Inlet Pump

Pumps move liquid without you digging a channel for it. Place an Inlet Pump where the liquid is, an Outlet Pump where you want it, join the two with Wire, and every pulse of that wire carries a small slug of fluid across. A Switch gives you one transfer at a time; a timer is what turns the pair into an actual pipeline that runs on its own. Water, lava, honey and shimmer all move the same way.

The sprite lies about what the inlet does. It looks like a nozzle that draws from beside it, but it drains whatever is sitting directly on top of its own footprint, evenly across all four tiles. The outlet is the same in reverse, spawning fluid over its own square. So the inlet has to be underneath the liquid, not next to it, and if the outlet ends up fully submerged it stops working until the level drops.

A single wire run can carry several inlets and several outlets before the game stops counting them, and adding more of both raises the transfer rate directly, with no extra wire acting as pipe. Go past the limit and the ones nearest your trigger along the wire are the ones that fire, so place the switch or timer at the end of the line you actually want running.

An inlet with no outlet on its circuit does nothing, which is useful. You can leave one permanently sunk in a reservoir and only wire the outlet when you want a fill.

• A lava curtain across a doorway kills anything that walks in and can be shut off from inside. The same layout run backwards drains an area you want to build in.
• Filling a fishing pond takes a small reservoir and some patience instead of a hundred bucket trips.
• A liquid sensor under the outlet fires every time fluid arrives and can send that signal back to the inlet, so the system clocks itself without a timer.
• Shimmer moves through pumps, which is the practical way to relocate it out of the Aether and into your base long before the Bottomless Shimmer Bucket is available.

On current versions lava leaves placed pumps alone. On old-gen console and 3DS it destroys any pump it covers, so drain or wall off the lava before mining one out. Lava also eats most platforms, and a pump standing on one goes down with it. Obsidian, Stone and Ash Wood platforms are the ones that survive.

Those same old versions had outlets giving back slightly more than the inlets took. Looping the circuit therefore multiplies liquid from almost nothing, which is how players there build infinite lava or honey supplies and mass-produce obsidian and honey blocks off a single starter pool.