Liquid measurement display in upper right unclear/inaccurate?

It indicates water accessible to duplicants minus the amount of water that's reserved by buildings that need water. This is similar to when you lay down a ladder, the amount of available resources goes down because that ladder has reserved some of the resources. I agree we should add a tooltip to the resources menu. I'm also curious if now that you know how things work, if you think there's still a problem with the display. Thanks for bringing this up!

 

Hmm, it varied by so much it seemed like there was something broken (i specfically remember 150k -> 250k -> 90k) , but I'll pay more attention next time I play and see if I can come up with anything more concrete for you.  When you say accessible, does that mean there has to be a valid path to it, or does it just have to be visible (i.e. not obscured by the 'fog of war'?).

1 hour ago, c0refile said:

Hmm, it varied by so much it seemed like there was something broken (i specfically remember 150k -> 250k -> 90k) , but I'll pay more attention next time I play and see if I can come up with anything more concrete for you.  When you say accessible, does that mean there has to be a valid path to it, or does it just have to be visible (i.e. not obscured by the 'fog of war'?).

I've had the same experience. At one point I was at over 280K of water (combined) and some time later it was listed as <100K. While nothing had really changed to the water setup.

Ok, so I understand what the 'available water' meter means now, but it's very unintuitive:  the amount of water *in liquid cells reachable by a duplicants' gun*.  Instead, I expected if a duplicant could reach any cell in a pool of water, the amount of water in the whole pool would be included in the meter.

I attached two files showing the difference.  In one, I have some extra ladder tiles and you can see the meter shows more liquid as available, 18k vs 14k.  I would have expected in both cases to see the same amount, the entire contents of the pool, which is somewhere around 56k.

Now this also makes sense why the number would change so much during a playthrough unexpectedly.  If a wide pool of water rises or falls, a large number of liquid cells may change from reachable to non-reachable or vice versa, which would result in change to the liquid meter.  If I build a ladder into a pool of deep water, the meter would go up significantly.  If I remove a ladder from a pool of water, the meter would drop.

If possible, I would definitely recommend that if a duplicant can reach any cell in a pool of water, the amount of water in the entire pool should be included in the 'water' meter.  I think that's what most people would expect it to read, and a much more useful metric than what it is currently.  If this isn't possible, it would be helpful to have a tooltip clarifying that the 'water' meter only includes liquid cells reachable by a duplicants' gun.

Ok, more data... I've been playing more, just checked my water meter and it looks totally incorrect.  I should have approximately 50k of water and 15k of contaminated water by counting up all the amounts in the liquid cells that are accessible to my duplicants (notice I made sure to build the pools so that all the water is accessible to the duplicants), but the meter is showing 289k and 53k?

Now I'm just totally confused.

Next I just saved and reloaded, and now the water meter is showing 158k and 24k.  Closer to what I expected but still higher than I think it should be.  Definitely something buggy going on here.