anything, and it never seems to affect the formation of puddles.
To me, it seems logical that all bodies of water require steady inflows to sustain them, and small, isolated depressions typically lack that even if the Headwater Area is enough for them to form when water is flowing, either because of precipitation or snowmelt. If neither is present, then puddles ought to dry up fairly rapidly, while streams and rivers with more established channels drink up most of what water remains.
I don’t know how difficult this concept would be to implement, but something similar is going on with snowmelt. If this is already factored into Precipitation, I’d be satisfied to just learn how to use it more effectively. For now, I’ll keep doing the extra work to filter out puddles by their depth, but my best results require at least two Create Waters, each devoted to either Rivers or Lakes.