Building the Dam in CityVille

Slowly but surely, the Dam feature has started rolling out to users in CityVille, but watch out: You need to be at least level 50 to receive this new source of hydroelectric power. Once you've received the Dam, you'll need to start the lengthy process of building it.

First and foremost, there's only one particular portion of the river (to the right of your town) that the Dam can sit on, and you must have your town already touching this square in order to build it. That's right, you might be looking at expanding your city before you can ever build your Dam, as seen below.

From there, you'll need to collect quite a few building materials to actually set the Dam into motion:

14 Rotors
14 Flood Gates
14 Turbines
14 Canal Locks
14 Generators

After this has been done, you'll still need to "whack" your Dam 15 times to finish the building process. In this way, we're actually looking at a reverse of the normal business process, where you whack the frame and then collect items, but I digress. Once you complete the 15 whacks, you'll instantly receive 31 free energy, launching you back up to a full bar to make up for the trouble. This extra point brings your current maximum energy total to 31, but there's a catch.

Overall, the Dam can be thought of as a sort of long-term business, without the customers. You'll need to routinely supply the Dam - at least once every 48 hours - to keep your boosted energy cap, or else you'll lose your bonus. To be specific, for each day after the first 48 hours of supplying you fail to re-supply the Dam, you'll lose a point, eventually dropping you all the way back down to the original maximum energy of 30. It should be noted that your energy level will never, ever decrease below 30; instead, the range of 31-37 energy points is the fluid portion.

Finally, if you're a daily active player, once you reach the current new maximum of 37 energy points, if you continue to resupply the Dam (as often as every 12 hours), you'll simply maintain the boosted cap. Unfortunately, it won't increase any higher than 37, no matter how much we may want it to.

As I can expect this fluidity to the maximum energy cap to frustrate some players, we'll make sure to keep an eye on things, to make sure Zynga doesn't pull a switch and change the feature. Also, this is a slow roll-out to users, so if you don't have the Dam in your city yet, don't be alarmed. Just make sure you have plenty of Gift Requests ready for the day, so you can ask for those parts as soon as you receive it.