PC Water Collection Options

[Veleyna]

I saw a thing on Youtube about upcoming changes removing jars from the game in favor of a dew collector and that got me thinking about necessary changes to the water system in 7dtd. I'm curious what others think about it though. So here's my thoughts. 

Firstly, I don't think jars should be removed at all. Rather they should be more rare and found in more reasonable places. Like who leaves a jar of murky water in their toilet? That's just weird. Convenient for the game's theme and all, but weird. Jars should be found rarely in cabinets, basements, or pantries, more commonly in places that would manufacture or use jars commonly, and crafting jars should require a special setup specifically for working glass. Jars would also be more common on farms where they likely used them to preserve food. Additionally, jars should have a wider variety of recipes since one of the main things jars would be used for in a survival setting is actually food preservation. These changes would make jars simultaneously harder to obtain and more valuable for things besides water, especially if jarred or canned food doesn't rot while unpreserved food has a timer, making the whole thing more realistic. 

Secondly, water should be obtainable passively with a list of options that each have pros and cons. Securing a source of water is vital for survival and setting up near a lake or river is definitely one fair option. The pro being that there's literally an abundance of water right there, the con being that having it securely within the base may be difficult and of course it will need to be purified. There's also the issue of location, you're less free to build where you might want if your priority is to be near the water source. Snow is another option for obtaining water, but has mostly the same cons with the necessary location being an entire biome instead. 

So here's a few alternatives. 

1: Rainwater collection. The pro is that it fills up fast during a storm, the water doesn't necessarily need to be purified, and it can be safely secured on the roof of your base. The con being that it only fills up during rainy weather, making it unreliable as a sole source of water and even less viable in desert biomes. 

2: Dew collection, as mentioned in the upcoming update. The pro is that it has more freedom in where it can be built, humidity tends to be everywhere, and also does not require purification. The con being that this is a slow method of water collection, though it could get a boost in foggy weather, it would take multiple dew collectors to be viable as a sole source of water collection. 

3: Well water. The pro is that this would offer the most clean water from a single source, the con being that it would be resource intensive to build and would require digging down, making it also the most labor intensive to build. This could come in both mechanical and powered variants with the mechanical version taking longer to manually pump the water while the powered version generates a small amount of noise. 

Having all these options and keeping jars would make finding a location for your base, designing your base, and ensuring a good supply of water a more central point in playing the game while also keeping it semi-realistic. 

What are your thoughts about this? Do you have any other ideas for how to obtain water or what could be done with jars?

 

[meganoth]

I saw a thing on Youtube about upcoming changes removing jars from the game in favor of a dew collector and that got me thinking about necessary changes to the water system in 7dtd. I'm curious what others think about it though. So here's my thoughts. 

Firstly, I don't think jars should be removed at all. Rather they should be more rare and found in more reasonable places. Like who leaves a jar of murky water in their toilet? That's just weird. Convenient for the game's theme and all, but weird. Jars should be found rarely in cabinets, basements, or pantries, more commonly in places that would manufacture or use jars commonly, and crafting jars should require a special setup specifically for working glass. Jars would also be more common on farms where they likely used them to preserve food. Additionally, jars should have a wider variety of recipes since one of the main things jars would be used for in a survival setting is actually food preservation. These changes would make jars simultaneously harder to obtain and more valuable for things besides water, especially if jarred or canned food doesn't rot while unpreserved food has a timer, making the whole thing more realistic. 

Secondly, water should be obtainable passively with a list of options that each have pros and cons. Securing a source of water is vital for survival and setting up near a lake or river is definitely one fair option. The pro being that there's literally an abundance of water right there, the con being that having it securely within the base may be difficult and of course it will need to be purified. There's also the issue of location, you're less free to build where you might want if your priority is to be near the water source. Snow is another option for obtaining water, but has mostly the same cons with the necessary location being an entire biome instead. 

So here's a few alternatives. 

1: Rainwater collection. The pro is that it fills up fast during a storm, the water doesn't necessarily need to be purified, and it can be safely secured on the roof of your base. The con being that it only fills up during rainy weather, making it unreliable as a sole source of water and even less viable in desert biomes. 

2: Dew collection, as mentioned in the upcoming update. The pro is that it has more freedom in where it can be built, humidity tends to be everywhere, and also does not require purification. The con being that this is a slow method of water collection, though it could get a boost in foggy weather, it would take multiple dew collectors to be viable as a sole source of water collection. 

3: Well water. The pro is that this would offer the most clean water from a single source, the con being that it would be resource intensive to build and would require digging down, making it also the most labor intensive to build. This could come in both mechanical and powered variants with the mechanical version taking longer to manually pump the water while the powered version generates a small amount of noise. 

Having all these options and keeping jars would make finding a location for your base, designing your base, and ensuring a good supply of water a more central point in playing the game while also keeping it semi-realistic. 

What are your thoughts about this? Do you have any other ideas for how to obtain water or what could be done with jars?

You have to ask the question what problem you want to solve with a change. Now in A20 water is unlimited. There usually are bodies of water everywhere, so once you have a few hundred jars you can fill them up after a 10 seconds drive with the minibike. Nobody would be interested in say dew collectors or wells or rainwater collection when the easiest method by far is just doing this 10 second drive to the next pond and fill up those hundreds of jars. And jars can be crafted in the hundreds easily if you have a forge.

So these are nice ideas but they would likely be ignored by everyone if implemented.

TFP wanted to solve something different: Not how to make additional ways or just a different way to obtain water, but make water a scarce and therefore valuable item. One you would be happy to find in loot, at least in the early and mid game.

 

[Roland]

I saw a thing on Youtube about upcoming changes removing jars from the game in favor of a dew collector and that got me thinking about necessary changes to the water system in 7dtd. I'm curious what others think about it though. So here's my thoughts.

If you have any questions about what you heard in the YouTube video please ask. There are quite a few gaps in knowledge about all the changes in A21 many of which work hand in hand with the revealed changes and commentators on YouTube tend to fill those gaps with inaccurate assumptions and guesses or think of the changes in the context of current A20 gameplay which is a mistake.

Even though they present themselves as experts they do not have access to the design meetings at TFP nor have they ever played A21.

 

[Veleyna]

You have to ask the question what problem you want to solve with a change. Now in A20 water is unlimited. There usually are bodies of water everywhere, so once you have a few hundred jars you can fill them up after a 10 seconds drive with the minibike. Nobody would be interested in say dew collectors or wells or rainwater collection when the easiest method by far is just doing this 10 second drive to the next pond and fill up those hundreds of jars. And jars can be crafted in the hundreds easily if you have a forge.

So these are nice ideas but they would likely be ignored by everyone if implemented.

TFP wanted to solve something different: Not how to make additional ways or just a different way to obtain water, but make water a scarce and therefore valuable item. One you would be happy to find in loot, at least in the early and mid game.

I understand that, that's why the first part of my post is there. Let's break down the problem in a bit more detail. 

People use jars to mass collect and store mass amounts of water obtained from the rivers, lakes, etc. This makes water seem abundant and usually easy to collect. Even the desert has a convenient watering hole to collect from. They do this because it is incredibly easy and because that's pretty much the only use for jars. Collect water, turn it into tea, keep killing zombies. 

The solution youtubers claim the developers are going with is to remove jars completely, but this potentially creates other problems and might not actually be the best solution. See, when solving a problem with a game the goal isn't simply to remove the problem itself. The goal is to remove the problem in a way that makes the game *more fun,* otherwise it's not a good fix and if it makes the game too tedious or, worse, boring, then it's objectively a bad decision. From what I've heard it sounds like they've thought this through beyond just removing jars which is why the point of the topic isn't to complain or try to talk them out of it, but to flesh out more info so that we might be able to help flesh out a fun solution. 

So the first part of my post covered what else could be done with jars. 

Step 1: Make them more rare. Right now they're found in practically every toilet as well as various loot containers. Murky water is relatively common, boiled water can be found too, as well as tea, beer, etc. Not only does this make jars waaay too common, it's entirely unrealistic.

Nobody has jars of murky water just sitting in their toilet and if an apocalypse were to happen nobody would be putting jars in toilets. That's just absurd. Most people don't use jars for beer, so looting a gas station or cannery and finding dozens of jars of beer along the way is also really weird, most likely those would be in cans. And crafting jars at a forge without tools for crafting glass? That doesn't make sense either. 

So, yeah, remove a lot of the ways in which people get jars. They should be a rare find in pantries or cabinets, more common on farms and places that use jars a lot. There should also be a new crafting station specifically for glass which could also be used for other items. This would make jars harder to acquire even by crafting and make it take longer to get to the crafting point if the glass station requires resources from the forge and to be made at the workbench. 

Step 2: Add more recipes that require jars. And this is where they can kill two birds with one stone, because another problem players have complained about is that farming is almost pointless later in the game. Food becomes pretty easy to acquire and ends up being stockpiled over time. Right now I have a game going, day 10 and I have 3 chests full of meat, eggs, produce, canned goods, etc. as well as some farm plots still in a chest because I haven't decided where to start farming at all yet, I have no farm plots set down anywhere to grow my own food. I stopped gathering food by day 5. The problem there is that the food doesn't rot or waste away, it lasts indefinitely, another unrealistic detail that is generally acceptable for a game but can make a zombie apocalypse game too easy. 

So if they were to add a rot feature to the food it would make those rare glass jars more valuable for preserving food instead of collecting tons of water. Not only does this align more with what jars would be desired for in the real world under such circumstances, it also forces the players to think more strategically on what they would use their jars for and increases the importance of farming and hunting. It also adds some potential other items such as an ice chest or fridge to preserve foods longer, maybe new recipes such as jerky to have options that don't rot as fast, etc. Additionally, it makes rotten meat a bit easier to get since, if you need it, you can just let the meat rot. 

Step 3: Alternative water sources, the main reason for my post and the thing I wanted to talk about the most. With jars being rare and needed for food, players will need a clean water option early on and the easiest thing to build in the real world is rainwater collectors. Dew collectors are also pretty simple, and building both could be ideal in some circumstances. Either one offers a clean water source not dependent on jars and could play a part in base design, a well even more so since it's a bit more limited in where it can be, but the well would almost definitely be a mid-game thing. Each possible water station should have pros and cons relating to how the water is collected and relating to speed, conditions, requirements, etc. I was mostly posting because, as I thought about this, I began wondering what ideas other players might come up with.

Bonus possibility: Another thing they could do to make people think strategically about their jars is simply lower the stack limit. Unfilled could be 10, filled could be 5, or even less. They could also add a canteen for water which doesn't stack at all, but can hold more than just one drink and is filled only at a watering station. Since the watering stations provide clean water as standard, jars for water would become more of an unnecessary hassle compared to the alternatives.

There's a lot that can be done to solve the same problem and I'm not saying this one solution is the only way to go or any arrogant claim like that. Mostly I just thought this would be fun to discuss and discussing it here might allow something to come of it, if other people agree and it reaches the devs that's awesome, if not then I get to learn more about what other players who enjoy this game think is fun or tedious. 

 

[meganoth]

Good points. Some comments:

Lowering stack limit is not going to limit water availability for most players, it just makes handling of water more of a grind and boring. Lets say you have 100 empty jars in your base and need water. If you could transport them in one stack you would fill them up at a pond, easy. If they were only stackable to 5 you still would take all of them with you and fill them at the pond, but it would take you an absurd amount of clicks to fill them. But you would do it because you know that you eventually need that water (for food and glue and ...) and need to to that work anyway

You are right that water jars in toilets doesn't make much sense. But 7D2D already was already halfways where one item of "jar of water" was just a quant of water with the container abstracted away. Specifically you never did get back a water jar if you used the water, just like you never saw an empty gas can or empty acid bottle even though the icon might mislead you into thinking there was a container.

Now if you look at the jar of water you get out of the toilet just as a quantity of water and abstract the container away then water out of toilets makes sense again.

Obviously simulating all the fluid containers in the game would be a step towards realism, and especially for the water containers as water is available in ponds and rivers and logically it should not be difficult to just build arbitrary containers for water if you can build a drone! But there are disadvantages down that road too, lots of micromanagement of containers and always the problem that water is essentially endless if you have at least a few reusable containers that you can refill, at least for glue and other production where the water doesn't need to be free of poisons. And if the containers vanish when used there you have your realism break again.

So TFP went with abstracting away containers completely because they were already there with all other containers and halfways with water containers. There is no doubt that there could have been other solutions, with different advantages and disadvantages.

At the moment they have already finished implementing the "abstracting away" solution, balanced it to some extent and want to drop it on their guinea pigs (  ),  the players, to see what happens. Undoubtedly many players will immediately object and loudly proclaim the decline of western civilization because of this, then some will appreciate the change and others will always protest at the strangeness of it. If too many object then a solution similar to yours might eventually be implemented to appease the masses. We will see.

 

[rateds2k]

Are far as water to drink, I think I heard that you can just drink directly from lakes in A21. There really isn't a penalty to it.

 

[Vaeliorin]

Are far as water to drink, I think I heard that you can just drink directly from lakes in A21. There really isn't a penalty to it.

-5 Health, Dysentery chance and possibly something else, iirc.

 

[rateds2k]

-5 Health, Dysentery chance and possibly something else, iirc.

Exactly, no real penalty. I drink murky water when I find it as I play and keep the clean water for recipes. It is not like health bandos are rare

 

[Riamus]

I saw a thing on Youtube about upcoming changes removing jars from the game in favor of a dew collector and that got me thinking about necessary changes to the water system in 7dtd. I'm curious what others think about it though. So here's my thoughts. 

Firstly, I don't think jars should be removed at all. Rather they should be more rare and found in more reasonable places. Like who leaves a jar of murky water in their toilet? That's just weird. Convenient for the game's theme and all, but weird. Jars should be found rarely in cabinets, basements, or pantries, more commonly in places that would manufacture or use jars commonly, and crafting jars should require a special setup specifically for working glass. Jars would also be more common on farms where they likely used them to preserve food. Additionally, jars should have a wider variety of recipes since one of the main things jars would be used for in a survival setting is actually food preservation. These changes would make jars simultaneously harder to obtain and more valuable for things besides water, especially if jarred or canned food doesn't rot while unpreserved food has a timer, making the whole thing more realistic. 

Secondly, water should be obtainable passively with a list of options that each have pros and cons. Securing a source of water is vital for survival and setting up near a lake or river is definitely one fair option. The pro being that there's literally an abundance of water right there, the con being that having it securely within the base may be difficult and of course it will need to be purified. There's also the issue of location, you're less free to build where you might want if your priority is to be near the water source. Snow is another option for obtaining water, but has mostly the same cons with the necessary location being an entire biome instead. 

So here's a few alternatives. 

1: Rainwater collection. The pro is that it fills up fast during a storm, the water doesn't necessarily need to be purified, and it can be safely secured on the roof of your base. The con being that it only fills up during rainy weather, making it unreliable as a sole source of water and even less viable in desert biomes. 

2: Dew collection, as mentioned in the upcoming update. The pro is that it has more freedom in where it can be built, humidity tends to be everywhere, and also does not require purification. The con being that this is a slow method of water collection, though it could get a boost in foggy weather, it would take multiple dew collectors to be viable as a sole source of water collection. 

3: Well water. The pro is that this would offer the most clean water from a single source, the con being that it would be resource intensive to build and would require digging down, making it also the most labor intensive to build. This could come in both mechanical and powered variants with the mechanical version taking longer to manually pump the water while the powered version generates a small amount of noise. 

Having all these options and keeping jars would make finding a location for your base, designing your base, and ensuring a good supply of water a more central point in playing the game while also keeping it semi-realistic. 

What are your thoughts about this? Do you have any other ideas for how to obtain water or what could be done with jars?

Rainwater is problematic.  Only chucks where players are are loaded. If your base is somewhere else, it isn't loaded and has no idea what the weather is like.  You could abstract it and say that if it rains on you, then it is raining in the rain collector, but if that is on the other side of the map, it doesn't make much sense.  I believe this is why they chose dew collectors, because they just work at a set rate regardless of weather.  I am unsure why they need direct access to the sky considering they are dew collectors and not rain collectors, but it isn't really important.

I am thrilled they are removing glass jars and cans. They just take up space and are wasted loot.  I never use them.  There isn't any reason to unless you go super crazy with glue.  I find so much murky water that even fit recipes, there isn't any reason to look for more.  Thankfully, that will be reduced from what I understand.  As for drinking water, I find so many things to drink that it isn't a big deal.  And one I can make mineral water, I never drink anything else except to use up loot that I don't have room for.  That may take more time with the magazines if they move it from book to magazine.

I do like the idea of a well, but it isn't really necessary.

 

[Roland]

I understand that, that's why the first part of my post is there. Let's break down the problem in a bit more detail. 

People use jars to mass collect and store mass amounts of water obtained from the rivers, lakes, etc. This makes water seem abundant and usually easy to collect. Even the desert has a convenient watering hole to collect from. They do this because it is incredibly easy and because that's pretty much the only use for jars. Collect water, turn it into tea, keep killing zombies. 

The solution youtubers claim the developers are going with is to remove jars completely, but this potentially creates other problems and might not actually be the best solution. See, when solving a problem with a game the goal isn't simply to remove the problem itself. The goal is to remove the problem in a way that makes the game *more fun,* otherwise it's not a good fix and if it makes the game too tedious or, worse, boring, then it's objectively a bad decision. From what I've heard it sounds like they've thought this through beyond just removing jars which is why the point of the topic isn't to complain or try to talk them out of it, but to flesh out more info so that we might be able to help flesh out a fun solution. 

So the first part of my post covered what else could be done with jars. 

Step 1: Make them more rare. Right now they're found in practically every toilet as well as various loot containers. Murky water is relatively common, boiled water can be found too, as well as tea, beer, etc. Not only does this make jars waaay too common, it's entirely unrealistic.

Nobody has jars of murky water just sitting in their toilet and if an apocalypse were to happen nobody would be putting jars in toilets. That's just absurd. Most people don't use jars for beer, so looting a gas station or cannery and finding dozens of jars of beer along the way is also really weird, most likely those would be in cans. And crafting jars at a forge without tools for crafting glass? That doesn't make sense either. 

So, yeah, remove a lot of the ways in which people get jars. They should be a rare find in pantries or cabinets, more common on farms and places that use jars a lot. There should also be a new crafting station specifically for glass which could also be used for other items. This would make jars harder to acquire even by crafting and make it take longer to get to the crafting point if the glass station requires resources from the forge and to be made at the workbench. 

Step 2: Add more recipes that require jars. And this is where they can kill two birds with one stone, because another problem players have complained about is that farming is almost pointless later in the game. Food becomes pretty easy to acquire and ends up being stockpiled over time. Right now I have a game going, day 10 and I have 3 chests full of meat, eggs, produce, canned goods, etc. as well as some farm plots still in a chest because I haven't decided where to start farming at all yet, I have no farm plots set down anywhere to grow my own food. I stopped gathering food by day 5. The problem there is that the food doesn't rot or waste away, it lasts indefinitely, another unrealistic detail that is generally acceptable for a game but can make a zombie apocalypse game too easy. 

So if they were to add a rot feature to the food it would make those rare glass jars more valuable for preserving food instead of collecting tons of water. Not only does this align more with what jars would be desired for in the real world under such circumstances, it also forces the players to think more strategically on what they would use their jars for and increases the importance of farming and hunting. It also adds some potential other items such as an ice chest or fridge to preserve foods longer, maybe new recipes such as jerky to have options that don't rot as fast, etc. Additionally, it makes rotten meat a bit easier to get since, if you need it, you can just let the meat rot. 

Step 3: Alternative water sources, the main reason for my post and the thing I wanted to talk about the most. With jars being rare and needed for food, players will need a clean water option early on and the easiest thing to build in the real world is rainwater collectors. Dew collectors are also pretty simple, and building both could be ideal in some circumstances. Either one offers a clean water source not dependent on jars and could play a part in base design, a well even more so since it's a bit more limited in where it can be, but the well would almost definitely be a mid-game thing. Each possible water station should have pros and cons relating to how the water is collected and relating to speed, conditions, requirements, etc. I was mostly posting because, as I thought about this, I began wondering what ideas other players might come up with.

Bonus possibility: Another thing they could do to make people think strategically about their jars is simply lower the stack limit. Unfilled could be 10, filled could be 5, or even less. They could also add a canteen for water which doesn't stack at all, but can hold more than just one drink and is filled only at a watering station. Since the watering stations provide clean water as standard, jars for water would become more of an unnecessary hassle compared to the alternatives.

There's a lot that can be done to solve the same problem and I'm not saying this one solution is the only way to go or any arrogant claim like that. Mostly I just thought this would be fun to discuss and discussing it here might allow something to come of it, if other people agree and it reaches the devs that's awesome, if not then I get to learn more about what other players who enjoy this game think is fun or tedious. 

Part of the disconnect between what a jar of water actually is and what a jar of water is perceived to be is thanks to the fact that of all the consumables in the game, only a unit of water would return the empty container that held that unit of water. No other consumable in the game returns an empty container or dish. By removing the empty jar as an item, now a "jar of water" is exactly the same as a "canister of gas" or a "bowl of stew". They are just a graphical representation of a unit of that consumable as it sits in your inventory. The empty jar item was removed as part of the process of making the game work uniformly across the board and not only as a solution to early water survival problems.

Your ideas are great but if you really want them to gain traction they should be based on the idea that empty jars as an item in the game are gone for good. They've actually been gone from internal builds of A21 for about 8-10 months now. In A21, all consumables in the game operate in exactly the same way which is an extremely highly valued outcome for them.

If the developers decide to make adjustments to early game water survival based on community feedback in the future, even they will look for solutions and balancing adjustments that are based on no empty jars existing in the game. I hope this knowledge gives you a good challenge to consider your own solution ideas.

 

[Veleyna]

Good points. Some comments:

Lowering stack limit is not going to limit water availability for most players, it just makes handling of water more of a grind and boring. Lets say you have 100 empty jars in your base and need water. If you could transport them in one stack you would fill them up at a pond, easy. If they were only stackable to 5 you still would take all of them with you and fill them at the pond, but it would take you an absurd amount of clicks to fill them. But you would do it because you know that you eventually need that water (for food and glue and ...) and need to to that work anyway

You are right that water jars in toilets doesn't make much sense. But 7D2D already was already halfways where one item of "jar of water" was just a quant of water with the container abstracted away. Specifically you never did get back a water jar if you used the water, just like you never saw an empty gas can or empty acid bottle even though the icon might mislead you into thinking there was a container.

Now if you look at the jar of water you get out of the toilet just as a quantity of water and abstract the container away then water out of toilets makes sense again.

Obviously simulating all the fluid containers in the game would be a step towards realism, and especially for the water containers as water is available in ponds and rivers and logically it should not be difficult to just build arbitrary containers for water if you can build a drone! But there are disadvantages down that road too, lots of micromanagement of containers and always the problem that water is essentially endless if you have at least a few reusable containers that you can refill, at least for glue and other production where the water doesn't need to be free of poisons. And if the containers vanish when used there you have your realism break again.

So TFP went with abstracting away containers completely because they were already there with all other containers and halfways with water containers. There is no doubt that there could have been other solutions, with different advantages and disadvantages.

At the moment they have already finished implementing the "abstracting away" solution, balanced it to some extent and want to drop it on their guinea pigs (  ),  the players, to see what happens. Undoubtedly many players will immediately object and loudly proclaim the decline of western civilization because of this, then some will appreciate the change and others will always protest at the strangeness of it. If too many object then a solution similar to yours might eventually be implemented to appease the masses. We will see.

Yes, lowering stack limits by itself would make it tedious, but the idea there would be to use that method in conjunction with the other methods. If it's tedious and the water is necessary, but the same needs may be met in non-tedious ways, players will be more compelled to pursue the non-tedious solutions. Especially of the non-tedious options brings the source of the water closer to home. 

The biggest downside to what I thought of, in my opinion, is just that it would be a lot of work and the developers probably have more important ideas they want to pursue. This is why I didn't make a post trying to argue that this solution is the only right solution or anything like that. Removing jars is easy, streamlines things more as you have explained, and solves the main problem being addressed with water being too abundant. Dew collectors then solves the problem of water being too difficult to obtain over time, even if it only offers a small amount you could make several to get all you need. My alternative would involve rehashing the locations at which jars may spawn, their spawn rate, editing specific POIs, etc. And that would only be the first step since the proposal then involves designing, balancing, and editing new recipes alongside the integration of an entirely new mechanic, a rot system. Then to make water less difficult to manage as the game goes on I suggested adding not one, but at least three different methods of collecting water. 

And all that work would take time away from working on other ideas they're working on. In the end, I'd say if this idea isn't practically unanimously popular it's probably on the list of ideas best left to the modders. 

 

[meganoth]

Yes, lowering stack limits by itself would make it tedious, but the idea there would be to use that method in conjunction with the other methods. If it's tedious and the water is necessary, but the same needs may be met in non-tedious ways, players will be more compelled to pursue the non-tedious solutions. Especially of the non-tedious options brings the source of the water closer to home. 

That would only work halfways as other methods would also be limited (to a lower degree) by the stack size. And forcing players to make decisions because it takes less clicks (instead of in-game reasons) is a last-ressort solution, taken if no other solution is possible.

The biggest downside to what I thought of, in my opinion, is just that it would be a lot of work and the developers probably have more important ideas they want to pursue. This is why I didn't make a post trying to argue that this solution is the only right solution or anything like that. Removing jars is easy, streamlines things more as you have explained, and solves the main problem being addressed with water being too abundant. Dew collectors then solves the problem of water being too difficult to obtain over time, even if it only offers a small amount you could make several to get all you need. My alternative would involve rehashing the locations at which jars may spawn, their spawn rate, editing specific POIs, etc. And that would only be the first step since the proposal then involves designing, balancing, and editing new recipes alongside the integration of an entirely new mechanic, a rot system. Then to make water less difficult to manage as the game goes on I suggested adding not one, but at least three different methods of collecting water. 

A rot system for food is proposed regularily in the forum, garnering positive vibes from one part of the community. And shot down immediately by another part of the community. This is always a very controversial topic. Survival game players tend to appreciate the idea, all others find it horrible. I'd say if you ever want to design a mod with an alternative system, think carefully if you want to include a rot system for water

And all that work would take time away from working on other ideas they're working on. In the end, I'd say if this idea isn't practically unanimously popular it's probably on the list of ideas best left to the modders. 

There surely will be a mod reversing the change immediately after A21 comes out, there always is as people hang onto old stuff often just because they are used to it. Lets hope there will also be mods implementing ideas like yours.

 

[ElCabong]

Take everything you see on YouTube with a grain of salt. It may not make it to the final release. If everybody is walking around thirsty all the time with the penalties you get for being thirsty, that's no fun at all.

As it stands now I just make a few empty jars on day one then forget about it. It would be an improvement if you need to spend more time getting your survival needs in order before you start doing trader missions.