PC What was the point of the water change?

[Lamblaska]

Yeah, i agree. I don't know the true answer but i feel its something along the line of:

- batteries (and anything with a "quality" to them that degrades) cannot stack because the qualities of each item may be different. 
- 6k stacks for "mined resources" is probably because they want it to be "painless" to mine and carry it back, as well as pick up a stack and build a base/repair it. 
 

The 125 jars vs 10 water ... Im totally guessing here based on the above resource stacks possible logic: it was probably to make it as painless as possible to harvest water and bring it back to base.

there are some "weight" tags in the XML so maybe they had planned on making items have weight and the stacks were based on this some time ago? Like "yeah, if you're not careful you will have 6k rocks and its heavy but you can carry it"?

but then again, radiators, engines, clothing with no quality: then the logic makes no sense.  So the lat guess is: as the game versions evolved, no one want and cleaned up old "ideas" as stacking and weight considerations are too low on the priority list at the moment, so its all kinda bonkers right now... but its more of a minor inconvenience vs breaks game vs OP stacks?

Agreed. Items with durability and quality are unattackable. Engine is a outlier here, because it had levels in the past (I think). 

I also agreed that inventory management should be simple instead of complex. I believe you present players with hard choices and tradeoffs without worrying too much about weights and realism about stacks. I'm more curious about what was the logic behind it. 

The whole point was more... abstracting jars is something in line with so many already in place abstractions of the game.

 

[meganoth]

In my opinion, the new water system has ruined the game. Finding new ways to drink water isn't fun, it's silly and tedious.

When in a survival situation you would hoard any materials that would be valuable to you, including something to drink out of.. you wouldn't drink out of a jar and then discard it after use, that's just daft. 

I want to be able to scoop up some murky water and go and boil it. Don't try and fix something that isn't broken

You don't discard the jar. Whatever container you are using, you probably take it with you and fill it with water again. It just isn't simulated, exactly like the gas cans or the containers you store food into like meat stew (or did you think you were storing meat stew by itself, just filling the rather fluid stew into your backpack?)

 

[theFlu]

Whatever container you are using, you probably take it with you and fill it with water again.

But only when staring at toilets. Of course.

 

[Vaeliorin]

You don't discard the jar.

 

[Volstag]

Not having glass jars that were pretty pointless does not in any logical way connect the dots you're trying to connect.

100% agreed.  Amassing water in previous alphas was trivially easy.  The only bottle-neck was finding a cooking pot.  Once that was obtained, water was no longer a concern -- which, honestly, left me wondering: why even have the water/hydration system in the game?

To be fair though, I haven't really had an issue w/ water in A21 either.  It's a little more challenging at the beginning, but quickly circumvented.

 

[meganoth]

100% agreed.  Amassing water in previous alphas was trivially easy.  The only bottle-neck was finding a cooking pot.  Once that was obtained, water was no longer a concern -- which, honestly, left me wondering: why even have the water/hydration system in the game?

To be fair though, I haven't really had an issue w/ water in A21 either.  It's a little more challenging at the beginning, but quickly circumvented.

"Quickly circumvented" is by design. I.e. the developers said they want food and water only be a problem in early game

 

[vom]

You don't discard the jar. Whatever container you are using, you probably take it with you and fill it with water again.

Then why can't we fill the jar with water?

That's like the most basic oldest aspect of human survival. Find some kind of container, and put water in it, so you can carry it with you.

 

[Stranded_Napkin]

Yeah, naw, I don't eat my jars in real life so I wasn't about to play that sh*t. I modded the jars back in before even starting A21. It still bugs me that you eat the container the stews and stuff are in. I like at least the food to make sense. Zombies can and should be the main "that's not actually real, ya know" thing in the game. Just because it's a game doesn't mean that nothing should make sense.

 

[EvilPolygons]

I've tried A21 without jars (vanilla) and with jars (via mods). What I've discovered is that I kinda dislike jars after all, lol.

BUT I also hate the fact that I can build a campfire right next to a lake and somehow cannot get any of that water into a pot for boiling. I'm not complaining about "realism" here. My complaint is that TFP went about the water rebalance in such a hamfisted and clumsy way. It feels like an artificially restrictive change made purely because they couldn't figure out a less over-engineered solution.

The absolute best solution I've found is Silver's water bucket mod. No, it doesn't bring jars back -- jars are unnecessary with this mod. It allows you to scoop murky water with a bucket from a POI and then boil the filled bucket on a campfire. 3 minutes of boiling produces 3 jars of clean water. The bucket mod is balanced, uses existing game assets and mechanics, and allows water collection without ruining the thirst mechanic during the early game. Scooping water slowly depletes the POI water source, boiling the water takes an appropriate amount of time + fuel, and buckets are non-stackable so water hoarding is vastly reduced compared to what was possible with glass jars.

I really don't understand why we ended up with dew collectors when instead the devs could have simply tweaked water buckets to do something that a bucket should be able to do; gather and transport water!

 

[meganoth]

Then why can't we fill the jar with water?

You can, from toilets, from water you find in kitchen cupboards, from dew collectors. Jars are just not shown as a separate item, like gas cans. What you collect is one quantity of water and you don't need to concern yourself with how that water is transported. 

Think about it, it was always illogical that there are jars of water in the toilets, but everyone accepted this as the truth. The best explanation to this must have always been that you have containers with you, jars for example or anything else, and you fill these containers from the toilet. 

If you are asking why you can't get water from lakes, that is the solution TFP came up with to make water a scarce resource even though lakes are everywhere. Think of the water as simply unusable and don't think any further. For what TFP wanted to achieve it was the easiest solution. Whether there are better solutions would have to be evaluated.

 

[meganoth]

I've tried A21 without jars (vanilla) and with jars (via mods). What I've discovered is that I kinda dislike jars after all, lol.

BUT I also hate the fact that I can build a campfire right next to a lake and somehow cannot get any of that water into a pot for boiling. I'm not complaining about "realism" here. My complaint is that TFP went about the water rebalance in such a hamfisted and clumsy way. It feels like an artificially restrictive change made purely because they couldn't figure out a less over-engineered solution.

The absolute best solution I've found is Silver's water bucket mod. No, it doesn't bring jars back -- jars are unnecessary with this mod. It allows you to scoop murky water with a bucket from a POI and then boil the filled bucket on a campfire. 3 minutes of boiling produces 3 jars of clean water. The bucket mod is balanced, uses existing game assets and mechanics, and allows water collection without ruining the thirst mechanic during the early game. Scooping water slowly depletes the POI water source, boiling the water takes an appropriate amount of time + fuel, and buckets are non-stackable so water hoarding is vastly reduced compared to what was possible with glass jars.

I really don't understand why we ended up with dew collectors when instead the devs could have simply tweaked water buckets to do something that a bucket should be able to do; gather and transport water!

Can you craft buckets from clay? Can you fill the bucket from a lake or swimming pool?

If your answer is yes to both you have the means to produce any amount of water you might need at the moment even on the first day. You need some more time and effort than in A20, but thats about it.

 

[EvilPolygons]

Can you craft buckets from clay? Can you fill the bucket from a lake or swimming pool?

If your answer is yes to both you have the means to produce any amount of water you might need at the moment even on the first day. You need some more time and effort than in A20, but thats about it.

No. Buckets are crafted using forged iron bars, same as vanilla. In fact, it's the *exact* same iron water bucket that already exists in vanilla 7DTD. Silver merely modded it so that it can be placed on a campfire and its contents boiled.

Considering the rarity of finding buckets in loot or on traders in the very early game, the cost of crafting them, the time required to collect and boil water in them, AND the fact that buckets aren't stackable, this solution is much more well-balanced and less "gamey" than dew collectors, in my opinion. Plus, as I mentioned before, it's the same bucket from the base game. So if you continue to draw water from a swimming pool, it will eventually run out of water.

 

[Ramethzer0]

Dying of thirst, not sure what to do. Doesn't seem to be any water on this map.

Have you tried.. Oh I dunno.. looting it out of the hundreds of POI's that are just readily available everywhere else?

You don't need a trader to exist.  Dirty water can be looted just about anywhere.

 

[meganoth]

No. Buckets are crafted using forged iron bars, same as vanilla. In fact, it's the *exact* same iron water bucket that already exists in vanilla 7DTD. Silver merely modded it so that it can be placed on a campfire and its contents boiled.

Considering the rarity of finding buckets in loot or on traders in the very early game, the cost of crafting them, the time required to collect and boil water in them, AND the fact that buckets aren't stackable, this solution is much more well-balanced and less "gamey" than dew collectors, in my opinion. Plus, as I mentioned before, it's the same bucket from the base game. So if you continue to draw water from a swimming pool, it will eventually run out of water.

I never saw a bucket in loot and ignored it in crafting in the last years, sorry for my ignorance there.

It would make the game more difficult in the beginnning as you practically were dependant on first creating a forge before you could start producing water. And then immediately (as the bucket is re-usable endlessly) your water problems are completely solved. Just build beside a lake or swimming pool, craft 1-4 buckets and any amount of water is producible in relatively short time. 2 buckets should be easy to produce even on day 2 or 3 and would generate nearly 5*3*2=30 jars of water in a single night in your base! Players investing in miner69er could produce even more buckets and make more water (another slight disadvantage of your idea).

Not saying your solution isn't a good one in many ways, it sure is less gamey for example. But it would be available later and has not the slow (depending on player) ramp up of water production that the dew collector solution has.

 

[theFlu]

Given the design goal of making glue expensive; but to address the logical failing of lake water a little.

- Make the dew collectors into water purification stations; insert murky water, to slowly recover clean water.

- Add a new drinkable water "Boiled murky water", which is still murky water, but take away the health penalty and the sickness chance, leave the hydration at 10. It's drinkable mud, you don't want to make glue out of it without it failing due to the contaminants.

- Allow for a mechanic to pull murky in jars out of lakes (easiest solution: repurpose the current drinking with a "harvest a jar" like the "use to pickup plants" used to be.)

I still wouldn't be a fan, but it wouldn't drive me quite as bonkers ...

 

[EvilPolygons]

I never saw a bucket in loot and ignored it in crafting in the last years, sorry for my ignorance there.

It would make the game more difficult in the beginnning as you practically were dependant on first creating a forge before you could start producing water. And then immediately (as the bucket is re-usable endlessly) your water problems are completely solved. Just build beside a lake or swimming pool, craft 1-4 buckets and any amount of water is producible in relatively short time. 2 buckets should be easy to produce even on day 2 or 3 and would generate nearly 5*3*2=30 jars of water in a single night in your base! Players investing in miner69er could produce even more buckets and make more water (another slight disadvantage of your idea).

Not saying your solution isn't a good one in many ways, it sure is less gamey for example. But it would be available later and has not the slow (depending on player) ramp up of water production that the dew collector solution has.

A few points in response.

First off, just to get it out of the way, dew collectors are NOT effective at regulating water collection during the early game. From day one as a new character, you can gather FAR more murky water from looting POI containers than you'll get from building a dew collector. It's just a fact. Especially if you spawn near a decent sized town with lots of residential and commercial buildings. Dew collectors are fine as an automated water collection mechanic, I suppose, but let's not kid ourselves -- they don't slow down water production in and of themselves. It was the removal of stackable water jars that slowed down clean water production, not the addition of dew collectors.

As for buckets, to produce large amounts of clean water using them, you'd basically have to do nothing but scoop and boil water non-stop all day. And even then you can't come anywhere  close to the amount of water that could be horded using empty jars from A20 and earlier versions of the game. Crafting a couple of water buckets -- or even 4 or 5 -- is absolutely nothing compared to filling hundreds (or thousands) of stackable glass jars from a puddle in a matter of minutes prior to A21. Add to that the fact that glass jars didn't deplete water sources, while scooping water with a bucket removes that block of water from the world. If you play with chunk and POI resets disabled, that means once the water is gone, it's gone. Permanently. Forever.

I also want to add that it's a little odd when some people act like building a base near a water source is somehow a cheesy exploit. The natural instinct of human beings is to settle near water sources! It is totally ingrained in us as an innate survival trait, and therefore it's ridiculous to NOT reward players for doing the one thing that absolutely anyone with any sense would do -- build near water!

But I wanna say again, this isn't about "realism" in a zombie apocalypse game. It's about artificially gamey and hamfisted mechanics that prevent players from doing what we intuitively know we should be able to do. It's even worse when a common sense feature, such as drawing water from natural sources, is removed after having been in the game for years. I find it incredibly aggravating.

Anyway, nothing else for me to say on the subject. I'm just happy that this game is so fantastically moddable.

 

[ZombiDweller]

New water system mostly work if you stay loot abdudance =>50%. Below that finding water in POI's becomes extremely hard.

And with high loot % world feels like cornucopia of drink, food, equipment, weapons and items. Able to run multiple trader missions a day eliminates water survival aspect of the game in couple of hours of playing (2-3 ingame days).

If would have gone little different path with the water change. I would have added infection risk to all water sources. Making boiling it nessesary. And make it more aling with the world with weird infection changing people to zombies. (its game world, somethings doesnt need explaining. same as why we only can get water with dew collectors)

Add some other ways to acquirge water, like melting 100 snowballs to 1 tainted/infected (murky) water jar.

Scoop bucket of water, and boilit down to 10 jars of clean water. (1-2 hour boiling time to reduce mass production. Also requirement of bucket)

Enviromental change to make rainy days give change of infection, to stay on story about weird infection in game world.

Swimming or long touch time of water have chance to infection.

Player could take the chance. Drink murky water from water sources and risking infection.

Overall i like the change, it just need little refinement to fit multiple play styles of the game. More story like and fitting to the game world itself.

And there is always modding option.

 

[Shaenara]

I find that I can still loot Murky Water and clean it by cooking it. It is scarce though.

 

[meganoth]

irst off, just to get it out of the way, dew collectors are NOT effective at regulating water collection during the early game. From day one as a new character, you can gather FAR more murky water from looting POI containers than you'll get from building a dew collector. It's just a fact. Especially if you spawn near a decent sized town with lots of residential and commercial buildings. Dew collectors are fine as an automated water collection mechanic, I suppose, but let's not kid ourselves -- they don't slow down water production in and of themselves. It was the removal of stackable water jars that slowed down clean water production, not the addition of dew collectors.

You CAN gather far more murky water by looting POIs if you are an experienced player in SP. Read Shaenara's post above or lots of other posts from new players saying they don't have enough water. (Shaenara, are you real or ChatGPT?). Some don't know all the sources, some simply have a harder time killing zombies and not getting enough kitchens looted in a single day.

And I can tell you that we were always thirsty the first few days as a 4 player group. After having aquired first 1 and then 3 dew collectors we had enough water for drinking, but not enough for drinking and crafting. We ended up building about 10 dew collectors. So yes, water scarcity was very effective for a rather long time in our game to throw sticks between our legs. And dew collectors only helped slowly rectifying this.

Naturally it is the whole water change (including not getting water from lakes) that does this. I may have been a bit careless in describing the whole water change unter the title "dew collectors"

As for buckets, to produce large amounts of clean water using them, you'd basically have to do nothing but scoop and boil water non-stop all day. And even then you can't come anywhere  close to the amount of water that could be horded using empty jars from A20 and earlier versions of the game. Crafting a couple of water buckets -- or even 4 or 5 -- is absolutely nothing compared to filling hundreds (or thousands) of stackable glass jars from a puddle in a matter of minutes prior to A21. Add to that the fact that glass jars didn't deplete water sources, while scooping water with a bucket removes that block of water from the world. If you play with chunk and POI resets disabled, that means once the water is gone, it's gone. Permanently. Forever.

I was comparing your solution not to A20 but to the current solution. A20 was not a solution but a problem (at least to the devs).

Even a swimming pool has so many water blocks that it would suffice for a loong time. Don't even think about depleting a lake with the bucket method

also want to add that it's a little odd when some people act like building a base near a water source is somehow a cheesy exploit. The natural instinct of human beings is to settle near water sources! It is totally ingrained in us as an innate survival trait, and therefore it's ridiculous to NOT reward players for doing the one thing that absolutely anyone with any sense would do -- build near water!

Why would I say it is a cheesy exploit when it would be exactly the thing I would do if silver water buckets were in vanilla? Everyone would do it. And that would make the water problem in everyone's game non-existent as soon as you have a forge, with a totally legitimite counter, not an exploit !

But I wanna say again, this isn't about "realism" in a zombie apocalypse game. It's about artificially gamey and hamfisted mechanics that prevent players from doing what we intuitively know we should be able to do. It's even worse when a common sense feature, such as drawing water from natural sources, is removed after having been in the game for years. I find it incredibly aggravating.

"...after having been in the game in years". Sure, happens in EA, and I have to confess that I like it that so many things change between alphas.

Lots of players like to be confronted with new problems each alpha, I would say they have an affinity to EA. Lots of other players can't really handle change well or find it aggravating, they probably should wait for a game to exit EA before playing it.

 

[Mister Forgash]

I'm not hating the dew collector. I am enjoying the removal of jars.. but from an immersion perspective, I wish it played out like this: It's easy find/make my 100s of jars, which I turn into 100s of murky water.. except that now- it becomes a costly and potentially dangerous process of getting water you can drink, or purifying it from that.. runoff you scooped from a ditch, or what you salvaged from the toilets last loot run.

..But this isn't really a complaint, water management is satisfactory and I really hope I didn't buy 7 Days to Stay Hydrated.