I skip 7 pages to state my take on this.
Survival Games totally departing from reality is not good game design, especially when it is unlogical.
The Humans in 7DTD are perfectly capable of creating a freaking rocket launcher out of an assortment of specialized parts for that weapon (whatever e.g. "Rocketlauncher Parts" in practice is to you in your imagination) and simple items.
But crafting a in comparison rather simple glass to catch some water is totally beyond their mind? Especially when they encounter this item EVERY FREAKING DAY while looting and traders have jars with clean water in them?
And everytime they use it, they fumble the jar out of their hands and it breaks and they seemingly also step on the glass shards, since ingame not even glass shards remain?
Oh come on, don't try to sugarcoat it with me with arguments of "balance", just taking out empty glass jars was the quickest and easiest way to fix it, but quick and easy solutions are seldomly good solutions.
And yes, forcing players to play trader-centric to solve their problems, just because 2 of the devs like to play that way, is not good game design either.
Let's face it: This change is bad, because it was a "quick and easy solution".
Now, complaining, everyone can do that.
I want to do constructive criticism.
The Fun Pimps, very obviously, as developers are masters of their own game. They have the power to just change numbers to reach a desired balance effect, they have the power to implement new items and mechanics.
I get their argument "Water was too easy to get and as a consequence Duct Tape was way too easy to get", but they should've solved that differently.
They should bring Empty Glass Jars back, but in a changed form.
I googled the original recipe of it, it was 10 Crushed Sand and 1 piece of Clay. Yeah I get their sentiment, that it feels like a "minecraft-ish" leftover from earlier stages of development, to stand in as a water mechanic at the time. But that humans create and keep jars, recepticales, tin cans (those were a thing once too) and the like to gather water and cook it to make it actual clean, drinkable water, that is such a #1 Survival Move, it is bonkers that it is not in the game.
So instead of removing jars, they could implement several obstacles to Jar crafting or in general crafting of critical items, by approaching it from a realistic angle:
Cost
They could simply increase the cost of certain recipes.
1) They could bring empty glass jars back and increase the cost.
10 Crushed Sand, 1 Clay => 1000 Crushed Sand, 100 Clay. It could be that easy and this one would work, players would suddenly be unable to craft 500 empty jars and fill them with water to cook (that was, what that TFP dev more or less literally wrote as a motivation for the change).
They would have to first find sand and then farm unholy amounts of sand and Clay to make jars with. But they would be reusable like in the days of old.
It would have the desired effect of reducing the amounts of water available to players in early game and the player would have the choice, the choice between using clay either to make cobblestone (very important for a Horde Base, 100 clay equals like 10 or so cobblestone blocks) or for a glass jar. And Player Choice is actual good game design.
2) Glue Recipe:
They could further increase the cost. I don't get the "Bones are the limiting factor" notion. They are not. You can find animals everywhere, you can find rotten carcasses everywhere, bones are absolutely not the limiting factor. Getting Water is the limiting factor. Still, one could increase the costs in the glue recipe to further cut down Glue production. Though I feel it is rather easy to find ready to use glue, if you just loot everything, even trash, that can give you randomly glue or duct tapes.
3) Clean Water Recipe:
You could increase the cost of Clean Water Production. If you have to cook water for a certain time to kill off all bacteria, germs etc. in it, you'd loose some to evaporation into steam in the process.
So instead of 1 Murky Water -> 1 Clean Water the devs could change it to 2 Murky Water -> 1 Clean Water. I wouldn't go too overboard there, since this would also hit players, that try to survive in the wild without questing for the traders or even interacting with a trader at all. But if the devs would bring back the empty glass jar and these are reusable, this imho would be necessary to further ramp down Water Production this way.
4) Water Filter Recipes:
I read that suggestion on reddit, so it is not mine, but it was suggested to make Dew Collectors buildable with easy to get items, but you would also need to build water filters to put them into a dew collector so they would actually work and that they could break down after a time.
I think there could be two tiers, an Improvised Filter, that you could craft by hand with e.g. cloth, Crushed Sand and Coal, that is less time efficient, but produces atleast slowly Clean Water.
And there should be a recipe, locked behind the Workbench, to make the Water Filters we have now, that, looking at the picture, look like industrial-produced, basically perfect Water Filters, that have the same speed as now and would cost more valuable and harder to get resources like plastic, glue, coal, crushed sand and forged iron or even forged steel to be produced.
Method of Crafting and how fast a player gets to crafting glasses and iron wares
Now IRL one simply doesn't erect a forge out of simple materials and then go and start firing it up to craft e.g. forged Iron or, before the change, glass jars.
One would need proper molding forms to pour hot, liquid material (e.g. liquified, hot sand = glass, liquid hot iron) into, , if necessary beat them into shape after cooling down to create an item and then put them into cold water to rapidly cool them down, so it solidifies.
1) Forges are pretty easy to get, like all players start out with the knowledge, how to make them.
Heck, without reading specialized books about that topic or atleast watching a lengthy YouTube Tutorial, IRL I would have no freaking clue how to produce a primitive forge. And most of us wouldn't have a clue either IRL. Why not reflect that in game?
Lock forges behind a basic recipe, that you could get from the trader, like Water Filters now, either as quest reward for the Tier 1 Complete Quest to choose or to buy for 2250 dukes, like the Water Filter. That would form a further slow down in players getting the ability to craft glass jars and other iron items.
And one should also be able to find that recipe in PoI's. There are already so many book cases in Tier 2 PoIs that you can engage with stone weaponry and spike traps, there should also be a chance to find Water Filters and a Forge Recipe there.
The sense of it is to give players a choice back, if they want to play the game centered around the trader as a quest-centric game with limitless supplies or if they want to play as Explorers surviving by looting PoIs.
And let's face it: Traders make it too easy. Traders can send you to the same PoI over and over and everytime you start the quest it magically resets the whole PoI and that can happen every single ingame day, that he sends you to a PoI you cleared before. This is an endless source of supply.
I do think, this should be a thing, since otherwise at some point they couldn't generate quests anymore, but there should be a cooldown for that, like an ingame week and after the blood moon the trader could hand you out a new quest for a previously cleared PoI.
The core argument of the devs, that it was too easy to get water doesn't make sense when traders make the whole game too easy either!
2) As said, one simply doesn't create Forged Iron Bars, when he has a Forge. Without a mold to cast it into, at best he gets a puddle of hit liquid iron on the floor, that then is some artistic plate of iron, once it cools down.
So there should be some kind of "mold creation" mechanic, where you have to create molds after recipes, that you can find in the world or get from the trader.
More common recipes like for civilian items like glass jars should be rather easy to find in book cases and cheap to get from a trader, either as a random quest reward for a Tier 1 Quest or for a couple hundred dukes (e.g. 600 dukes, what you pay right now for a cooking pot).
With the recipe in mind you could create a mold out of clay and in a molding station (new work station, that you would situate logically next to the forge) you would insert that form.
The Forge then no longer would be able to produce simple, finished and ready items like nails and jars, the forge would just heat e.g. iron up and would give you liquid iron as a generic item and you would then put that liquid item into the molding station and with a mold for e.g. "Nails" you could produce Nails.
And obviously, to come back to water, you could also produce glass jars there with a mold for glass jars.
The molding station itself could be bought for dukes at traders, be obtained as quest rewards, rarely found in the wild as loot or dismantling broken mold stations and it also could be locked behind "Advanced Engineering" for making one by yourself.
3) I like the dew collectors as automated clean water production, but it is rather easy to get them early on and then Water isn't an issue anymore either, it just is further slowed down by their slow production, which you can easily counter by, you guessed it, putting up more dew collectors.
So they should be pushed into mid game, if water jars make a return, because it automatizes the whole process and you no longer would need to go to a lake to get dirty water and to cook it into clean water.
So put Water Filters into the Tier 3 Complete Quest Reward instead of the Tier 1 Complete Quest Reward, make them more expensive at the trader and make them hidden behind "Daring Adventurer" rank 1 to actually be able to buy them.
In return, Water Filters also should be (rarely) be able to be found in PoIs that are related to Water Production (like Water Works) or, with a lower chance, in PoIs related to Tool Production and Sales (e.g. a Working Stiff Tools store or Truck) or in Working Stiff Tools Crates.
And the beauty is: The devs can directly and easily influence the spawn chance of Water Filters there just by changing numbers, so if they feel, that they're too easy to find and traders are devalued, just lower the probability to loot water filters in the wild.
These are some suggestions, how to bring empty jars back and don't make them too easy to get and don't make water production too easy and even if not all of these suggestions would be implemented, all of them would be way better changes than just outright removing the empty jars and making humans in that universe at the same time smart enough to produce complex weapons and too dumb to produce a simple jar and force them to a player centric playstyle.
