Ive already broken down why the empty jars were removed and how it changes the game and why having an infinitely refillable container is a bad idea—several times. Go back and read so you can understand why the change was made. No change is made simply to make a change. That isn’t how game design works. These changes were made after team meetings in which the ramifications were discussed and then tested. When it comes out in experimental it will be further tested by the overall community. I know some people won’t like it but I’m pretty confident most will enjoy the change and appreciate having a new type of workstation to craft and a new type of farm to create—all while making the game more consistent with itself.
Is it more consistent with the rest of the game though?
Let's consider the needs of the player and how most of those are solved in the first few days; shelter, food, weapons, vehicles, and healing.
Shelter can be sorted out within 5 minutes of spawning in. Grab a POI and break the stairs and you're done. Shelter solved within 5~10 minutes of spawning into a new random world gen. Isn't this too easy? Even for horde night a huge number of industrial buildings can just have their stairs broken and the player is completely safe even on a day 70+ horde. Why does water need to be more complicated than shelter?
Food can be sorted out on the first day for more than half of random world gens and by day 3 for the other other half. A utility point in living off the land and a quick stroll down the new and massive farming section of a city which puts 10s of farm POIs right next to each other and you'll have 3~5 stacks of corn plus some potatoes. Just eating those raw is days of food by itself. If you didn't spawn at a city, just follow the road and it'll connect to one thanks to a20s better world gen. With said food now in your pocket, you can stroll down the road collecting 100s of roadkill and use the rotten flesh to easily make farms before day 7, thereby making food infinitely renewable in base before the first horde even comes regardless of random world gen or RNG. Why are farms providing infinitely renewable food sources ok but jars providing infinite access to water not ok? I'd argue this is inconsistent. It's not like farms don't need a huge amount of tending to keep them running in the real world.
Aside from the farms issue, a day in the snow biome provides such a ridiculous amount of meat that you can just live off of that for several bloodmoons and skip the veggies. Wolves get 1 shot by a primitive bow with stone arrow and provide 25 meat/hunger each. They don't hunt in packs or provide any actual danger to the player. We can also just stand on boxes and pelt a bear with stone arrows until it dies for an even bigger boon of meat. And if we ever run out, next time we come back with a vehicle and a gun it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Why is the existence of the snow biome ok but jars being refillable isn't?
Weapons are getting rebalanced by virtue of the trader changes in a21 so not much we can say on this. Hopefully it gets rid of the buying an autoshotgun on day 2~4 though.
Vehicles are sorted by day 6 reliably. I haven't had a world (even nightmare, insane, feral sense always on, 1 hour days challenge worlds) where I haven't had a motorcycle by or before day 6. It's dirt cheap to buy from traders and even cheaper to craft if you're willing to commit to INT. It's definitely subjective, but I'd argue that the motorcycle is the best vehicle in the game 90% of the time. Even if you don't agree with it being the best, it is a high tier late game vehicle that can be reliably gotten before the first horde night and can comfortably travel to 8-10 traders in a single 1 hour day on 8k maps thus trivializing distance in the game. Once you get your motorcycle, you never need to replace it, it just works infinitely. Why is it ok to get a motorcycle and have that last forever but it's not ok for jars to be refilled?
Gas is a joke no matter which way you slice it. With a point or 2 in salvage operations tearing down a single parking lot of cars gives about a full 10k stack of gas so if you spend 1 night traveling around and dismantling stuff you'll get enough gas for the next several bloodmoons. Once you have a chem station it's even easier, 10 minutes on an oil shale vein and you'll have enough gas for the rest of the playthrough.
Almost forgot
healing. A trip to the desert with 1 point in living off the land will give you enough aloe to outheal anything. A single point in physician unlocks bandages to multiply their healing 6x over. 2 perks in game multiply your healing 12 times over, think about that. Just 2 levels by themselves makes healing mathematically 12 times easier (double the aloe then 6x the healing).
Why is water being more tedious to both secure in the early game and set up for the long game when compared to other things which should be harder like shelter, food, and vehicles? Are we going to make all those things more difficult too so that it's consistent?
Pre-counter argument: "But you can do those things that early because you know what you're doing and are experienced in the game." The exact same point can be made about water. New players aren't going to know to live near a water source, they'll be too panicked while out or focused on other goals to remember to fill up their jars. New players already struggle with the basics, it's just vets who trivialize water on the first or second day reliably.
No other substance in a container returns the empty container. Only canned food and drink did. Now those two exceptions work the same way as the rest and are no longer exceptions.
But why was it decided to remove jars instead of... adding containers for those? The way gas works in 7 days has always felt like a placeholder. Why not add in a jerrycan which would make gas management harder and also more space inefficient (which would make a vehicle like the 4x4 more valuable as it can holder more gas in it and more space for extra gas if needed)? This would also be more tense as it'd take more time to syphon gas from a car rather than magically get it while we wrench it. It also adds to tense situations of searching for cars that actually have fuel and weren't drain by other survivors already (as opposed to literally any car you see now giving you gas 100% of the time). Adding in content actually
improves the game as opposed to just removing stuff.
Oil could also just give a can after use? Like to harvest oil from a car require us to have an empty can and properly drain it. Again, increasing the time for us to get the resource we want out of a car leading to tense moments where zombies sneak up on us.
Stew could just give a jar? Not like you can't just drink soup plus the recipe already takes a jar in the form of the water needed for it so literally nothing would have to change. The code is already there too, sham chowder gives you back a can so making stews give back a jar wouldn't even be extra work.
Same deal for acid, either add in a plastic bottle or let them use jars too. Or we just hand wave acid because maybe it's too dangerous to try to clean the container it was in so we just say it's junk now.
There was never four pages devoted to the weirdness of those things and people have always just accepted it.
There may not have been pages devoted to it, but clearly it's been noticed. Check out the Undead Legacy mod which does add in a jerrycan because of the weirdness of gas in 7 Days. 7 Days is in alpha so a lot of people likely just expected the current implementation of gas is a placeholder to be fixed later and the current implementation is not meant to be permanent. If this is intended to be the 1.0 design of gas maybe we should start devoting pages to that? Why does wrenching the door of a car magically give me cans of gas whose cans magically vanish once the gas is used??
End of the day though, the devs don't tell us something like this until it's decided so there's no point really commenting on it like I have. Similar to the farm change last alpha that nearly everyone was against (and I ended up actually liking). Most people just quit farming this alpha and live off meat and traders. Even I, who like farming and weirdly liked the changes, found myself not doing farming because it's now too time consuming. They just aren't worth the time in 90% of playthroughs where you've beaten the game by day 35 (all books discovered and max rank gear). Maybe the new water change and farming change will be useful when we get late game content so there's a reason to keep going after day 35, but until then we just have to live with them or ignore them and find a better way to play than the devs anticipated. Cause remember, they said food was actually hard for a20 lol, but foods never been easier. Dozens of farms being neighbors makes it trivial to collect corn and potatoes out the wazoo and the snow biome still exists as an all you can eat buffet. Water actually being more difficult is unlikely (though it does seem like glue will be harder/more tedious).
)
or just build them on the ground etc. I get all of that. The thing is that it removes the option of not having to do that. If you want to go into end game then you're just going to have to manage the sprawl. No choice.
