I dunno if yall have ever been to New England. But even during power outage… most rural (well water) houses have a pressurized storage tank that can serve 10-50 (2 tanks at my house will give 80) gallons of clean filtered water.
And for the city folk. Even if the pumping station goes offline (usually in an outage they won’t due to the generator at the pumping station… curiously missing ingame) there’s almost always several thousand gallons in a water tower or ground level tank (also both missing ingame).
This seems like an easy immersion world gen structure to add, but Im not sure about some things. So I came up with a few blanks of my own where I would like to offer answers, or - Oh Boy! A good first project
how does the game handle liquid physics, such as a body of water suspended in the air, or “at” player level? It doesn’t at all does it? What happens if you dig a hole next to a deep water tile? Nothing right?
would it be better to put all the water in an “spigot” and treat it as one massive thing of storage at the base, and just pretend its all in the tank?
Far as I can figure the games limits might actually make adding this make the game less Immersive as it would draw more attention to the lack of water physics.
It generally takes just a day or two to completely drain water towers, and in a REAL disaster, all it takes is a few broken pipes to make that happen even in the absence of normal use.
So the timeline is power loss → towers stop refilling → towers empty, which only takes a day or two at the outside. The DDA scenario takes place several days after all that happened, so any water towers/resivoirs are assumed to be drained.
There is all kinds of things you could do with this though, like installing a huge water catcher on top of a water tower and using it as a massive water source.
I wasn’t aware of the pressure tank thing, that certainly seems like a valuable resource you could find in out-of-town homes. The engine doesn’t have support for such a thing, but it’s certainly doable, and they could spawn with a variable amount of contents (based on being used after a power loss etc).
It does bring up another issue witch is wells in general, which we could also support, both as something you find and something you build.
We don’t have any support for liquid physics, and we don’t particularly need it, we don’t support medium scale terraforming like minecraft or df, which is where that kind of thing becomes important.
We can re-use the vehicle electricity system to distribute pressurized water, it’s pretty straightforward, so there’s no reason to do anything hacky like store water in sinks.
Well in the case of water tanks. Even assuming they are empty and fluid physics isnt a thing… they could still exist.
1 as a source of steel, a lot of steel.
2 as a structure the player might use. If the player were to cut into one, its a big house sized steel structure, usually surrounded by a fence.
3 the smaller buildings possibly at the site could be sources of a few different things. (water purification tablets, and chemistry sets for testing water quality come to mind)
Another thought. Make the tank an immobile vehicle. For larger tanks, the door tile is basically the ladder up on the tank. And the floor tiles each have a large volume vehicle storage tank in them.
Or there could be a tank farm of smaller ones. Iirc you can just place a steel frame, a board, and a storage tank on a tile.
And for reference on what I meant by pressure tank.
Most homes have those. Some older ones will have a non-pressurized tank in the attic. In both cases its meant as storage and buffer. And as a side effect, there is water available to the house for a bit after loss of the well pump.
I would assume that even if a complex water system is never implemented most wells utilize large and or powerful electric motors (and as I have seen tend to have a backup generator close by) either of which could be salvaged for whatever purpose you need.
I’ve never seen one of those tanks. My home’s about a hundred years old though, and there’s a well on the property, so I assume they didn’t need a storage tank because they drew directly from the well. When we joined the town’s water system I guess we neglected to get any kind of storage tank.
As for wells, they don’t exist in game, right? But water pumps do, and they have either infinite water or an absurdly high amount of water? I seem to remember it used to display something like a million units of water (or something) not that long ago.
I like the idea of water towers (thanks to 7 days to die) and I agree they’d most likely be empty. Pumps are my go-to in game for reliable, long term water without my having to do anything special.
Also I’ve never seen a well with any kind of motor or moving parts, but I’m from a pretty rural area. Our wells are just holes in the ground with a cover.
You rarely “see” modern wells. They usually look like a bit of pipe sticking up out of the ground with a cap. Down inside thr pipe is the well pump and everything else necessary to feed water to the home.
As a related note, I’ve recently had to learn a lot about sprinkler systems, and one thing that I’ve learned is that almost all sprinkler systems are based on large, stagnant tanks of water which haven’t moved in decades. They’re deeply filthy, slimy sources of water.
So, I would guess that large cities in C:DDA might have buildings flooded with disgusting water in them, if people were looking for even more buildings to add to cities.
That’s an outstanding point, yes any buildings that have had fire supression systems triggered would be super gross.
Even better, those systems can be entirely passive, so they could still be active…
At first I thought this was refering to septic irrigation sprinkler systems, which if not maintained also get…more disgusting than they already are, although they are basically just a giant underground tank that gets microbes and chemicals dumped in it to break down the solids before spraying the liquefied results like a normal-ish sprinkler.
By the end though I was thinking of sump pumps used in buildings too low to drain water normally. Is there a flooded basment building in-game yet? I feel like i’ve heard of people running into something like this, but don;'t remember anything specific and havn’t run into any myself. Could also be an interesting location to add, as an alternate version of several locations.
Especially, if it put the player in a position where they might be forced to do all their fighting in shallow water,if they wanted whatever loot might be in there. Would make a good home base for aquatic mutants too ^>^ and lends itself well to the imagination and the feeling of a world that has stopped working.