Jars, Dew Collectors, And Survival

The following post came from Reddit from user Emotional-Lab-751 in response to the developers remarks about jars. I wanted to share it here because it covers everything from jars to the state of the game now. It's a mammoth, but well worth the read.

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Jars, Dew Collectors, and Survival — Why We Strongly Disagree with the Dev’s Premise

Why This Is a Post (and Not a Comment)​

This was originally intended as my friends & I's direct response to the developer post about Jars found here:
Reddit wasn't letting us post any comments, so we decided to make it in a separate post here.

Our Perspective On Jars, and Everything Around Them:

The developer, Joel (u/funpimpcolt), argues that the old jar system was removed because it was essentially never really a survival mechanic. To quote:

"You could scoop up some sand, craft 5000 jars and never have any struggle with water ever again... Nobody ever spent a nickel on water... it was so easy to have endless water that it shouldn't have even existed."

They suggested that if jars were ever brought back, they'd need major nerfs like:
  • Being non-craftable
  • Breaking on death or falling
  • Limited interaction with water sources
  • Being tied to dew collectors in convoluted ways
And the post ends with a challenge:

"Is it the realism you liked, or that it was easy?"

Our answer is: neither and both. My friends and I strongly disagree with the removal of jars—and more importantly, we reject the design philosophy behind that decision. We reject the premise that survival systems must remain hard forever to be valid. We reject the idea that progression is a flaw. We reject the trajectory of this design philosophy that has developed over recent years, which punishes players for solving problems instead of building on their creativity. Survival gameplay, in our eyes, has been increasingly, gradually, reduced to a narrow formula: if players find a sustainable solution to a need, it must be taken away. That’s not how good survival systems work—and we believe this change reflects a growing trend of removing depth in favor of grind.

Why Jars Mattered​

The jar system wasn’t perfect, but it worked, and it felt right. It felt intuitive. It connected survival to the environment. It offered a tactile, intuitive loop:
  • You find a river or toilet
  • You collect water with jars
  • You boil or purify it
  • You store it
It mattered where you built your base. It mattered who gathered and boiled water. It encouraged cooperative gameplay and added weight to travel planning.

It also felt like something you’d actually do in a survival situation.

Yes, it became easier over time. That wasn’t a flaw—that was progression. The entire point of a survival game is to overcome basic challenges and build stability. Jars made that process immersive.

There Were So Many Ways to Balance It​

If the jar system became too efficient or "abusable" (covered later in this post), it could have been refined without being deleted. Some examples:
  • Noise penalty: The more jars you carry, the louder you / your inventory "clinks". That noise could attract zombies or increase threat level. Makes stealth (which has also been nerfed in recent years) more important again.
  • Exponentially-Curved Weight Scaling: A few full jars? Fine. Dozens? Now you’re a slow-moving, high-risk target.
  • Break chance: Fall damage or death could break a portion of your carried jars, discouraging hoarding without punishing reasonable use.
  • Spoilage: Clean or boiled water, or maybe instead the jar itself, could mold over time unless stored properly. Maybe you have to re-boil that water, or clean that jar, or the jar reaches a mold threshold to where its permanently moldy. This adds upkeep to your supply chain, and is even a complement to bringing back the rotting of food.
  • Dew collector integration: Collectors could require jars to function, grounding automation in real logic.
These would deepen the system without invalidating it.

The Real Problem with Dew Collectors​

The dew collector isn’t the issue. Its role is.

It replaced the jar system instead of extending it. And worse, after basic water boiling, it became the first, only, primary water solution in the game. You now just find jars sitting in toilets, etc. Both of these things are illogical to a believable survival situation.

In any real survival scenario, your first instinct is to look for natural water and contain it. You don’t start by crafting a high-tech machine that magically fills with purified water.

The dew collector could have been an upgrade:
  • A mid-game tool that collects purified rainwater
  • Slow, passive, and dependent on jars for output
  • Rewarding for long-term planning
Instead, it bypassed the challenge entirely and made water passive. (It also very clearly uses a tarp, but you never find or make a tarp, ever in-game)

How the System Could’ve Evolved Instead​

Removing jars wasn’t necessary. Rather than eliminating jars, the game could have expanded the water system to be more engaging and immersive. Here are a few intuitive ways that could’ve worked:
  • Irradiated natural water: Give water a green hue. Scooping it applies a radiation debuff unless purified. Depending on the biome, this natural water could be more / less irradiated, or even have certain impurities that require specific solutions to remove.
  • Purification tablets: Craftable & Purchase-able items that convert irradiated water into murky water.
  • Interactive POI sources: Toilets, sinks, bathtubs, and water coolers should be (limitedly) interactive, not lootable. Require jars to collect water.
  • UV jar lids: Real-life inspired tech. Slowly purify water inside jars via solar or battery-powered lids.
These ideas make jars part of an evolving system. Not obsolete.

The Ripple Effect: Water No Longer Matters​

The Ripple Effect: Water No Longer Matters

Removing jars didn’t just affect crafting—it erased water as a meaningful part of gameplay.
  • Rivers, lakes, and ponds are now irrelevant. They’re no longer strategic locations, just visual filler.
  • No reason to settle near water, scout for it, or build infrastructure around it.
  • Environmental risk and planning are gone. You don’t weigh travel decisions or manage hydration routes.
This isn't an isolated case. It reflects a broader pattern:
  • Fishing, when brought up, is typically met with disinterest or dismissiveness from the dev team.
  • Underwater bases frequently break with updates—maybe unintentionally, but consistently.
  • Water has no physics—rain doesn’t fill basins, there’s no flooding, no waves, no terrain reaction to water, no water reaction to weather or storms (which are now part of the game as of v2.0).
  • No aquatic mobility—wearable fins/swimming gear, rafts, boats, pontoons... even buoyant blocks are missing. Crossing water is always clunky, annoying, & slow, never strategic.
  • No aquatic life—no fish, amphibians, or water-adapted zombies.
  • Underwater is Empty—There's no underwater POIs, loot, chests, containers, quests, .... anything.
  • Biome-Specific Water—Things like snow that falls and actually collects/piles on the ground are no longer in the game.
All of these things mentioned above related to water aren't in the game, or have been removed/patched out. Jars were the last, and for the most part, only, meaningful connection players had to water. Their removal made one of the world’s most visible (yet thin) layers completely inert. An obstacle.
 
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Addressing Some Divides in the Player Base​

It is important, and fair, to note that there is divisiveness in the 7 Days to Die player base about Jars. From what my friends and I can tell, there are four general camps that can be found:
  • Those who want the jars system back, who most likely agree with this post's argumentations
  • Those who likely did want the jars system back, but have grown against it because discussion about it is annoying and old to them. They are tired of hearing about it, but likely agree with a lot of the general community sentiment towards the game's design. They might even not care anymore due to the quickening of dew collectors in more recent updates.
  • Those who don't want the jars system back OR the current system; they believe neither system was "realistic"
  • Those who did not like jars and/or like the current system better.
For the sake of a complete and whole discussion, my friends and I believe its relevant to discuss two of the common arguments against jars we've seen being discussed in the community itself:

1) Addressing the “It Wasn’t Realistic” Argument

Some players argue that jars were unrealistic because boiling water doesn’t remove radiation or every toxin.

Sure. But this is a survival game, not a chemistry simulator.

"Realism" in survival games isn't about being 100% scientifically accurate. It's about believability.
  • Boiling water? Intuitive.
  • Filling jars from a sink? Believable.
  • Rainwater being clean? Plausible.
What isn't believable is a high-tech machine creating clean water on Day 1 without jars, power, or rain.

When we say the jar system was "realistic," we mean it behaved like something a human would logically do when trying to survive. Dew collectors do not.

2) Addressing the “The New System Isn't Hard Anymore” Argument

Some players defend the current system, saying it’s fine now that dew collectors and their mods provide water quickly again. But this misses the point. The devs removed jars because water was “too easy”—too fast to obtain, too trivialized. And now? We’re right back to a fast, easy water system.

Yes, it takes a bit longer to find a water purifier mod. But in every 1.0 or 2.0 playthrough we’ve had, we acquired one early without issue. So what changed? A hands-on system with environmental relevance was replaced with a slow, tedious grind… that was later patched back into being fast. The supposed problem jars created wasn’t solved. It was just replaced by a more passive version that lost all the depth—and ended up just as quick.

If fast water access is inherently a design flaw, then the current system fails too. If it’s not, then jars were never the problem, or a problem at all, to begin with.

This Isn’t Just About Jars — It’s About the Direction of the Game​

My friends and I don’t just disagree with the removal of jars—we reject the premise behind the decision entirely. The idea that “jars made water too easy” reflects a deeper design philosophy we fundamentally disagree with: the belief that any system players can optimize—especially early—must be dismantled or replaced.

But survival gameplay isn’t about constant hardship for its own sake. It’s about solving problems, adapting, and progressing. A survival system should challenge the player early, reward planning and cooperation, and then scale—or phase out—as the player’s situation improves.

Yet in 7 Days to Die’s recent direction, we’ve seen a shift:
  • Systems that allow for meaningful solutions are treated as exploits
  • Complexity is removed in favor of shallow loops and passive mechanics
  • Freedom is reduced, and more aspects of the game feel locked to singular “intended” paths
  • Grind replaces depth, with less emphasis on how and more on how long
The removal of jars didn’t evolve the water system—it deleted it. And what replaced it?
  • Nothing that fosters meaningful player choice
  • Fewer options for how to handle hydration
  • Railroaded mechanics, like dew collectors that function in isolation
  • Repetitive grind loops that make hydration feel more like a time tax than a challenge
We’re told this makes the game more “survival-oriented.” But that’s a misunderstanding of what survival design actually means.

Not All Survival Systems Need to Scale the Same Way​

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that jars did trivialize water too quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean the system was flawed.

Maybe it’s okay for some survival elements—like water—to become manageable early on. Maybe it’s good design for players to solve that problem quickly, allowing attention to shift to food, shelter, disease, heat, combat, or crafting.

Not every survival mechanic needs to escalate in difficulty at the same pace. Trying to force every system to stay “challenging” across the same timeline is artificial. It flattens the survival curve and undermines the satisfaction of progression. It becomes a treadmill, not a sandbox.

Water was one of the only systems that offered a realistic early-game challenge with a clear progression curve:
  • At first, you’re desperate.
  • Then you’re boiling jars of toilet water.
  • Then you’re building infrastructure to sustain yourself.
That arc worked. Removing it didn’t preserve challenge—it erased progression entirely.

A Flawed Philosophy: Punishing Success Instead of Building on It​

The explanation the dev gave—"players could scoop sand and make 5,000 jars"—isn’t invalid. It’s true that with a desert biome and some planning, players could produce jars in bulk and stabilize hydration relatively early.

But again: that’s not inherently a problem. That’s a solvable design challenge.

Instead of adjusting the system—adding risk, spoilage, encumbrance, or jar breakage—the whole mechanic was stripped away. And that exposes the real issue: a design philosophy that treats player success as game failure.

If you solve a problem through planning, that’s “too easy.” If you build a system that works, it must be dismantled. If you interact meaningfully with the world, that system becomes a target for replacement. If any of the above being done quickly, it seems to be automatically a target in the developers' eyes.

This mindset is not just frustrating—it’s creatively limiting. It narrows the game’s systems, design, and potential instead of expanding them. It punishes ingenuity instead of celebrating it.

And jars are simply the most visible casualty of that mindset.

What We Want​

We’re not just asking for jars back—we’re asking for a reevaluation of the entire survival design philosophy moving forward. Jars are the symptom. Just one of the symptoms. The core issue is a design philosophy that's created a specific pattern of decisions that reduce interactivity, ignore intuitive player behavior, and treat cleverness as something to be punished.

We want a game that:
  • Trusts the player to find clever solutions and rewards that ingenuity
  • Builds on systems, rather than scrapping them when optimization emerges
  • Respects intuitive logic and realism that make the world feel alive
  • Uses progression as a strength, not something to be feared or flattened
  • Adds complexity and flexibility, not grind and restriction
Jars made water matter. Their removal removed strategy, location relevance, and cooperation. If they were too easy—adjust them. If they needed work—refine them. But we believe that this situation, and others that have happened/are happening with other core systems within the game, should never happen again.

We ask the developers to embrace a design direction that values player creativity, system evolution, and the immersive complexity that made 7 Days to Die stand out in the first place.

Bring back jars. Make them better. And please—design with what works and what is best. This might mean reverting some systems that just haven't worked, and keeping others that have. And that's okay.
Thank you for reading, and to any and all developers being open to our feedback.
 
It mattered where you built your base.
I'm still reading, but this is so not true (you know about buckets, right?). There are culverts with water in them like every 200m or so.
(It also very clearly uses a tarp, but you never find or make a tarp, ever in-game)
That's why it costs 100 polymer, I would guess. It's possible to find tarps in broken-down dew collectors, though seemingly very rare. I imagine if I thought for a few minutes, I could think of other devices or stations we make that have components that you never find or make in the game, so I'm not really sure what point this is trying to make.
How the System Could’ve Evolved Instead
This seems to be arguing that gathering water becoming THE most complicated process in the game would be good and/or fun. What other systems in the game are remotely this complicated? Those suggestions wouldn't fit at all with the other systems in the game.
No aquatic mobility
I thought they mentioned that boats (or some sort of boat) might be added in the future, but I'm really not sure about that.
Underwater is Empty
Mostly, but I believe there is at least a POI or two that has some sunken cars in it (like the pond behind the Fates Motel). I think there's a new bridge-over-water POI that has some stuff underwater.

I didn't particularly dislike jars, but I don't really care that they're gone either. I'm perfectly content with dew collectors.
 
The devs removed jars because water was “too easy”—too fast to obtain, too trivialized. And now? We’re right back to a fast, easy water system.
With jars, once you had a forge (pretty easy to get on day one), you could quickly make a stack (125) of jars. One right-click on the closest culvert (water sources aren't particularly rare - it doesn't have to be a lake, or river, etc.) and that stack of jars becomes 125 murky water. You could easily do this on day one. Base collection rate for Dew Collectors is like 3 jars of water per game day. I mean, do I need to elaborate on how those two numbers aren't remotely close to one another?
 
I didn't particularly dislike jars, but I don't really care that they're gone either. I'm perfectly content with dew collectors.
How very nice for you. But that's just you.

If there were anything I'd like to get across to users of this forum and otherwise it's to consider -- just consider -- stopping thinking only of themselves and start thinking about the game and its overall appeal. That (probably) will be TFP's primary concern as opposed to anyone's desire for the game to be developed according to their personal specifications and whims.

Let the cookie handouts and/or tomato and egg throwing begin.
 
I always wondered why they didn't just add something like purification tablets. After all, simply boiling water does not necessarily purify it. It often requires both boiling and some sort of disinfectant. You still get the jars, and maybe boiled water could have a much lower chance of negative effects as compared to murky water, then purified-by-tablet water equates to basically the current boiled water.
 
If there were anything I'd like to get across to users of this forum and otherwise it's to consider -- just consider -- stopping thinking only of themselves and start thinking about the game and its overall appeal.

This would be a much more compelling response if there were any way to collect data about jar preference that isn't limited to the terminally online.
 
I always wondered why they didn't just add something like purification tablets. After all, simply boiling water does not necessarily purify it. It often requires both boiling and some sort of disinfectant. You still get the jars, and maybe boiled water could have a much lower chance of negative effects as compared to murky water, then purified-by-tablet water equates to basically the current boiled water.
Interestingly enough, Subnautica has two ways to purify water: craft bleach, which results in more water per treatment, and a water purifier.

Now, who would add bleach to their drinking water to purify it is anyone's guess. I certainly wouldn't. Purification tablets, otoh, I would probably craft and use.
 
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How very nice for you. But that's just you.
I posted that because my take on the jar situation wasn't reflected in the OP's section titled "Addressing Some Divides in the Player Base".

Also, it's possible that my take might be the majority (though I'm not claiming that I know that it is or anything).
 
I always wondered why they didn't just add something like purification tablets. After all, simply boiling water does not necessarily purify it. It often requires both boiling and some sort of disinfectant. You still get the jars, and maybe boiled water could have a much lower chance of negative effects as compared to murky water, then purified-by-tablet water equates to basically the current boiled water.

I think the answer there is that one of the goals was to add a manufacturing hurdle to glue.
 
one of the goals was to add a manufacturing hurdle to glue.
Exactly. Drinking water probably wasn't even part of the equation. They wanted to stop supposed exploiters from exploiting the game's systems, which I think we've established isn't even possible. Let supposed "exploiters" exploit to their hearts' desire. Most players of video games aren't playing video games in an effort to exploit their systems. Only speed runners and, possibly, min-maxers are.

Are there studies and proofs to that effect? No. But I think some things are self-evident.
 
Drinking water probably wasn't even part of the equation
I think Joel mentioned something about that in his "Why do you want jars back?" reddit post. He said that in the early game, he liked the idea of you having to choose whether or not to preserve that jar of water for drinking, or glue production. When you have 60+ jars of murky water on day 1, that isn't a balance you have to give any thought to anymore. He seems to want to preserve those kinds of gameplay decisions, particularly in the early game.
 
It mattered where you built your base. It mattered who gathered and boiled water. It encouraged cooperative gameplay and added weight to travel planning.

It also felt like something you’d actually do in a survival situation.

Yes, it became easier over time. That wasn’t a flaw—that was progression. The entire point of a survival game is to overcome basic challenges and build stability. Jars made that process immersive.
They would have to greatly reduce water found in POIs to make that a reality. Currently murky water is very abundant on regular loot settings.

It should get easier but not trivial. The problem is the interaction with other crafting elements. An easy solution is to make a jar sink in the game that removes jars from the game. For example breaking, consume on use, consume on craft with glue, something.
There Were So Many Ways to Balance It
If the jar system became too efficient or "abusable" (covered later in this post), it could have been refined without being deleted. Some examples:
  • Noise penalty: The more jars you carry, the louder you / your inventory "clinks". That noise could attract zombies or increase threat level. Makes stealth (which has also been nerfed in recent years) more important again.
  • Exponentially-Curved Weight Scaling: A few full jars? Fine. Dozens? Now you’re a slow-moving, high-risk target.
  • Break chance: Fall damage or death could break a portion of your carried jars, discouraging hoarding without punishing reasonable use.
  • Spoilage: Clean or boiled water, or maybe instead the jar itself, could mold over time unless stored properly. Maybe you have to re-boil that water, or clean that jar, or the jar reaches a mold threshold to where its permanently moldy. This adds upkeep to your supply chain, and is even a complement to bringing back the rotting of food.
  • Dew collector integration: Collectors could require jars to function, grounding automation in real logic.
These would deepen the system without invalidating it.
I agree some simple tweaks would have been better before the implementation of the dew collector. Now that we are here I am hesitant to go back for a feature that is barely worth mentioning.

Noise and weight are irrelevant as you typically have a water source nearby. Not worth the coding.

Fall damage or breaking in general is also bad because you fall from heights rarely enough to matter and there are perks that remove fall damage altogether. If it's on hit then T5 POIs become nearly impossible due to their length.

Spoilage doesn't solve the glue issue.

The dew collector integration is fine and seems obvious at first glance.

The Real Problem with Dew Collectors
The dew collector isn’t the issue. Its role is.

It replaced the jar system instead of extending it. And worse, after basic water boiling, it became the first, only, primary water solution in the game. You now just find jars sitting in toilets, etc. Both of these things are illogical to a believable survival situation.

In any real survival scenario, your first instinct is to look for natural water and contain it. You don’t start by crafting a high-tech machine that magically fills with purified water.

The dew collector could have been an upgrade:
  • A mid-game tool that collects purified rainwater
  • Slow, passive, and dependent on jars for output
  • Rewarding for long-term planning
Instead, it bypassed the challenge entirely and made water passive. (It also very clearly uses a tarp, but you never find or make a tarp, ever in-game)
The jars in toilets are fine as it's a game and it doesn't overly break immersion in the game in the same way you can't just get a tire off any car.

The dew collector is hardly a high tech machine.

I agree it could have been done better and in conjunction with jars.

The polymer is for the tarp. If I recall you did have to get a tarp before but it was difficult to find sometimes so they changed it.
How the System Could’ve Evolved Instead
Removing jars wasn’t necessary. Rather than eliminating jars, the game could have expanded the water system to be more engaging and immersive. Here are a few intuitive ways that could’ve worked:
  • Irradiated natural water: Give water a green hue. Scooping it applies a radiation debuff unless purified. Depending on the biome, this natural water could be more / less irradiated, or even have certain impurities that require specific solutions to remove.
  • Purification tablets: Craftable & Purchase-able items that convert irradiated water into murky water.
  • Interactive POI sources: Toilets, sinks, bathtubs, and water coolers should be (limitedly) interactive, not lootable. Require jars to collect water.
  • UV jar lids: Real-life inspired tech. Slowly purify water inside jars via solar or battery-powered lids.
These ideas make jars part of an evolving system. Not obsolete.
Agree with a lot of the ideas here. Irradiated water sources requiring more strenuous cleansing would have been good and purification tablets for faster acting purifying.

The limited water was done well in Humanitz but I don't think it's important enough to code both limited water sources and partially full jars. Waste of time. A massive waste.

UV cleaning jars is fancy but also not necessary. Things need a purpose. We have plenty of ways to purify water at this point.

The Ripple Effect: Water No Longer Matters​

The Ripple Effect: Water No Longer Matters

Removing jars didn’t just affect crafting—it erased water as a meaningful part of gameplay.
  • Rivers, lakes, and ponds are now irrelevant. They’re no longer strategic locations, just visual filler.
  • No reason to settle near water, scout for it, or build infrastructure around it.
  • Environmental risk and planning are gone. You don’t weigh travel decisions or manage hydration routes.
This isn't an isolated case. It reflects a broader pattern:
  • Fishing, when brought up, is typically met with disinterest or dismissiveness from the dev team.
  • Underwater bases frequently break with updates—maybe unintentionally, but consistently.
  • Water has no physics—rain doesn’t fill basins, there’s no flooding, no waves, no terrain reaction to water, no water reaction to weather or storms (which are now part of the game as of v2.0).
  • No aquatic mobility—wearable fins/swimming gear, rafts, boats, pontoons... even buoyant blocks are missing. Crossing water is always clunky, annoying, & slow, never strategic.
  • No aquatic life—no fish, amphibians, or water-adapted zombies.
  • Underwater is Empty—There's no underwater POIs, loot, chests, containers, quests, .... anything.
  • Biome-Specific Water—Things like snow that falls and actually collects/piles on the ground are no longer in the game.
All of these things mentioned above related to water aren't in the game, or have been removed/patched out. Jars were the last, and for the most part, only, meaningful connection players had to water. Their removal made one of the world’s most visible (yet thin) layers completely inert. An obstacle.
I agree with most of this. Water has no purpose in the world. Some of the suggestions are fancy but perhaps are not needed at the moment such as physics, bases and mobility. Sounds like a good DLC option.
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With jars, once you had a forge (pretty easy to get on day one), you could quickly make a stack (125) of jars. One right-click on the closest culvert (water sources aren't particularly rare - it doesn't have to be a lake, or river, etc.) and that stack of jars becomes 125 murky water. You could easily do this on day one. Base collection rate for Dew Collectors is like 3 jars of water per game day. I mean, do I need to elaborate on how those two numbers aren't remotely close to one another?
I think people aren't saying they want a 1 for 1 copy of the old system but that the old system with a few changes would have been a superior system. I imagine people asking for it back would fully expect it to come with more limitations to balance it, at least that's what it seems in the reddit thread.

But I agree that as a system it doesn't add much and it's better to focus on other things before jars.
 
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I think Joel mentioned something about that in his "Why do you want jars back?" reddit post. He said that in the early game, he liked the idea of you having to choose whether or not to preserve that jar of water for drinking, or glue production. When you have 60+ jars of murky water on day 1, that isn't a balance you have to give any thought to anymore. He seems to want to preserve those kinds of gameplay decisions, particularly in the early game.
When I see posts like this, I like to point out the system used by the Undead Legacy mod. Jar can only be crafted very late in the game and not in large quantities. It also takes a long time. Water from lakes, rivers, and ditches is considered contaminated and unusable. You have to get water from taps, boilers, and hydrants, but these sources are limited. Later in the game, you get a well, but it supplies water slowly, like the dew collector.
 
Now, who would add bleach to their drinking water to purify it is anyone's guess. I certainly wouldn't. Purification tablets, otoh, I would probably craft and use.
The Federal Government. See the 3rd bullet point, here:

I only knew because when I rotate the water in my emergency provisions I need to use a little bleach in the containers.
 
I only knew because when I rotate the water in my emergency provisions I need to use a little bleach in the containers.
Yeh, bleach itself is surprisingly safe; or rather, the human digestion system is awesomely robust. Don't go drinking a lot though...

For the bit you quoted, should we tell her that "purification tablets" essentially contain.. bleach? :)
 
1) Addressing the “It Wasn’t Realistic” Argument

Some players argue that jars were unrealistic because boiling water doesn’t remove radiation or every toxin.

Sure. But this is a survival game, not a chemistry simulator.

"Realism" in survival games isn't about being 100% scientifically accurate. It's about believability.
  • Boiling water? Intuitive.
  • Filling jars from a sink? Believable.
  • Rainwater being clean? Plausible.

To me, this take on "it wasn't realistic" isn't entirely appealing and needs refined.

I don't think anyone wants to make a chemistry simulator. To me, the appeal to looking to reality is to find the interesting complications that would make survival a game. That is, what represents risk and what actions can be taken to eliminate risk.

Boiling water doesn't remove harmful particles (including radioactive particles), thus drinking water that has only been boiled comes with some risk, but less risk than murky water. There's a possible game element here.

It is far from a chemistry simulation to have no-risk water come from a chemistry station. The player isn't being asked to do the chemistry. They need only invoke the recipe and add fuel. That is no more complex than boiling water.

"Filling jars from a sink? Believable." -- To you, perhaps, but not me. Damaged infrastructure and a lack of water company employees means no water pressure. I also know from the COVID era that water trapped in plumbing like sink traps, drain traps, and toilet bowls evaporates unless humans are there to use those things.

"Rainwater being clean? Plausible." -- Again, to you, perhaps, but not me. Farmers with cisterns that collect rain water know that is not potable water. It needs treatment because it picks up pollutants from the surface that collects it. To drink it, you would still want to filter and disinfect it, or take the risk associated with drinking murky water.

What isn't believable is a high-tech machine creating clean water on Day 1 without jars, power, or rain.

When we say the jar system was "realistic," we mean it behaved like something a human would logically do when trying to survive. Dew collectors do not.

Now here's where I think you're getting somewhere. I have stressed ever since the water system was changed, man has been carrying water away from a water source since before recorded history. It's a pretty significant break from everyday life to not allow that. The game should allow people to harvest water.

To keep it a game, however, it should be murky water so that the player has to deal with risk and/or work to overcome that risk.

I don't mind the Dew/Rain Collector. It's a real thing. A survivor would make something like it. I know I would take my plastic shower curtain and catch rain in a trashcan. I'd probably also divert the downspouts from my roof into trash bins. That said, it isn't always raining, so I'd probably also walk two blocks to the river and get water.
 
Now here's where I think you're getting somewhere. I have stressed ever since the water system was changed, man has been carrying water away from a water source since before recorded history. It's a pretty significant break from everyday life to not allow that. The game should allow people to harvest water.

...and I'd like that to be with a bucket, and jars to stay the hell away. Jars can just magically appear when the bucket of water is processed. I'm fine with that, in exactly the same way I'm fine with bowls magically appearing when I make gumbo stew and gas cans magically appearing when I collect gas from a barrel.
 
I came here expecting a compelling argument and instead it was a novel.

Personally, I think the removal of jars was better for the game from a balance standpoint. It was far, far too easy to get literally hundreds of jars within the first couple days- and without even really trying.
I think reintroducing jars will take away time that could potentially go towards other survival mechanics that would be more impactful.
But I'll play 'what if' for a second.

If jars came back, what I'd need to see is,
1, gating the crafting of jars behind a mid/late milestone.
2, In addition, treating murky water would need to be more time consuming/more of a process.

Perhaps it would require adding another variety or two of water, such as a 'Nasty water' that requires more time/materials to process it into safe water.

It mattered where you built your base. It mattered who gathered and boiled water. It encouraged cooperative gameplay and added weight to travel planning.
In this comment, I just think you're full of it, and I don't mean the water. Who gathered water was less meaningful than who gathers clay.. It matters who cooks it? Travel planning? Are you serious? I'm going to pretend for a moment jars are a thing and for some reason you didn't build close enough to spit in the water from your base- .. What is the travel planning for filling jars? Bring jars? - Leave a few empty inventory slots? - Maybe enough empty spaces in case you need to run? Why does it matter who cooks it? Too strapped for materials to put down a second campfire?

I suppose none of that really matters though because far as I'm concerned there's only one reason needed-
Immersion alone is a strong enough reason to use jars. In a natural disaster I'd be far more likely to try to transport water in a jar or cooking pot than I would to build a dew collector, it just seems intuitive. - If anything I'd probably exhaust the closest water sources to me before attempting to build a dew collector.

I supported when jars were removed, and I suppose I'd support if they came back-- Assuming we were giving hurdles on making the collected water safe[r] to drink.

I don't care if the loot tables have to be played with to balance the drop chance on drinks/murky water because the loot tables still need balance anyhow.

Now, who would add bleach to their drinking water to purify it is anyone's guess. I certainly wouldn't.

Where I live, hurricanes are a periodic threat and occasionally take out the local power grid for a couple days- the county recommends we keep bleach on hand in case we need to treat water.
 
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