New player - so I need a cooking pot and a bucket to purify lake water? How to bucket?

[owkennedy]

Single player, n00b question.

I'm level 1, not even close to getting a purifier. I drink whatever clean water I find and boil whatever murky water I find but I'm not much of a scavenger. I've just got a cooking pot and no bucket. So, I can't transport water from lakes, etc to my cooking pot, so now I'm just drinking from the lakes and getting dysentery. Is this normal?

How long until I stop getting dysentery? What level do I need to get to and where should I be putting my experience points so that I can get clean water without raiding or purchasing?

I feel like I must be missing something...

[CatPerson]

What version are you playing? I don't think buckets have anything to do with cooking water these days, since there are no (empty container) jars anymore, although I could be wrong.

If A21 or beta-1.0, you need to build dew collectors, that produce jars of murky water (very slowly, over time), which you can then boil on the campfire with the cooking pot.

Or you raid enough houses and via searching toilets, kitchens, cupboards in general, just looting everything in sight overall etc you'll find jars of murky water as loot here and there, that you can boil etc.

Edit: if you find the green/white pills (vitamins I think? I forget) and take them before hand drinking from lakes, you won't get dysentery (for a short while).

[Northern Spartan]

You'll likely get it a few times in the beginning - Hollywood tends to leave the part out where all the water is contaminated and the hero has the squirts every second day. :)

(Playing on 1.0)

Pots and Grills for your campfire can be looted in kitchens or created in a Forge when you get one built. You should be able to get one drop within the first week or so. If you are having trouble managing, the traders sell them relatively cheap, 600 dukes or something. Dew collectors give a steady supply of water but it will be contaminated, it's worth building several as a number of key recipies (glue, used in making Duct Tape, for example) need water.

Hope that helps!

[CatPerson]

^ They said they had a cooking pot already.

Edit: forgot - to the OP - there is no method in the game anymore for clean drinking water outside of looting murky water, dew collectors, and purchasing. Dew collectors also produce some "heat" (a screamer/zombie attractant after a while), so crafting large fields of dew collectors could be risky. At least until you're higher level/geared or already very familiar with the game. Just saying.

[Tahnval]

Without raiding or purchasing...that's a tall order. Starting with A21, the devs decided to make it impossible to obtain water in the obvious way, from the widely available vast water sources.

In experimental A22/1.0 you can build a dew collector without purchasing anything, although you'll have a hard time acquiring enough scrap polymer without raiding POIs. A basic dew collector in experimental A22/1.0 will slowly produce murky water that you can boil. You'd probably need several if that's your only source of water.

Neither your level nor your skill points will help with that.

[Macdallan]

Originally posted by CatPerson:

What version are you playing? I don't think buckets have anything to do with cooking water these days, since there are no (empty container) jars anymore, although I could be wrong.

If A21 or beta-1.0, you need to build dew collectors, that produce jars of murky water (very slowly, over time), which you can then boil on the campfire with the cooking pot.

Or you raid enough houses and via searching toilets, kitchens, cupboards in general, just looting everything in sight overall etc you'll find jars of murky water as loot here and there, that you can boil etc.

Edit: if you find the green/white pills (vitamins I think? I forget) and take them before hand drinking from lakes, you won't get dysentery (for a short while).

Yep, main way to get murky is looting until you can build dew collectors. Can also buy water/drinks from vendors and vending machines.

A21.whatever's dew collectors require a filter but they produce clean water. This makes them much harder to build than Exp1.0's dew collectors. The filter isn't cheap but can sometimes be purchased from the trader, I also got a couple from a mission reward after doing a bunch of tier 1 missions.

Experimental 1.0's dew collectors do not require a filter making them much easier to build, but produce murky water that needs to be boiled in a pot. You can add filters later to produce clean water.

You can find the snow biome and get snow easily by digging. You can also dismantle ice machines and get some snow from those. Snow can be processed into water.

You do not need a bucket to get drinking water, however you CAN make your own pond at your base by moving water to your base using a bucket and dumping it in a hole in the ground, or other structure built to hold water. This can be super useful if you find a filter mod for your helmet. Filter mods let you drink directly from bodies of water like a pond, lake, or river, and suffer no ill effects. You can sip from the pond you created whenever you want if you have a filter mod.

Yes, you are correct, it's the green/white pills.

[CatPerson]

Originally posted by Tahnval:

although you'll have a hard time acquiring enough scrap polymer without raiding POIs.

Bashing the rubber tires on the roads doesn't give you tons per tire, but there sure are a lot of tires on the road these days. That's mostly what I use early to have enough to build the first dew collector. That and my motto is generally just "bash everything" - it all adds up pretty fast, imo.

[Macdallan]

Originally posted by Tahnval:

Without raiding or purchasing...that's a tall order. Starting with A21, the devs decided to make it impossible to obtain water in the obvious way, from the widely available vast water sources.

In experimental A22/1.0 you can build a dew collector without purchasing anything, although you'll have a hard time acquiring enough scrap polymer without raiding POIs. A basic dew collector in experimental A22/1.0 will slowly produce murky water that you can boil. You'd probably need several if that's your only source of water.

Neither your level nor your skill points will help with that.

Scrap polymer can be obtained by walking the roads and chopping tires with an axe if you don't want to go into any POIs to get it. You should be able to get enough to build one dew collector by doing that, you can also loot any garbage, containers, and cars you find along the way. In A21 the filter is the big problem, not polymer, and that issue is solved in A22/Exp1.0 since they've removed the filter as a requirement.

I have no idea why the heck they won't let us bring water back and boil it at a campfire anymore. It's one of the stupidest changes they have made so far. Getting water in large quantities was allegedly a problem, but within a day or two you can start setting up to do that and it's not hard to produce 40+ bottles a day if you have a fair number of dew collectors... the change they made to the water collection mechanics was unnecessary. They removed a logical system for no good reason...

[Macdallan]

Originally posted by CatPerson:

Bashing the rubber tires on the roads doesn't give you tons per tire, but there sure are a lot of tires on the road these days. That's mostly what I use early to have enough to build the first dew collector. That and my motto is generally just "bash everything" - it all adds up pretty fast, imo.

Yep, it's not a lot per tire but bashing tires will give you enough for one dew collector in a reasonable amount of time. You only need one dew collector to permanently solve your hydration needs (if you play solo) if you have a cooking pot - and those are easy to get.

Pro tip: Always make tea, coffee, or yucca juice if you can. They all provide more hydration than water and the flowers for tea are in abundance in the starting biome. It's also not hard to get a huge amount of yucca fruit if you can find the desert.

[CatPerson]

You can also abuse drinking from lakes, if you're patient and don't mind dipping the hand in over and over for long minutes. The "drinking" reserve number will go up really high and keep you hydrated for longer the higher that number gets. I think it still works in experimental 1.0. Dunno if they'll get rid of that or not.

But of course it's really boring hand drinking for 10-20 minutes in a row to do it. >.>

[owkennedy]

Thank you all of you for your replies. This is cleared up everything. You have been very helpful!

Would be great if you could just boil water from natural sources like a regular person, but I guess I could build a dew collector instead :P

Looks like I'm going to be doing a lot of invisible game poos.

[Macdallan]

Originally posted by owkennedy:

Thank you all of you for your replies. This is cleared up everything. You have been very helpful!

Would be great if you could just boil water from natural sources like a regular person, but I guess I could build a dew collector instead :P

Looks like I'm going to be doing a lot of invisible game poos.

Yes, it would be great if we could just boil water from natural sources... Macdallan's right eye twitches a few times...

It's rant time.

We used to be able to collect water from lakes, ponds, rivers, swimming pools, ditches, etc. using glass jars or empty cans and then boil that. The developers decided to remove that functional and logical system, and both the cans and the jars, from the game. A lot of players opposed this change because, like you, we think it's a logical way for players to obtain water.

The real kick in the pants is that they added a system to allow you to drink directly from water sources like a pond or lake so you CAN drink that water, but it might make you sick and it does 5 health damage unless you have a helmet filter mod installed.

It makes no sense to me that you can drink the murky water directly, and you can boil murky water that you find elsewhere to make it safe (somehow it appears in a magical glass jar that disappears when you consume the water or otherwise use it) but you cannot use a container to transport the water to a pot and boil it. Even with jars and cans removed we should be able to take a cooking pot or a bucket to a water source, bring that back to a campfire, and make a few murky water from it.

This was all done because water was "too easy" to obtain in large quantities. Well, it still is. You just have to build a lot of dew collectors instead of a lot of jars. You no longer have to make or find jars, then go fill the jars with water from a source because you can build a dew collector pretty much anywhere. They basically just traded collecting water using jars for dew collectors which are harder to make but by default produce 3 jars of murky water per day, and can be upgraded. It slows down early game water collection, but over the long term it has made almost zero impact.

[Scyris]

Originally posted by Tahnval:

Without raiding or purchasing...that's a tall order. Starting with A21, the devs decided to make it impossible to obtain water in the obvious way, from the widely available vast water sources.

In experimental A22/1.0 you can build a dew collector without purchasing anything, although you'll have a hard time acquiring enough scrap polymer without raiding POIs. A basic dew collector in experimental A22/1.0 will slowly produce murky water that you can boil. You'd probably need several if that's your only source of water.

Neither your level nor your skill points will help with that.

naw there is a ton of stuff outside of them that give polymers, Car tires, Car bumpers/hoods/sidings/seats, those boxes in poi's they give 2-3 paper and polymers per on average as well. Run around even a small town for a bit and you'll easly get 100 polymers even on day 1. I find the bigger issue usually getting the 4 duct tape to make it on day 1. Til then, there are many places murky water is pretty much set to always be at in loot, just need to learn where these are. ANy food store/cafe will prob have several drink machines/coolers that always give murky water and if your lucky you might get something actually drinkable.

[Scyris]

Originally posted by Macdallan:

Originally posted by owkennedy:

Thank you all of you for your replies. This is cleared up everything. You have been very helpful!

Would be great if you could just boil water from natural sources like a regular person, but I guess I could build a dew collector instead :P

Looks like I'm going to be doing a lot of invisible game poos.

Yes, it would be great if we could just boil water from natural sources... Macdallan's right eye twitches a few times...

It's rant time.

We used to be able to collect water from lakes, ponds, rivers, swimming pools, ditches, etc. using glass jars or empty cans and then boil that. The developers decided to remove that functional and logical system, and both the cans and the jars, from the game. A lot of players opposed this change because, like you, we think it's a logical way for players to obtain water.

The real kick in the pants is that they added a system to allow you to drink directly from water sources like a pond or lake so you CAN drink that water, but it might make you sick and it does 5 health damage unless you have a helmet filter mod installed.

It makes no sense to me that you can drink the murky water directly, and you can boil murky water that you find elsewhere to make it safe (somehow it appears in a magical glass jar that disappears when you consume the water or otherwise use it) but you cannot use a container to transport the water to a pot and boil it. Even with jars and cans removed we should be able to take a cooking pot or a bucket to a water source, bring that back to a campfire, and make a few murky water from it.

This was all done because water was "too easy" to obtain in large quantities. Well, it still is. You just have to build a lot of dew collectors instead of a lot of jars. You no longer have to make or find jars, then go fill the jars with water from a source because you can build a dew collector pretty much anywhere. They basically just traded collecting water using jars for dew collectors which are harder to make but by default produce 3 jars of murky water per day, and can be upgraded. It slows down early game water collection, but over the long term it has made almost zero impact.

Once you get 4-6 of these things going with or without mods in it, you'll have more water than you'll know what to do with eventually. The earliest mod you can get doubles its production speed. Usually traders start selling it on day 4.

I do wish there was a craftable mod thats unlocked with 1 or maybe 5 workstations that increases its storage slots to 6 or 9, as the devs wanna force you to other biomes, you can't always collect the water. All the vehicles are slow as hell in this game. gets real annoying when you wanna get decent loot as you need to go to other biomes that are often 2 km+ away.