Good arguments for water system ?

[b0rsuk]

1. Underground pipes might enable efficient heating

Now In the past I used the argument that lying pipes would likely just feel like conduits mk 2. But take a look at this base:



It looks all wrong (distances, concave huts) because it's a melee colony, and I raise war beasts too. It's almost winter now, but I realized that I may run out of firewood so I made my girls sleep in shared rooms.

Heat transfer is a major advantage of underground colonies and single building colonies (a.k.a. Rimworld Institute) If there were underground pipes available, I could heat efficiently. Even assuming that heaters were made more intelligent and had more granular power use (they have Low and High modes now), heating with heaters would require a lot of steel (flat map!), components and especially breakdown maintenance. You still need one heater per room and no two ways about it.

Campfires are inefficient for small rooms, like heaters/coolers they're One Size Fits All. And refueling them is a lot of work, definitely not worth it during a toxic fallout. By the way the is not tundra. Technically it was boreal forest.

2. Water system could distinguish biomes like arid shrubland, desert and rainforest. Plants in the dry biomes would have to be watered somehow.

Arguments against:

-1. There's no convincing way to represent floods without Z-levels (maps only have one layer)

By the way can someone help me find the most recent thread about encouraging open colonies ? The one shorter than 42 pages ?

[Aerial]

I made a comment in the recent Windows thread about how adding a need/mood benefit for natural light would encourage more town-like layouts instead of the mega-warrens.  Is that what you're thinking of?

[O Negative]

I'm personally super biased towards having a water system, but I'll try to be as neutral as I can be.

Feel free to add these to the original post for simplicity; if you desire.

New Arguments:
3. In favor - Water as a basic physiological need would add meaningful depth to the gameplay, without overcomplicating things too much. Water already exists as a tile, and rain is already an implemented weather pattern. Simple jobs like collecting water from a pond, or building rain barrels would fit into RimWorld just fine. Harsher biomes like the desserts would have more of an identity as a difficult biome to survive in.

-2. Against - Water would make certain biomes unsurvivable depending on the starting season and items. A lot of people don't like the idea of not being able to beat every biome from the get-go, with the right strategies.

Rebuttals:
1. Rebuttal - Conduits are already frustrating enough to keep track of, and the last thing anybody needs is to worry about a "Zzztt for pipes" event. If anything, I would recommend water radiators powered by electricity. But, we already have an electric heater, so that seems redundant.

-1. Rebuttal - While the idea of floods in RimWorld is interesting, it doesn't make sense to assume they are a necessary part of a water system.
Z-Levels do not have to precede a water system.

[Jibbles]

I build lots of bases like this, where rooms and buildings are spread out.  I just like the style and kind of helps with combat cause I use little to no turrets. Sometimes the layout will backfire on me though. Anyways, like you said heating and cooling these bases uses up a lot more resources. There are more items to break and repair.  I've been wanting pipes to be introduced into rimworld. I don't know if it was meant to discourage/penalize this kind of base building or if it's just something that hasn't been worked out yet.

I wish you could elaborate a little more on your ideas of the water system.  Unless you're only wanting to focus on watering plants.  I like the idea of interacting with water in rimworld, but I always felt a lot of work need to be done to add it in properly.

[Hans Lemurson]

Irrigation pipes and water pumps!

[b0rsuk]

-2. While a water system could be used to diversify biomes, there are workarounds like making rain, storm speed up plant growth. This would give a big boost to rainforest growing

Irrigation pipes and water pumps!

What about them ?

[Dorian]

I think if you add water, go all in, or don't add it at all.

Where to get water?
Existing water tiles and rain barrels (as mentioned  by "O Negative"), but also from snow, and a new item to build; A water well.

Water wells could be dug in anywhere and have 2 phases of work.  First phase is "dig" where you place the well, and someone mans it to dig deeper and deeper.  Chance roll of when, or if, they hit water.  If they hit water, next phase is "collect" where you collect the water from the well.  If you don't hit water while digging, you can deconstruct the well and try somewhere else.  This can be an old-school bucket well, or a hand pump.  Maybe one of each with different efficiencies, and where the old school well uses stones, and the pump uses steel.  Different biomes get different results.  If you're in the desert, you gotta dig deep!

Water isn't clean
You would have to have water in 2 parts.  Dirty water, and clean water.  Dirty water can water plants, but if ingested, can have a chance to cause disease like a sickness, or parasites.  Using the cook stove, or campfire, you can add a bill to boil water which turns dirty water into clean water.  Colonists will only drink clean water if it's available, but if only dirty water is available, they'll drink that instead.  Forbid dirty water collections to keep them from drinking it if that's all you have.

Character stat
I'm not sure if a new bar should be added like the "food' bar, but perhaps add it as a mood called "thirsty".  If you're thirsty for too long, you get a health issue of dehydration.  Thirst could also come faster in hotter temperatures, and having plenty of water could help to stave off heatstroke a little longer.

Just my 2 cents...

[b0rsuk]

Just my 2 cents...

Blah, blah, blah ! That's a bunch of useless details. Keep it out of this thread! Can you make a good argument for water system ? Your post doesn't have it. What does it add to the game ? How does it make it more interesting ? The game could have a detailed system of pimple popping. What makes water system more interesting ?

[Rafe009]

 Adding hydration to the game, as the previous poster mentioned, would make desert survival a sort of inverse challenge of icesheet survival. Right now deserts are largely about making hats, dusters and having AC units everywhere. The lack of available soil for growth is essentially the same issue with ice sheet survival.

Stillsuits, urine recycling, rain condensation collection, drilling to aquifer, channeling existing water sources, water purification of putrid surface water early game.

Also what about a desiccator that can use animal/human corpses to extract water from but would only give dehydrated meat with less calories?

Also hygeine would be an interesting mechanic as dirty pawns would be less likely to have positive social responses or fall into romance. It might add for a more interesting system than hats being useful for amping social numbers up - wouldn't make sense for the coms unit though.

Negatives i can see with this is it's one more thing to manage and if all other things are kept equal might make the early game much harder given you now have to find water or establish a source of extraction.

Another negative is that the entire game might have to be re-balanced to accommodate the time investment pawns spend maintaining and building the water system and engaging in their own hygiene, this might require other things pawns do to become easier and the balance of the game already feels pretty good.

One other issue is would feral animals need to hydrate and if so many would likely just aggregate near large bodies of water. Animals that are too far away from water on the map might either leave the map or linger and dehydrate at the edge of teh map if there is no water near which would seem a bit artificial

[b0rsuk]

Stillsuits,

"Totally not dusters with appearance change"

rain condensation collection

Rain ? In a desert ? And how would this be more interesting that another type of power generator ?

drilling to aquifer

Drilling is high tech in Rimworld, and you can't expect players to reach it quickly and survive. Deserts would be only available to people who migrate there from a more hospitable biome.

channeling existing water sources

How would you detemine which way water flows on a completely flat map ? Dwarf Fortress has vertical levels, water flows down or in absense of holes uses floodfill algorithm. Rimworld has no up or down, no high or low.

water purification of putrid surface water early game.

Mandatory facility to construct and forget about it other than breakdowns ? There are already things you can build close to water: moisture pumps. They give you a large amount of soil in ice sheet, and let you drill there.

Also what about a desiccator that can use animal/human corpses to extract water from but would only give dehydrated meat with less calories?

Biomes with many animals don't need it, hot deserts have very few animals. That would leave arid shrubland.

Also hygeine would be an interesting mechanic as dirty pawns would be less likely to have positive social responses or fall into romance. It might add for a more interesting system than hats being useful for amping social numbers up - wouldn't make sense for the coms unit though.

So duplicating the existing eating mechanic ? Colonists need to go to location X each day and spend a few minutes there ?

The negatives you listed could be overlooked if you had convincing arguments for water system. But good point about animals. They're now plants that move, possibly they are that way so as to not drain too many processor cycles. Adding a water need would ask more of their AI, and that could slow the game down.

I'm specifically interested in arguments that are not just listing things that would make Rimworld sound more detailed. In particular not making a parallel power system that's functionally identical. Anyone can list stuff. Look, I can do this too:
badger, aardvark, raccoon, magpie, rat, crow, cat

[O Negative]

I'd actually like to make the point of animals aggregating around water holes/"rivers" a positive argument for adding a water system.

4. Animal behavior could be made more convincing by having animals with a depleted water need seek water tiles for hydration, much in the same way they already do with plants and other pawns on the map.
This would also help get newly spawned animals on the edges of the map to migrate to the center regions where water is more commonly spawned.
It would also supply a deeper sense of realism, as animals tend to behave this way to begin with.
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4. Rebuttal (1): Animals needing to drink water would cause potential performance loss, due to the increased number of constant calculations.

4. Counter-Rebuttal (1): While a fair point, for now, this can also be said for any added mechanic.
Alpha 17 is supposed to bring many bug-fixes, and I would like to see just how much performance is gained before using "further loss of performance" as an argument against any new possibilities.
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4. Rebuttal (2): How are animals in dry biomes supposed to get by?
They don't have access to the same technologies players will be using to acquire water.

4. Counter-Rebuttal (2): Animals native to dry biomes would have an inherently slower loss in their water need.
They've evolved and adapted to live in those environments, and it could always be made a point to add at least one small oasis when generating a map tile.

[Hans Lemurson]

Desert animals can also get some water from the food they eat.  The kangaroo rat gets most of its water from carbohydrate metabolism.

[Beider]

I am not too much fan of adding hydration/hygiene for characters, I feel it is unnecessary as it just adds another bar next to food and sleep (There is a mod for hygiene already and I found it very uninteresting). Food could technically include drinks anyway. In short, it doesn't add any new interesting gameplay.

As for adding a whole water system with pipes and the likes, I really don't see the point. We got options for creating power and electric heaters already exist, so why add more that run on water instead? If you would add water then it would make sense to add toilets, showers, etc... But I don't think that would add anything fun to the game, just one more thing your colonists will run off to do.

However I am a big fan of the idea of plants requiring to be watered. Growing is totally overpowered at the moment, you only need a few growers to make massive amounts of cash and enough food to supply your entire colony. I think plants having a need to be watered which varies depending on temperature (warmer weather = needs more water) would be good, it could be used to restrict how many plants a single grower can manage to grow (and make high growing skill more valuable as they can water faster).

I would like to see something like a well/rain barrel where the growers have to go get water, then go over to the plants and water a few of them, get more water, repeat... Perhaps even make it so that wells can't be placed anywhere on the map or that certain locations on the map would give more water from a well than other. Or something like that so you have to take this into account as well, but that is not strictly necessary.

Some nice features I see from this,

• Would make growing less powerful
• Would make hot/dry biomes a lot harder
• Would make rain matter more, rainy day = your growers can do other things (Anyone else get happy in Stardew Valley when it would rain the next day?)
• Would make you have to consider your farm placement more, not just plant and forget all over the map
• Rain would give another advantage (except power usage) to growing outside compared to inside
• Adds more diversity to the biomes
• It's an interesting new mechanic that makes perfect sense and can be tuned for balance (set plants to dehydrate faster at higher difficulties)
• Can also balance individual plants this way. More profitable plants = higher water need
• Allows for the potential adding of new expensive research / buildings to automatically water your plants
• This can also add some interesting new game events (eg. Dry wind for a few days so more watering required or drought during which your wells run dry and you have to rely on rain water or no growing...)
• High growing skill would be even more valuable as they can water faster therefore maintain more plants
• Finally it fits in nicely with existing game mechanics (temperature, rain, heat wave)

There are probably some other nice things about this as well, but those are the ones I can come up with in a few minutes. As for downsides, I don't really see any as it adds an interesting new challenge to the game and helps reign in growing a bit since it is way too powerful at the moment.

An additional idea could be to add something like plant quality, which would directly affect yield when you harvest. Then if your plants lack water instead of dying straight off their quality would degrade. That way if you have to defend your base from an attack you may need to consider leaving your growers to water else it will affect your harvest yield (but not kill it completely).

Edit:
I would like to add I am not a fan of adding some sort of pipe system for plant watering, etc... But rather a building like a sunlamp that could water a radius around it (preferably small radius, very expensive and high power consumption, or not at all else growing just becomes OP again near endgame).

Edit 2:
I thought about wells only being placable in certain spots like geothermal is now, and I think this could be a good mechanic. That way as you start out your growers may have to haul water from further away. Then rather than automatic plant watering you could make research that would initially allow your colonists to move more water at a time, or to make some sort of storage container so that water can be moved closer to the growing spot by haulers. And finally at really high research and for very high costs even allow automatic transfer of water (but then we might get into piping unless some other elegant solution is made or perhaps a classic aqueduct?)

Either way, just an additional related idea I wanted to mention.

[publicuser]

Water can be pumped from groundwater or lake/river, but if add water system, it should add sewage treatment plant as well, otherwise water system will be polluted, and cannot be used sooner

By the way, if water system added, there are many things needed, for example, shower head/bathtub, toilet, washing machine, etc. Because colonists care about many things(hungry, hot/cold, social, love, room's beauty, comfort, space, etc), no reason they don't care about personal cleanliness

[Elixiar]

Pros.

Water based power - hydro plants, water mills.
Sea travel, boats and fishing.

It would 'make sense'. Also it would add some genuine difficulty to desert biomes.

Growing system would be more developed.

Cons.

I would really hate pipes. I'd be only ok if you just needed to store water in a silo and then it can be magically accessed from water points in the colony. really don't want to have to build pipes like in prison architect.

Would make water/ food gameplay annoying. That said, if the penalty of no food went down and water placed as the top priority that could be interesting.

No toilets or sanitation please. Don't want to play the sims.



Overall I want water. But I would want it to be a basic system.