brum

After reading some of the replies and tips.. I am now of the opinion that it's not really a balancing issue, as water is indeed fairly easy to get; the main issue is that the game does not explain how to do it. Case in point, you have to have empty hands while standing above water to drink it; this is the kind of thing most people would not try. I have not seen the game write or tell me in any way that you can drink from bodies of water. The same applies to some other aspects, like being able to get antibiotics (honey) from tree stumps. I just destroyed a few, and i didn't get honey, it just gives you a bit of wood, so from that point on i didn't touch them, until i read up about them on wikipedia. I think a mark of a good game is that it conveys this kind of information to you in some way; so that you don't have to play it with wikipedia open.

As the topic suggests, i have issues with how water is implemented right now. I'm playing on a 2 person server and it's extremely weird how literally the only way to gain water during the early game is to go on toilet scavenging runs to get your needed daily 2-3 jars of water. It's really, really strange. I don't understand why you can't make glass jars or make plastic containers or buckets to fill them with water and just boil them. I feel like it's some top-down balancing decision because they felt like water production was too tedious during the late-game, so they made early game almost unplayable as a result. Not just from a game feel perspective, but also in the immersion breaking way. I've looked into how to solve this issue, and it seems like the only solution is buying something from an NPC for a total of 1500+ tokens, of which i've found maybe 400 so far in 14 days. I don't get it, why do i need to interact with a trader, as the only way to get water, the most common element on the surface of the planet? Why are there no alternative methods to tide people over at the start of the game, which allows you to get water without a collector, albeit in a more tedious way? I understand the reason for water collectors to exist, to basically allow players to put that part of the game on autopilot, to be able to focus on other things, but why are there no alternative early game options at ALL that don't rely on RNG toilet scavenging during the early game? I find it really crazy and a bad decision to change the game this way compared to how it was years ago, where it was a true, uninterrupted, logical scavenging game. I also noticed zombies just spawn out of NOWHERE ontop of you, rather than wandering around normally, or loading inside a house when you are first approaching it.