Boiling Water in Other Things AND Water Discussion in General

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

As per the title of this thread, I suggest that the characters be able to boil water to make it safe to drink in non-traditional ways.

Possible tools that can do this off the top of my head are plastic bags, coke bottles, plastic water bottles, glass bottle, anything that can hold water really. Even jerry cans if you can get a big enough fire.

Whether this should be put into the game due to its impact on making survival much more easier, I leave it up to you.

Edit: I realize that this suggestion may run counter to come reader’s expectations of how… well, generally how boiling liquids work and the melting and combustibility of some of the materials suggested.
The two main issues with this I think is 1. the melting point of plastic, and as an aside to this 2. whether you can actually get the water to boil without melting the plastic.

  1. The melting point of plastic is above the boiling point of water, but a fire is much hotter. The issue here is the physics of convection. Like a bundle of wet news paper, it cannot actually combust if there is a sizable amount of water inside of it when you put it over a fire. It is because the water in the newspaper is an energy sink. Not only will it heat up, but it will be able to store energy in itself. And when water takes in too much energy, it will turn into steam and carry that energy away.
    So not only does the fire need to exert enough energy into the newspaper to burn it, it must exert enough energy to turn the water into steam and be carried away as well as enough to burn that newspaper.

The principle is very much the same with a plastic bottle of water. While a fire can melt a water bottle, when you put water into it, or any other sort of material that doesn’t act like air and quickly runs away without absorbing much energy at all leaving the energy trapped in the container, the fire will need to put enough energy into the material that is in the container as well, and put enough energy into it that it raises the temperature of the material inside to the melting point of the water bottle for it to melt the plastic bottle.

I do not recommend you try this at home (what with the fire and all), bu there are many youtube videos that show that this is possible, despite the number of people on Yahoo Answers telling you “no” obviously not having even the decency to google these things before giving people answers.

  1. You do not actually need to boil water to make it safe to drink. Louis Pasteur came up with the method of pasteurization that is often used for milk nowadays, but can also easily apply to water as well, as it were pasteurizing water. Around 70 degrees Celsius is all that’s needed to kill pretty much anything that would harm you.
2

I sort of do and don’t agree with this.

The problem I have with it is that boiling water has become so easy that acquiring sources of water is essentially becoming a formality. In fact, thirst is more an inconvenience requiring you to carry water with you, than it is a driving force behind gameplay.

I think the game makes too simple a distinction between “clean” and “dirty” water. There ought to be diferent levels and types of cleanliness.

“Toxic” Water has been taken from an incredibly unclean source, and definitely carries chemical, bacterial and parasitic impurities.
“Dirty” Water has been taken from a natural source, and probably carries chemical, bacterial and parasitic impurities.
“Fresh” Water has been taken from a natural source, and is unlikely to carry chemical impurities, and may carry bacterial and parasitic impurities.
“Clear” Water has been filtered, and is unlikely to carry chemical, or parasitic impurities, but may carry bacterial impurities.
“Clean” Water has been boiled, and is unlikely to carry chemical, parasitic, or bacterial impurities.
“Pure” Water has been chemically treated and filtered, and is sure not to carry chemical, parasitic, or bacterial impurities.

Getting access to truly pure water requires chemical treatment, perhaps through iodine tablets, and also filtration.
Any other method (just filtration, just boiling) only reduces some of the risks associated with drinking impure water.

In this way, early players will still struggle to access enough drinking water, but will soon establish a regular supply, but more advanced players can also start to combat the risks of disease, either through water treatment machines or tablets, or by finding ways to resist toxins, parasites, and infections.

It would make water a more interesting part of the game - a risk/reward system, rather than a good/bad system.

3

Once you get a pot, water already does become a formality as it is. What this suggestion does is speed up the already mundane process of reaching this formality, it does notmake it any less dull as you’ve already expained in the latter part of your post.

In any case, not only would this provide safe drinking water much more quickly, it also serves as a sterilizTion tech ique for the containers that are used to house the water. Many people in thire world countries who have no knowledge of germ theory regularly recontaminate their safe wafer by pouring it back into the container laced with unsafe water.

On the subject of the various levels of “safe” water. Technically there isn’t a difference between boiling water and pasteurizing it. In both cases you’re just raising the tempurature up to a point where the pathogens can no longer survive. It’s kinda of like putting water into a coffee maker the doesn’t heat it all the way to boiling, yet still makes it safe to drink. This is especially important in countries where tap water isn’t exactly safe to drink. This sort of knowledge is also spread to third world countries through aid agencies, which is the source of my knowledge on this.
The main issue with water pasteurization is that it gradually becomes more expensive the bigger you scale up, making other sterilization techniques, like the use of clorine and floride, much more economic.
What you are describing are different techniques to making water safe to drink, none of them, at least without the use of UV lighting and radiation sterilization, can guarantee that the water is absolutely safe to drink. Whether iodine tablets are any safer than pasteurizing waterI think there is a difference but ultimately miniscule.

4

You’re forgetting a few things:

  1. Solid contaminants (e.g. mud or plant matter) which can, even when sterilised, lead to digestive problems
  2. Chemical contaminants (e.g. from industry, or toxins from bacterial contamination) which boiling won’t necessarily remove
5

Edit: I have not mentioned these two factors because these two have nothing to do with pasteurization.

Yes, but neither mud, nor industrial pollution seems to be in the game atm. Barring of course the toxic waste dump. The player’s character seems to be smart enough to avoid areas where obvious residue in the water exists, and to filter it with some sort of cloth before putting it into containers if obvious residue exists.

In any case

  1. Nothing bar irradiation will guarantee that the water is safe to drink if you don’t filter it with a cloth, and using a store bought filter uster for the tap is a good way to ruin it or make it so that you need to clean it.

  2. Barring techniques that remove pollution in water, you will not make it safe to drink with your average household filtration device, nor with survival ones. Making polluted water safe to drink requires a great deal of kniwledge about what exactly is polluting the water in the first place. The processes used to make water polluted by human waste is very different from the processes used to process crude, or pesticides.

6

[quote=“Benedict, post:2, topic:620”]I sort of do and don’t agree with this.

The problem I have with it is that boiling water has become so easy that acquiring sources of water is essentially becoming a formality. In fact, thirst is more an inconvenience requiring you to carry water with you, than it is a driving force behind gameplay.

I think the game makes too simple a distinction between “clean” and “dirty” water. There ought to be diferent levels and types of cleanliness.

“Toxic” Water has been taken from an incredibly unclean source, and definitely carries chemical, bacterial and parasitic impurities.
“Dirty” Water has been taken from a natural source, and probably carries chemical, bacterial and parasitic impurities.
“Fresh” Water has been taken from a natural source, and is unlikely to carry chemical impurities, and may carry bacterial and parasitic impurities.
“Clear” Water has been filtered, and is unlikely to carry chemical, or parasitic impurities, but may carry bacterial impurities.
“Clean” Water has been boiled, and is unlikely to carry chemical, parasitic, or bacterial impurities.
“Pure” Water has been chemically treated and filtered, and is sure not to carry chemical, parasitic, or bacterial impurities.

Getting access to truly pure water requires chemical treatment, perhaps through iodine tablets, and also filtration.
Any other method (just filtration, just boiling) only reduces some of the risks associated with drinking impure water.

In this way, early players will still struggle to access enough drinking water, but will soon establish a regular supply, but more advanced players can also start to combat the risks of disease, either through water treatment machines or tablets, or by finding ways to resist toxins, parasites, and infections.

It would make water a more interesting part of the game - a risk/reward system, rather than a good/bad system.[/quote]
Careful. This feels like the same problem that I had with Static Spawn: adding more work for the player (boiling doesn’t cut it anymore), but leaving the payoff (don’t get sick) at the same level.

7

I tend to agree that adding more stages of water pollution is sort of counter-productive, even though it might be realistic. In the short <1 year lifespan of the vast majority of Cataclysm characters, I don’t think ingesting more than what is considered a safe amount of mercury is the most harmful thing that will happen to your character. Water is already harder to find than food imo, and making it unsafe to boil it from toilets and streams just puts up an extra uneeded barrier to survival when more interesting ones exist.

As for the topic of the post itself, I can understand how to boil water without either a frying pan or a pot by just keeping it at a good distance from the fire. However, you’d still need a metal utensil like some tongs to safely remove it from the fire, or at least some fire-resistant gloves or something. Sounds to me like metal tongs would be just as annoying to find/carry around than a frying pan or a pot…

8

You could give a morale boost for “fresh” water, with no possibility of a bad effect.
“Pure” water could have the highest quenching.
“Clean” water would be boiled and the default with no perks.

9

Over in the power-plant thread I used “Pure Water” to reference water sans the Substance; if the player managed to remove said Substance from syr system and thereafter used only Pure Water, xe is effectively cured. Knowing that one ain’t gonna rise again should be pretty good for morale.

Fresh water could well have a slight morale bonus for having some flavor (boiled water is flat, IIRC), though IRL it could be dangerous. Problem is that bringing IRL mechanics into the game would require tracking water sources and assigning effects fixed at water-acquisition/processing, rather then the current random roll when drinking.

This would make water-finding more involved, and since toilets may or may not be considered acceptable water sources, will probably add to the difficulty. I submit that the possibility of morale bonuses and finding reliable water sources that need not be purified (the Substance notwithstanding) seems worth thinking about*–the savings in electric/fuel/player effort would be significant over time.

*As in kicking around, commenting, etc.

10

I think water should have different modifiers for different pollutants

Water: Unknown
Or
Water: Boiled Unknown if it was boiled/filtered/whatever process.

Different pollutants would give different sicknesses and require different processing.

The river can’t be clean, all those dead bodies (Bacterial/parasite infection).
Toilet suffers from toxin pollution.
Puddles have ionized/random pollute inside (radioactive or other)

11

OK, and then one gets back into the previous problem: this creates additional work for the player, but doesn’t seem to add much additional benefit. Currently, there’s one problem, one solution, and two ways to implement it: non-Clean water rolls to sicken the player. Boiling the water or running it through a Purifier, at the cost of batteries, is a tedious task* once the player obtains the necessary gear, and rewards the player by guaranteeing that they don’t get sick by drinking the water.

*The devs added interface functionality (repeat-last-craft) based on player complaints regarding boiling water. QED, the task is tedious.

Under the proposed multi-contaminant system, I would have to check for X different types of problem and take the appropriate actions (probably involving tools/charges, which are being made increasingly tedious, if not difficult, to find) for the same end benefit: not getting sick.

Raising the “price” without raising the benefit only makes the game more tedious/difficult.

12

Currently, sickness is a bit limited which might be part of the issue. If there were varying degrees of how sick an illness can become much like the depths of addiction, water quality might play a bigger role. The representation of a character’s immune system might give different types of water a purpose.
For example, flowing water might have be perfectly fine to drink without much purification to it, but it might not be a good idea if the character is sick and his/her immune system is on the back foot and wouldn’t be able to deal with the minor pathogens present in it.