Why DONT you want jars

[ALEXZANDER]

Shortly - i dont want jars in game because i am lazy to just drop them if i dont need them comments be like
Playing alpha 16.4 alpha and dont have problem with them at all

 

[EvilPolygons]

I'm for letting people gather water from streams and lakes. If they did that they could also remove all murky water from loot which would be very pleasing. Whether its a canteen, or a bucket, or you just get jars of murky water whenever you press E empty handed...I don't much care at this point. I think the game is better without empty jars in loot and it would be better still without murky water in loot.

I agree mostly but not entirely. One of the things about this game that screams "it's the apocalypse and everything is terrible" is surviving off of toiler water. So I'm fine with murky water being removed from nearly every other loot table, but they gotta keep toilet water. It's just too gross to get rid of.

 

[Kyoji]

The problem with that is it makes it even worse for those of us who don't want to deal with jars. At least when it was 125, I could loot everything and ignore that I got empty jars and they'd only take one slot until I hit 125. With only 15, I'd be using multiple slots very quickly in a POI, especially a tier 5 POI. Since I don't normally spend time looking at what I loot and just hit loot all for each container, I'd quickly end up with a bunch of slots filled with jars that I'd then have to drop in order to pick up other things when I got full. That's what I don't want to have to do again and one reason why I don't support adding empty jars back.

Unless you can't loot empty jars. If you want to say that you can't loot jars, then feel free to have them be a small stack size.

Even so, unless they make it so you have to fill each jar one at a time with a 2 second or so timer so that it's just a royal pain to do (but is immersive and realistic!!), then empty jars will always end up being extremely easy no matter how you set them up unless you limit the total number you can carry to only a few total - perhaps having a "canteen" slot that is the only way to carry a reusable water container (jar or canteen or bottle or whatever).

I think inventory management is important in a survival game and adding an extra slot for jars wouldn't be much of an issue. Unless they turned down water found while looting you will just be throwing them away - like cornmeal. Or they could just add another row for your backpack or perhaps an upgraded backpack you can find which would make clothing stores and camping stores more valuable.

But I agree that a simple stack size limit doesn't really fix the issue of water scarcity.

I know people don't like to hear it but the only way to make it balanced without destroying another system is to make them consume on use like every other container IMO.

 

[Sapient6]

If the game is going to make me deal with glass jars then I want it to also make me CARE about glass jars. Late game, as I'm converting the last of my weapons to tier 3 quality 6, I better still be excited to get a jar in loot... because I'm still having trouble keeping my thirst meter full, and still struggling to make repair kits for lack of duct tape. And when I drink and get an empty jar, that jar had better be the most valuable crafting ingredient in my inventory.

If they add in glass jars and on day 10 finding glass jars is less exciting than finding corn meal, then all TFP will have done is add more stupid clutter that makes nothing better. At that point they'd be much better off just making water trivial. Interacting with a stream should just give you a stack of murky water... which would make the game worse, but still be a better change than just bringing back glass jars.

So yeah, I'm against glass jars because I'm against middle of the road add-nothing features. Removing glass jars the way they did was not the "best" design choice they could have made at the time, but it was still an improvement.

 

[8_Hussars]

That's not why they were removed. They were removed because they trivialized water.

Joel said this:

Why not both?

That Joel quote feels more like after the fact justification, or maybe something pulled from the recent TFP Jars Reddit post. We all knew water was too easy, but it’s also clear it was never rebalanced to be a harder survival mechanic once Jars were removed and the Dew Collector came in.

In the latest dev stream, they mentioned not wanting biome-specific armor mods because it would be a hassle for players to constantly swap them. That shows they’re prioritizing in-game logic and playability, while putting immersion on the back burner.

IIRC, in an earlier dev stream they also said Jars, being the last container left, broke their internal game logic.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter much beyond giving context to some of the decisions they’ve made.

 

[Wheesel]

Just my 2 cents about water mechanics:

Change Dew collectors to only collect dew during night time.

Change dew collectors to fully fill up during a rainstorm.

I'm pretty indifferent on bringing back glass jars or not but if they did, I'd make them work as follows:

Allow crafting empty glass jars but gate them behind having crucible (some one elses idea earlier in this post) but dont introduce other ingredients into the recipe.

Allow finding empty glass jars in loot.

keep stack size of empty glass jars at 10 just like murky and clean water.

When you use a glass jar filled with murky or clean water or a drink its gone, just like the food items no longer leaving empty cans.

 

[Sapient6]

Change Dew collectors to only collect dew during night time.

Change dew collectors to fully fill up during a rainstorm.

Go a couple steps further:

Dew collectors don't work in the Burnt Forest and Snow biomes.

Dew collectors collect irradiated water in the wasteland, with an alternate recipe to use it to make glue but can not be used in cooking.

Easy peazy quick and sleazy.

 

[Syphon583]

Look, is it realistic without them? No. Would the game's survival mechanic be improved with them back? Also No.

Nearly every other survival game I've played does not allow the player to collect endless amounts of water containers to be filled at will. They limit their ability to carry anything more than a small amount and make collection and purification a process. Are dew collectors the answer? No, not from a survival aspect.

I would hate having glass jars back in the game. Give the player the ability to make varying qualities of canteens to carry on them (1 can be carried at a time). Have containers at your base to store larger amounts of water (dew collectors could be repurposed for this). Add more steps to the purification process that can be enhanced and improved as you progress in the game.

(these are just spit-balled ideas. I'm sure there can be other implementations that accomplish the same thing)

 

[Kyoji]

Go a couple steps further:

Dew collectors don't work in the Burnt Forest and Snow biomes.

Dew collectors collect irradiated water in the wasteland, with an alternate recipe to use it to make glue but can not be used in cooking.

Easy peazy quick and sleazy.

Only issue is that now you can't reasonably live in those biomes. Perhaps cooking takes longer in snow and water collection is slower in desert and burnt forest. I don't think any of this is necessary but it would be neat to see at least some complexity return to the game.

Look, is it realistic without them? No. Would the game's survival mechanic be improved with them back? Also No.

I agree that even with the return of jars it won't fix water survival. Furthermore, changes you would make to fix survival water focus could also be done with dew collectors.

 

[Kalen]

So, it is far faster. It's also far cheaper. Your argument was that you thought jars were better because of the time spent gathering and boiling the water (see quote below). But you agree that that is not the case. It's faster, so that time spent is less. Yes, there is a jar limitation, but you can keep refilling them, so that's not much of a limitation. And you can compare that limitation to the number of dew collectors you make.

This is out of context.

I stated that other items that use implied containers (for lack of a better term) such as gas and oil, automatically give you the containers when you collect them. When you wrench a car you get containers of gas and oil, even though we can all be sure, that there weren't containers of gas and oil actually in the car. The game simplifies it by just giving you those resources in containers.

I then said if you were going to make water work the same way, then you would be able to collect jars of murky water directly from open water. Walk down to a lake, right click on the lake and pick up a jar of murky water.

EvilPolygons replied to that saying

Anyway, drawing water from natural sources isn't a "worse" solution. It's how I have my game modded and it's the *best* solution. Because it takes time to gather water bucket-by-bucket and boil it. The work it takes and time it takes is the mechanism that balances it. And you don't need jars for that at all.

I was commenting that directly getting jars from lakes was a worse situation because you could infinitely get water. Empty jars, while reusable, at least provide a limit to how much you can get.

He also commented on the time it took to collect and boil the water, to which I also pointed out that you had to collect and boil jars as well.

 

[EvilPolygons]

I was commenting that directly getting jars from lakes was a worse situation because you could infinitely get water. Empty jars, while reusable, at least provide a limit to how much you can get.

Which had nothing to do with my original comment. You were just shifting the goalpost around for the sake of your own argument, because I never suggested that we should get "jars" directly from lakes. When you collect water with a bucket, the bucket fills with the equivalent of 3 units of murky water. You can't remove "jars" from the bucket -- the murky water either stays in the bucket or you dump it out on the ground. When you boil a bucket's worth of murky water on a campfire, it goes directly into the cooking pot.

The entire point of the bucket mod is to simulate how people *actually* gather water. Which is far better than this ridiculous notion that anyone is going to hike down to a nearby river with 300 empty glass jars instead of a freaking bucket or pail.

Nearly ANYTHING is more immersive than glass jars, because glass jars are completely unrealistic and utterly ABSURD. Old plastic milk jugs would be more immersive, because at least people really actually use those to collect water.

 

[InfiniteWarrior]

As loathe to repeat myself as I am.... Have we not already determined it's not about jars?

 

[Kalen]

Which had nothing to do with my original comment. You were just shifting the goalpost around for the sake of your own argument, because I never suggested that we should get "jars" directly from lakes.

How am I shifting the goal posts, I made a statement about how one could accomplish the task of gaining water from a water source without using jars.... and added why I thought that was a worse idea than my original stance of just adding jars back.

You chose to comment on that post and mention some mod that I've never tried or even heard of.

Then my comment got taken out of context and I had to explain its origin.