Charcoal water purifier error message

[VonCede]

When I tried to purify my gallon jug of water (10) with the charcoal water purifier with only 2 charcoals loaded in, I got the error message “You don’t have enough battery power to purify all the water.”, which made me scratch my head for a moment.

I don’t currently have enough resources to test other charcoal-powered items how they handle this situation.

Version: Windows SDL 0.8-257-g529a989

[Hex]

I’m not sure if it’s bugged, but I tried this earlier in my playthrough and the purifier needed 1 “charge” of charcoal for every unit of water, I think.

If this isn’t a bug, charcoal for this purpose is really inefficient currently. For 10 units of water you’d need 10 two-by-fours just for the charcoal! Considering that a single two-by-four in a rock fireplace will burn long enough to boil those 10 units (and then some!) I think the numbers need tweaking a wee bit!

[kevin.granade]

There’s a fix in-progress for the error message.
As for balance, yea that might be a little excessive, it looks like the process you’re using in game would have about 50% yield by volume, so we might want to bump that up a bit, also I’m not really sure what the exchange rate for a carbon filter SHOULD be…
Also after reading about it, carbon shouldn’t be remotely sufficient to purify even regular groundwater to a safe state, much less goo-infested danger water
Water purification needs a total rework ><
Also word of warning, if you search for “carbon filters”, or “DIY activated charcoal”, it will return a ton of weed growing resources, I’m fine because I’m on every watchlist known to mankind already, but others beware <<

[VonCede]

Also after reading about it, carbon shouldn’t be remotely sufficient to purify even regular groundwater to a safe state, much less goo-infested danger water

Does the ultraviolet light kill it?

… wait a second, since I can only assume from how long the water cleaning takes that we are only boiling the water, not distilling it…
Then in what temperature (in Celcius) does the goo die?

[i2amroy]

As best as I know the goo isn’t actually contributing that much to bad water poisoning (though it might help just a bit). The major problems come from the radioactive and other toxic stuff that have been dropped into the water along with a bunch of other junk (which means that boiling water to clean it really wouldn’t do much at all).

[An0n3]

boiling away radiation

Yeah no. It works from a game-y perspective though.

[kevin.granade]

I have a more involved proposal outlined at https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/72
but it hasn’t trickled to the top of anyone’s task list, so we still have a crappy model of water safety.

[An0n3]

Like I said it makes sense from a game-y perspective though. You want people to be able to get it without too much trouble since you need so much of it so regularly.

[Rivet]

[quote=“Hex, post:2, topic:3165”]I’m not sure if it’s bugged, but I tried this earlier in my playthrough and the purifier needed 1 “charge” of charcoal for every unit of water, I think.

If this isn’t a bug, charcoal for this purpose is really inefficient currently. For 10 units of water you’d need 10 two-by-fours just for the charcoal! Considering that a single two-by-four in a rock fireplace will burn long enough to boil those 10 units (and then some!) I think the numbers need tweaking a wee bit![/quote]

Yeah it’s meant to be inefficient. The charcoal you produce in-game is a pretty far stretch from the fancy activated charcoal such filters normally use. Add that to the fact that the purifier unit is a cobbled together collection of bottles and hoses, and you’ve got a leaky, inefficient system.

The charcoal purifier’s benefit is that it’s a portable water purifier that doesn’t use any of your precious batteries, instead running off of cheap and easy to produce charcoal.

That being said, I think I might boost charcoal’s production efficiency a bit, to make the inequality slightly less over the top.

Edit: Charcoal production efficiency has been doubled.