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.
Short answer: pipe machine gun.
Long answer: There are people who can survive in 7D2D with a bone knife. Doesn't mean that the average case can or will optimize his game that far.
Given a choice of drinking murky water and craft a simple mod for my stone axe or craft a pipe machine gun or a wooden bow or just drink some clean water I probably would do one of the former.
And even if someone loots 3 murky water on average means that he can be unlucky and find only 2 per day on the first three days.
The question is how much he then would dislike drinking murky water. A strategy someone with cooking pot and the golden rod tea recipe might take would be to produce a stack of golden rod tea, drink from sewers and heal any dysentery with golden rod tea. Will people do that? Will I do that?
I don't know, that is a question we can only answer once experimental drops and we have played one or two worlds already.
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.
The point is that there is no limitation at all. Normally you might not need to make that trip, but then you might get some meat and want to make boiled meat out of it, build a mod, make some coffee or red tea for some early mining or other stamina-heavy activities (i.e. where you don't drink it for hydration but for the buff), ... And there is practically no limit.
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.
My problem here is that I know pretty well the changes in A21. But I don't know exactly the changes you are proposing. Not only is that knowledge distributed over multiple pages but I also forget details. Did you ever say whether empty jars can still be crafted in the forge with your scheme? I don't remember. What else is changed?
Which makes for a lot of guessing how your mod plays out. The changes you initially suggested (as far as I remember) definitely were not enough to make water scarce. Maybe you just forgot mentioning them because the scheme is clearly worked out in your head. Or worse you are adapting the scheme whenever someone brings up a problem.
Simply said: First define your mod completely in one post (with all changes you are proposing). Then we have a basis to argue about.
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.
What does rare drop mean? Acid is called a rare drop as far as I know, a tier3 weapon schematic is a rare drop. You'll likely have found say 5 or 10 acid at the end of week 2 but probably not a single tier3 weapon schematic.
And I won't even try to guess what the number of filters you find will be in A21.0 experimental, the important thing will be what the number will be in A21.5 stable. We know that TFP often "errs" on the difficult side in their first balance attempts and adapts to make it more newbie-friendly after some balancing steps.
Sure, they could change trader density or make the filter a common repeatable quest reward, but they're not going to.
I'm talking about making filters being less rare to find than you expect. You bring up far off suggestions I never mentioned and dismiss them. ??
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.
Possibly. All of these methods create somewhat different results. At the moment none of these were mentioned and since we don't know what loopholes their scheme will have we can't really predict which correction they'll use.
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.
Craft turret ammo (a little harder now with cans removed), sell polymers, leather and stacks of paper for early cash.
Whatever you do, if you put part of your money into water you have less to spend for books, magazines, weapons, armor, mods ...
There are players who carefully have analyzed the game on how to get a lot of money out of selling specific stuff to the trader. And they easily have 10 times the money a newbie has at any day or more. The average player has not minmaxed the game to this degree and won't have money to throw out of the window, at least not in the first 2 to 5 weeks.
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.
Which isn't as it should be. But generalized accusations into the room where anybody could feel addressed/blamed if he so much as posted a reply to those modders do not help as well. Next time either report it or maybe try to calm the waters.
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.
A new scheme? I'm not gonna discuss another one, but notice that the developers probably have no design rule that states: "Make no new assets if possible" or "Don't remove anything". Nobody can say that TFP is averse of changes.
Maybe they didn't think of your scheme exactly or maybe their scheme solved another problem they were having. Or there is a problem with your scheme that they did not want to have. Sometimes a problem can be solved many ways and the decision between the best is nearly arbitrary. Even with Rolands detailed description we don't know what alternatives were discussed and why they were rejected.
So I don't see any sense into speculating what they were thinking. We can compare schemes theoretically, but will never know if TFP had other criteria we don't know of. And we can only be sure about the results when we actually have played it.
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.