Why is rain water tainted lol

[DoggoComunista]

Is it acid rain or something?

[RiddilingIce]

I always wondered that lol

[Doom]

Originally posted by DoggoComunista:

Is it acid rain or something?

It was a feature added in build 31 and its sole purpose is to make your life more complicated.

It is possible to make up some excuse, but this feature is here only to ensure you have to waste time boiling the water over and over and over.

[Unknown Zom]

Oddly Drinking Natural water (River,Pool,Rain collector) is safe to drink and impossible to die to unless already food sick from something else (rotten/raw), Just can't bottle it.

So I'll just assume bottling tainted water is like fast forwarding and letting the gunk in the water grow and fester much faster, but doesn't really explain rain collectors just being a large bottle? Would feel like they would be just as bad but they aren't, just that once it's in the bottle it's the same as bleach I think.

[Darksurgeon]

It's hilarious how even when something in this game doesn't make sense, fanboys will think of alternate realities just to preach "ReALiSM"

[Hongo]

irl if you leave rainwater in a barrel it turns green and slimy.

[Hathur]

In RL you can use a small bit of bleach to make a rainbarrel perfectly safe to drink (kills all the bacterial growth, works like chlorine). Game has bleach in it, weird we can't purify rain barrels with the already existing bleach.

[Doom]

Originally posted by Unknown Zom:

Oddly Drinking Natural water (River,Pool,Rain collector) is safe to drink and impossible to die to unless already food sick from something else (rotten/raw), Just can't bottle it.

By the way, water from a toilet seat is not tainted and is safe to drink. Just saying.

[Unknown Zom]

Pretty sure you'd be drinking from the tank and not the bowl but I don't know every existence of every toilet model in the game.

[Retro]

Originally posted by Darksurgeon:

It's hilarious how even when something in this game doesn't make sense, fanboys will think of alternate realities just to preach "ReALiSM"

Well I did quit a bit of Googling on this, and apparently the game leans towards real life when it comes to rain water.
Not that it's an absolute, but every article I've found on it that's based on science and health says it's best to boil rainwater, depending where you live and how often it rains.
Most of the problems come from the unfiltered air with bacteria and parasites. I don't know what fanboys you speak of, because this isn't a fanboy related subject

[[IHS]Greg_Kirkman]

Rain water picks up airborne contaminates when falling thru the air from the rain cloud. The game lore points to the zombie virus as being airborne. Now do you really want to drink that rain water?

In irl rain water is normally collected from rain runoff from roof tops. Roofs are very dirty surfaces. They catch not only dirt and dust blown by the wind but also feces from passing birds, dead insects, etc.. These collect in the rain gutters and get washed into the rain barrels. This makes the water tainted and it needs to be filtered or boiled to be made safe for drinking.

[Liro Raériyo]

i did put a bowl out in the middle of rain once in my back yard and drank from it, i certainly didnt feel crazy ill... but i did feel slightly off from it while only drinking about a mouthful an hour or so later.

so yes i do actually believe that rainwater is not the best thing to be drinking.

[a three-colored carp]

Originally posted by Hathur:

In RL you can use a small bit of bleach to make a rainbarrel perfectly safe to drink (kills all the bacterial growth, works like chlorine). Game has bleach in it, weird we can't purify rain barrels with the already existing bleach.

you're just trying to get us all to drink bleach!

[EmperorVolo]

It's how the zombie virus was delivered. Shrug?

[Hugs]

TBH while i think it's exaggerated in Zomboid it's 100% true that if you drink rainwater without cleaning it you have a chance of getting sick. It's partly pollution, partly that many bacteria capable of harming you can actually survive in the atmosphere and travel down with the water when it rains.

[BangPowBoom]

I know its a different game... but PZ seems to have shared a lot of design ideas with CDDA. One of the themes in CDDA is that literally EVERY PARTICLE of water was infected by a sentient creature from another dimension that took control of anything that consumed it to create the zombies. I tend to assume this is one of those shared design philosophies.