Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-24108228-20141010230721

Because if you're going to revamp hunger, you may as well do thirst too! =Better Beverages= Basically a massive splurge of every thirst suggestion except the saltwater ones. Plus a new bit to bind it all together.

Why This Should be Added
I came up with this idea after I was looking through the wiki activity and saw the "Beverages" category. Over two thirds of them are completely inferior to water, the current king of drinks. Capable of being autonomously created anywhere, found on almost every island, restoring as much thirst as apple juice, and even being able to be placed into buckets, there is almost no reason why you should even bother with anything that isn't poison or herbal remedies. And don't even get me started on snow water.

As for buckets, they're so abusable. Two gold =/= three bush stumps and a pile of leaves. The limiting factor is storage space, not liquid, with the rare exception of a couple cases where new and unprepared tribes have moved to an area with no water and haven't got a well yet. Instead of how much you can fit in your bucket, the limit should be how much fluid you actually have to fit in your bucket, thirst being an issue and not an annoyance.

And unlike saturation and my other hunger suggestions, this has actually been thought about by editorial powers. The scarfion bucket was supposedly created to help balance thirst ("They [buckets] start to misbehave if you have more than one of them"), but was abandoned for unknown reasons. Probably time. Anyway, away from trying to figure out what admins are saying, and onto the actual suggestion!

Buckets
As the core of this suggestion, buckets and other water containers (which shall be abbreviated to just "buckets") are now able to pick up any liquid. From dirty water to herbal remedies, they can hold anything! When placed in a bucket, their stats can change (as did water), they go as follows:

Water
That blue stuff we all know and love isn't the top of the drink chain anymore! Instead, it restores the following stats: Hunger: 0 Thirst: 5 Health: 0 Which puts it at the same stats as drinking water from a pool, albeit without the health loss. This allows for further drinks up the chain to be more effective without becoming OP (600 thirst in a golden jug is a big no-no), and actually give use for the new drinks ("I would make juice, but water works well enough and I cant be bothered"). This applies only to water that is obtained through wells and freshwater sources, snow water is an exception to this and will be covered later.

Berry Juice
This is a terribly underpowered drink. Anyone who has tried to craft it in bulk knows what I mean, 1/8 berries will just randomly fly away no matter what you do. The rest you have to chase down after placing. Despite this, berries are pretty plentiful, so it's going to have the stats of: Hunger: 1 Thirst: 10 Health: 0 Keeping the same hunger and health values as before it's put in a bucket, it is obtained by clicking berry juice with an empty or partially filled bucket of berry juice, yielding two portions. The thirst is doubled, because berry juice needs a definitive advantage over water.

Prickly Pear Juice
Yet another substandard juice, this also requires small buffs. Hunger: 1 Thirst: 13 Health: 0 With no difference in hunger or health, the thirst of this juice also receives a five thirst buff, totalling it up to 26 thirst per juice made (as two portions are obtained from each juice cup). Unlike apples and berries however, pears don't roll away from you when crafting with them, so mass farming and juice production is a much more appealing option for large scale juice making. It may be slightly inferior to apple juice, but it's still over twice as good as water, and has the added bonus of giving you millions of prickly pear leaves. The only real drawback is the difficulty it takes to get it initially.

Apple Juice
So, we finally meet. The most effective beverage in the game. Well, other than the almighty pond-water. But all that is about to change my dear friend. Very, very, soon. Hunger: 2 Thirst: 15 Health: 0 Optimism (and slight insanity) aside, this juice is the best thing you can put in a bucket. With an almighty 30 thirst per juice, that's 5 minutes each. Fill a golden jug and you have 75 minutes worth of thirst sorted out. This is the kind of thing you would raid for! (more on this later). But don't worry, my numbers may seem big, but the old water values were equally bad, 50 minutes from filling your golden jug at the nearest local pond. With three times the amount that water gives however, you'll certainly want to get your hands on this should you get the chance.

Milk & Glass of Milk
Milk is a very limited item, the only use being cheese and a temporary thirst solution should you be patient enough. Multi-wielding at least three milking pails is almost a necessity. However, if milk is to be buffed, then this might happen: Hunger: 2 Thirst: 10 Health: 0 This would make milk an easier to mass produce berry juice, or the new water of mainland tribes and nomadic dwellers who don't want to go the extra mile. As always, glasses of milk would be two portions, and the single item form would be one. Do note that milk is rather hard to obtain in bulk without lots of effort beforehand, so a single trip to mainland with a milking pail isn't going to be the next cooked beef.

Snow Water & Glass of Water
When obtained with a bucket, this would be named "Cold Water", and would be a slightly lighter shade of blue, to differentiate between the two. It would have the stats as follows: Hunger: 2 Thirst: 10 Health: 0 Cold water would be an item exclusive to spire, magma, and snowpeak, and would be one of the most easy to mass produce drinks in the game. With double the thirst of pond water and a much higher production rate (think of how fast you can place snow on a stove, then compare it to that of a well, which will do the same in a minimum of 46 seconds, or up to 80 depending on the type), it will be a core part of living on some islands. And yes, spire is supposed to be harsh, I know that, but doubling the effectivity of the snow water there isn't all that much of a huge change. Hunger will still be the main issue for the settlers, since who goes to spire without a well anyway?

Herbal Remedy
Now for the more interesting ones! A herbal remedy can be picked up in a bucket similarly to any other beverage, but it will mean you can drink directly from it instead of having to go into your inventory, search "Herbal", click on an item, place it, select the eat/drink tool, and then drink it, all in the space of less than 20 seconds, in most cases much less. Should I have medicine for my ailment, it shouldn't be that hard for me to drink it and cure my poisoning. Sure, poison should still be somewhat of a threat, but if I expect it I should be able to have something on my hotbar for the event. Anyway, enough babbling, onto the stats: Hunger: 0 Thirst: 5 Health: 20 These are the exact stats of herbal remedies, albeit with an extra five thirst because even medicine should heal thirst somewhat. This would mean for much more use to herbal remedies, as they're more easily accessible. People on flax or with extensive farms would now be capable of making a living off the remedies, and it would be yet another step to encourage inter-tribe trading. Either way, herbal remedies do need a buff, because what's coming next is certainly going to need a counter:

Poison
Poison is the last type of beverage, unique in that it cannot be consumed directly through the bucket. This is to avoid awkward events in which you're poisoning a tribe's food supply and you find yourself dead because you accidentally clicked the "Drink" button.

The use of this would be that when used on a food item, it would become poisoned, and one portion would be consumed, similar to fireproofing. Yet another unique fact is that it only receives one portion when it empties a glass, as poison only has one portion. This would allow for stealthy and more streamlined poisoning of food supplies, although wouldn't be completely invisible, actually using a bucket nearby food would be awfully suspicious. On the subject of poison, another thing to note would be that when you take from a poisoned beverage, it would apply that to the next time you drink, and the effect would disappear if you store and take the bucket, as losing 30 portions of apple juice because someone poisoned one of the glasses you were filling up your jug with would really suck. If you know it's poisoned you should be able to extract the poison without drinking it.

Side Notes
Buckets and other water containers would now be treated differently, instead of being one item they are now separate tools. A bucket with poison would be called a "Bucket of Poison", a steel bucket with apple juice in would be a "Steel Bucket of Apple Juice", and so on. This would not only ease on scripts in each bucket, but allow for easier inventory management, and allow for the next feature to work:

Stored buckets retain the amount of liquid they had in when they were stored. This is more in place for preventing errors more than anything else, you do "store/all" and then you remember you had a full steel bucket of herbal remedies and all of it is lost. It also means you can have lots of buckets of different fluids without massive inventory management issues. Having four different gold jugs is a pain in the neck to put it bluntly. And yes, it is possible, it's been done already with bows.

Droppable buckets? Please? :( I would state this as an addition, but it's clearly a large bug and not a feature, so it's clearly already on the to-do list (which is slowly being worked through).

Barrels
An upgradable, lockable, high capacity water storage, these are an extremely key part of tribal water containment.

Basic Concept
Barrels are crafted with one of the following recipes: Plank + Plank + Plank + Wet Clay Carpentry 2, Engineering 1

Plank + Plank + Plank + Small Bush Stump Carpentry 4, Engineering 2 One of which requires higher skills but cheaper resources, the other vice versa (unless you happen to live next to clay, in which case lucky you!). They are visually and functionally the same and will store 200 portions of whatever you decide to put in them. They are used by clicking the "Tap" on the side with a water container, filling the container to the best of it's ability. You could also drink directly from the barrel, although that would only restore the stats of drinking the fluid directly from the original source. To fill the barrel, you click the top of the barrel to empty the contents of your bucket into the barrel, assuming it is the same type of fluid. If you want, you can simply place the cup of beverage on top of the barrel and it will automatically empty into the barrel, although this does not work for milk or snow water, they have to be placed into a cup beforehand.

They cannot be retooled, only deleted, saving the pain of accidentally retooling a barrel of poison while moving a lot of buildings, but the fluid can be transported through buckets should you decide to move.

Upgrades
Previously I mentioned upgrades. I did not lie, they are as follows: Small Stone > Create Item = Stone Nozzle Masonry 1

Refined Iron > Create Item = Iron Nozzle Smithing 1

Refined Steel > Create Item = Steel Nozzle Smithing 2

Stainless Steel > Create Item = Stainless Steel Nozzle Smithing 3

Refined Mithril > Create Item = Mithril Nozzle Smithing 5

Pure Bluesteel > Create Item = Bluesteel Nozzle Smithing 5

Refined Iron + Cutstone > Create Item = Juicer Smithing 2, Cooking 2, Crafting 2 There's a lot of upgrades! In more detail, they go as follows.

Nozzles are a "lock", applied by crafting it with a barrel, and being unable to replace it with a nozzle of a lower grade. Mithril and bluesteel are both classed as top tier and cannot be interchanged. The nozzles will prevent anyone who is not in your tribe from using the barrel, meaning you can have public barrels and they will be safer than a granary, however they're not invulnerable, as you can break them with a pickaxe.

Stone up to steel nozzles all require three hits from a pickaxe of it's grade or higher to be "smashed", while stainless steel requires bluesteel or mithril pickaxes. In the case of the top tier nozzles, you need to hit the nozzle with the type of pickaxe the nozzle is made out of, cleverly sidestepping the issue of taking a stance on the bluesteel vs mithril, while still taking into account the cost of them.

As for the juicer, it is a small attachment that goes on the top of the barrel that allows for apples, berries, prickly pairs, milk, and snow water, all to be placed on top and be automatically turned into juice inside the barrel, correlating to the amount required to create the cupped version of the beverage (which is two portions). Because when it comes to it, you can farm pretty quickly and the effort of making the juices would far exceed the value of going past the stage of even bothering to harvest the crops, a lot of apple farms I make are big enough that I just stop using them altogether and just eat the apples off the trees when I get hungry or thirsty. Since the farmers are the main target of these changes, we want to encourage them to use it.

What This Would Add
One of the biggest changes that affects all players is that pond water now has half it's original effectivity. Now, this may seem like a large annoyance, but in actuality, it's not all that bad. To put it into a simple pros and cons format, we end up with this:
 * Pros:
 * Nomadic survivors now have to worry more about thirst, instead of what colour metal they should make their godlike crown out of when they rule the server with their countless advantages over tribal players.
 * Farmers now have a larger role in tribes, and wheat is no longer the king (queen?) of all crops, encouraging exploration for the more obscure yet better crops.
 * Natural water sources are no longer enough to sustain tribes of three to four, encouraging people to get architecture and build wells, and then in turn decide that now they have the levels they might as well go all out and make a bigger village, which attracts more people, and overall makes the game more cooperative and helps tribes overcome the never-ending fear of soloist nomadic raiders. This may seem like a slippery slope argument, but it makes a huge amount of sense for an avid tribalist.
 * Cons:
 * A handful of speed running techniques may be hindered by the new limitations on a bucket (which could be worked around rather easily).
 * Friendly islands receive more focus, as nomads have to visit them more often (is this a bad thing? I'm struggling to find bad things).
 * Some really lazy people might complain. Oh no, I have to visit a pond twice as often. It's the end of the world!

As for the new fluids, the possibilities are endless. Kegs are designed to be raider friendly, allowing for dedicated raiders to obtain something from attacking smaller tribes, and possibly in conjunction with the saturation suggestion, even allow for large scale warfare over food and drink, the farming based tribe can actually fight back against the metal based tribe. The new fluids open up a new world of exploration incentives, go to spire for a bit to collect some snow and keep your tribe happy for a while, but soon it'll run out and you'll be looking for more permanent solutions. Collect prickly pears, ship a cow, perhaps even periodically steal someone else's drinks without them realising.

And for those of you who want to say I make too many suggestions based around core stats and values, bear this in mind. In a poll people said they wanted this kind of overhaul the most. For a game called "Survival 303", the element of surviving is only a challenge for the newest players, and the rest of the game is hugely PvP orientated, even the soloist farmers have to go out of their way to account for the huge amount of raiders. It's very uncommon to find one who isn't firmly settled at desert or an artificial island. I feel this game should be brought back to its roots, and the suggestions I make reflect that. Better thirst? Yes. Yes, but different to what you said. No. I want to post a random answer.  