Liquid flow and plumbing should wait until the 3D map system is in place, but the fundamental concept here to be able to withdraw liquid from a sink or bathtub after it has been poured there. I was shocked when I dumped my steel jerry can of dirty water into a sink, then couldn’t get the 100 units back. I was going to boil it and pour the clean water back into the jerry can. I was hoping to catch the eye of one of the programmers familiar with the source and inspire them to make the tweak without having to get neck deep in the source and the mysteries of github myself. I should have probably kept my rambling ideas about the logical extensions of that core idea to myself. I think I scared folks away.
We can already drop liquids anywhere in the world. We can extract water from toilets. All that is required here is to make a terrain flag so that toilet functionality can be extended to other things that make sense to be able to hold water.
The main stopping point I see is that first point from my initial post. What happens if you pour more than one type of fluid in the same place? Right now they make two distinct puddles on the floor, neither of which can be interacted with except to mop them up.
The simplest solution would be to ignore the inconsistency and allow both fluids to be accessed. This is both very unrealistic and makes a single storage space far more useful than it should be. We should have to have separate vats from clean water, untreated water, weak acid, concentrated acid, and coffee; not pour them all in one sink and still have full easy access to each one.
Second simplest and perhaps the cleanest solution would be to not allow a second fluid in the same WATERTIGHT space. This fixes the balance issue of the previous solution. It’s still immersion breaking to have the game say “You can’t pour orange juice (rotten) into the sink of non-drowsy cough syrup.” but most people could accept that.
Third simplest solution would be to turn combinations of liquids into untreated water, or a new “heavily contaminated water” that requires distillation to purify. We’d be able to mix crap together without artificial restrictions and we could get water back out of it eventually.
Fourth simplest solution, and it starts getting complex enough here that it’s questionable if the result is worth the effort, would be to have a combination matrix. We already have combination in a limited form, in that if acid rain happens over a funneled container it turns the water inside into weak acid. We would have to consider the results of any two liquids mixing and create a lookup chart based on the results. Most viable combinations would result in untreated water or weak acid, perhaps with “heavily contaminated water” from the above idea as a default.
The most realistic solution is a full blown chemistry simulation. No, not even close to worth it… unless an amateur chemist with a penchant for game programming happens to be reading this.
