Hardcore mode: Water

[deoxxys]

Hardcore mode:  Adds water into the game.  Funny enough water is needed less often then food.  Your character doesnt actually "hold" any pure water in their inventory.  There is a canteen meter added between the hp/hunger indicator.  This "holds" your water.  Your character will automatically drink from this when they are thirsty (there are no drinking animations).  

 

Because of this some new mechanics, monsters, regions and machines will be needed.

 

Water sources: ponds (unfiltered), Snow (unfiltered/winter only), mountian streams (pure), and Oasis (pure).  

 

First let me explain the filter mechanic. There are 2 kinds of water filtered and unfiltered.  The canteen meter has 2 bars reprensenting the 2 kinds of water.  One light blue for pure water and a murky brown for unfiltered water.  To purify water, you will need a "water purifer", a new machine that will purify your unfiltered water making it addable to the canteen meter.  Because of the default dificulty of winter, thirst is made real easy by having a lot of available nearby unfiltered water (snow), that is as long as you have a water purifer.  

 

So you know about ponds and snow, lets talk about the Mountian streams.  A *new* area is added to the game, yay!  I was thinking it would be a good idea if this was a landmark, kind of the way caves are.  The area on the landmark will be represented by an area that takes up one screen and looks like tall misty mountians.  If you click on this then you enter the mountian area.  The mountian area has a couple of new things.  The mountian area is made to look like misty mountians in china, because of this we have: pandas, bamboo shoots, a broken bridge and a mountian stream.  The mountian area is semi linear, with the point of reaching the top.  Im not sure if I want the pandas to be aggessive or nuetral, but they will definitely drop a good amount of meat  There are two types of bamboo shoots: edible and choppable.  All bamboo shoots grow back.  The smaller bamboo shoots are edible but can only be eaten on the spot.  Bigger ones can be chopped down and burn for a long time.  Then theres the broken bridge that helps you cross a gorge.  This bridge needs to be repaired once with 3 wood planks and a hammer.  Once you reach the top you find the mountian stream which has pure water to fill your canteen meter with.  It also has an inexhaustible amount of fish in it.  You will need to fish here quite a bit if you want to catch the magical koi.  Which I will cover in the next paragraph.  But first lets talk about the levy.  Dont want to have to make a trip up to the mountian everytime to get water?  Well if you build a levy at the base of the mountian you can skip the trip and just go to the base of the mountian everytime, however it takes alot of wood planks and cut stone.

 

Now for the magical koi, why do we need this?  Well, the magical koi has a special organ you will need to make your "raincatcher".  The Raincatcher is a new machine you make to help lessen trips to water sources during the summer (since during winter theres lots of snow).  Whenever it rains, the raincatcher will "catch rain" and store it in a basin.  If you have a water purifer made then rain water caught by this machine will already be purified when you harvest it.  More then one rain catcher will make your thirst problem lessen, 3 and you probably will never go thirsty during summer, that is if it rains.  However you will need to catch more magical koi.  [Magical koi catch rate=15%; only in mountian stream].  Koi organs needed to make Raincatcher:2 + other more common materials.

[deoxxys]

Oh and there should be an occasional water-based monsters giving you the reward of pure water for killing them.  Allowing you to establish a base early on without having to worry about water.  This monster would slowly go extinct as they dont respawn.

[Neosaurus]

And all this just for a "hardcore" mode? No.

[AlexNT]

 Snow (unfiltered

 

[Battal]

Too micromanagy.  No.

[deoxxys]

Too micromanagy.  No.

 

 

really what else is dont starve about?

[Sporb]

The problem I have with a hydration meter is that it probably wouldn't actually add new game mechanics. It would basically just be a second hunger meter that drains slower and requires you to find different things to fill it.

 

Look at the meters that are already in the game.

There a health meter which only goes down when things happen to you, such as getting attacked or eating bad food. It can be raised by eating healing foods or using healing items. The most significant thing about this meter is that emptying it is the only way you can die.

Then there's the hunger meter. This one always drains over time, and when it's empty your health drains very quickly. There's no way to stop it from draining, you have to eat to raise it. That means that this meter is a major motivation in the game. Sure, you're not likely to actually starve, but you've got to continually provide yourself with food.

Finally, there's the sanity meter. This one is drained and filled much more gradually than the other meters. And, while you can do specific things to raise your sanity, such as eating taffy or killing a hallucination, you can also cancel out the sanity drain or even raise your sanity over time with dapper clothing. Also, low sanity doesn't kill you, it only spawns monsters you can fight.

 

As you can see, each of these meters is pretty well differentiated from the others. There are different ways that they are raised and lowered, there are different penalties for letting them get too low, etc. Hydration would automatically lower over time, it would require specific items to fill it, and it would probably start draining your health when it runs out. That doesn't sound different enough from hunger to be its own meter.