The changes in A21 will not necessarily solve your hydration problems the moment you get a cooking pot. Because you want to use some water you loot for production of food and glue you will have a motive for drinking from sewers and the like.
There's really no need to craft early game or cook anything that requires water. You can go an entire 60 hours without having to do either.
In your scheme the only limit is how much inventory management grind the player is prepared to do.
Well sure, except that you're neglecting that there is no incentive for the player to do that before having a cooking pot, and if you're already looting 3 bottles of murky water a day for free, then there's just no point in making that special trip to get those 3 bottles of water.
But let's say you've collected 2-3 full storage boxes of jars, have the 4x4, and a fully modded Q6 drone to carry them all to the water source. Your combined inventory space is 172 spaces if you leave a space to stack into, that's a hard limit. The soft limits are that even if you drink 3 drinks a day it'll take you 57 days to collect that many, you need to already have the 4x4, a fully modded Q6 drone, and neglecting travel time it'll still take you 3 real time minutes or a full game hour to accomplish. All for approximately half of what you need for those 4 stacks of bolts. And remember, once you convert to glue, the jars vanish, so you'd have to wait another 60 days before repeating it.
You don't know that yet. You are talking about 2 dew collectors but it is totally unknown how many dew collectors a player can build say on day 20 on average.
No, but I can estimate given that one source of the required filter coming from traders will most likely be as a quest tier reward that isn't repeatable, it's a "rare drop" and as such will both be cost prohibitive and infrequent in trader inventories.
When I was talking about feedback, naturally written feedback from players here in the forum should be taken into account.
No disagreement there.
The math you do with 2 collectors is unavoidable BUT probably useless.
Sure, they could change trader density or make the filter a common repeatable quest reward, but they're not going to. What they're more likely to do is adjust the output of the dew collectors and/or make them modable and/or drop them into traders inventory more frequently late game and/or make filters craftable and/or add a skill to the intellect tree to allow higher production from them.
The math isn't useless if we assume that what's been reported so far is true, and there is no reason to believe that it isn't.
And my group actually buys other stuff from the trader
Craft turret ammo (a little harder now with cans removed), sell polymers, leather and stacks of paper for early cash.
Which is why I was asking if anybody was really dismissing them out of hand without bringing arguments. Do you have some examples?
No, and I'd never specifically name any names, but since I do follow those people in other places, I know that it was enough to terminate the conversation for them regardless of whether it was within the forum rules.
I prefer better commentary to accusations of "making changes without any reason" or wild speculations on what the reasons were (not refering to you here, but a few posters have done this)
I have most certainly speculated on the reasons for these changes, and I'm not really ashamed of doing so either. I have gone as far as to suggest that it was in many ways a solution looking for a problem.
If we start with the premise that drinks are too easy to come by in the early game a lot of the changes make sense. Remove boiled water from the loot table, now you're stuck drinking murky until you get that cooking pot or buying from the trader. That pretty much solved the whole thing right there for the early game.
But then you get that cooking pot and the jars you collected, so we remove jars from the loot table too and now the player is limited to the jars that have been returned from drinking until they get a forge, and then just make jars uncraftable and the player is still limited to gaining jars at 3 per day and any jars used to create food or glue are not returned and you end up with the exact same water budget as the dew collector is presently advertised. All with a few xml edits and at no point was it necessary to remove water collection or add a new asset.
Someone wanted to add the dew collector, and I suppose it could fairly be argued that it was to introduce scalability, but it wouldn't necessitate removing water collection to achieve that, except that fewer people might opt to test the new gadget if that 3 per day budget was already adequate.
They have a vision and a goal for the game which they should be constantly striving for. I am grateful that they made it easy to mod the game so for those of us that want to make small changes in the vanilla experience to those that want to make complete overhauls, we can do that.
