A fun thing you can do with the cantrip spell, shape water, is animate a continuously turning small water wheel for an hour, since the water needs to fit in a five foot cube, it can't be a big one, but given that it costs the casting of one cantrip and you can have two of the continuous effects happening at once, you can therefore animate a ten foot tall five foot wide column of water, and like, I'm not going to do the fluid dynamics because they fundamentally do not matter to the level of D&D's rules, but it's definitely an extremely simple technological achievement to extract *some* of that energy to do mechanical work, and what I am really getting at here is that with a pretty small population of wizards, sorcerers and druids capable of casting a literal cantrip, you could absolutely power a large city, either in terms of translating that into things like drop hammers and conveyors, or just demanding that your DM let you invent electromagnetism (less likely).
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