Water from Fishing Holes

[Hesha]

Please tell me I'm not crazy and this used to be a thing...

I could swear that before I stopped playing about 15 months ago, it was possible to take water from the fishing holes on Mystery Lake. The water was not potable and needed to be boiled, but at least you didn't have to melt snow.

Am I right? Was it possible at some point? If so - why was it changed?

[Hotzn]

It was never possible.

[cekivi]

Although it is frequently requested.

[Wormer]

From my point of view the game needs a source of water that doesn't depend on fire. Especially on Interloper where matches are very limited. This is also very natural to take water from a fishing hole.

It also could make for a reason to ever drink non potable water. I have some experience with the game and honestly I have never had a choice to drink a non potable water: you either have it and can boil it with ease, or you can't make a fire and die from dehydration. Now at least you can have a choice when there aren't means to make a fire.

I'm not quite sure what kind of poisoning one gets from drinking non potable water and assume he gets default food poisoning. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if that's the case probably it might be better to have slightly less destructive effect like dysentery of a kind that won't necessarily kill you without treating. For instance: receive 50% less calories from eating food and increased fatigue lose rate might be fine. If you continue to drink non potable water regardless it might or might not develop into full poisoning.

Then there is a sea or oceanic salty water that probably should behave different. It isn't suitable for drinking or ain't good to cope with thirst at least. That kind of water can naturally be used to receive salt through evaporation at fire. Mines might be another source of salt: mining salt with an axe from an unlimited source in a mine would be cool. Like it have been proposed before salt is used to preserve meat. Downside of the salty meat is of course a substantial amount of thirst when you eat that.

[Mike in GA]

i have wondered about this also with the water falls, but I would think the ice would be very thin near the bottoms where water harvesting would be. 

Untreated water though, I contracted giardia while living on my family cattle ranch. I lost about 60 pounds over a period of about 5 months I would guess. Would it have killed me? I sure wasn't lugging a 30 kilo/66 pound pack around that's for sure. I had zero energy, so just to add some real life perspective. 

Also on the other hand, I drank water straight from the streams on our farm for years and never got sick. In the summer when baling hay I would be drinking/laying in the streams as often as possible over like 10 years/summers. So less than a 1% chance stat wise, more like .5% 

BUT, when I did get sick…I whined like Will with a sprained ankle 

[cekivi]

There are actually several older posts on the subject of water gathering although I don't have the links at the moment. Generally, it is a very requested feature (especially from ice fishing holes) for the reasons @Wormer outlined. Getting water from a waterfall though would be a bad idea. The risks would just be too high even if you were suffering from dehydration. 

Of course, eating snow should also be an option (with a major warmth penalty) but I don't know if that will ever be implemented 

[Thrasador]

1 hour ago, cekivi said:

Getting water from a waterfall though would be a bad idea. The risks would just be too high even if you were suffering from dehydration. 

Bucket on a stick?

[Mroz4k]

By drinking untreated water, you can contract dysentery. It works pretty similarly to food poisoning from what I remember, but there is more you need to do to cure it - like drinking treated water. I remember I contracted it once because I tried drinking the untreated water after getting close to dehydratation and the only thing I had left was about 0,7l of non potable water I had left, which was the "result" of me, utilizing campfire to the last minute. I was too lazy to build another fire to turn it potable. Mistake I paid for by having to make it anyways, with a lot more wood on it to make the 4 liters of clean water to get rid of the affliction.

I kind of agree with Wormer on the subject. If nothing else, the ice you cut out in itself is non potable water (though I think it could be also used to create "Ice lens", which is a method of creating fire like through a magnifying glass, only with the use of an ice instead - and this fire making method would be very sought after in Interloper before one finds magnifying glass, I think. Yes, you can make fire using ice - it is quite ingenius)

2 hours ago, cekivi said:

There are actually several older posts on the subject of water gathering although I don't have the links at the moment. Generally, it is a very requested feature (especially from ice fishing holes) for the reasons @Wormer outlined. Getting water from a waterfall though would be a bad idea. The risks would just be too high even if you were suffering from dehydration. 

Of course, eating snow should also be an option (with a major warmth penalty) but I don't know if that will ever be implemented 

On the contrary, with a bottle, stick and a cured gut, I could very easily get water out of a waterfall with next to no risk at all (unless we are talking about "weak ice around the waterfall bottom, which doesnt seem to be the case in TLD), simply by tying the cured gut around the bottleneck (talking typical plastic bottle) and then wrapping the rest of that same cured gut around stick while holding it. Basically I would make a bottle water-catcher which I could place under the waterfall from safe distance and get bits of water here and there, rather fast and safely. Then it is just matter of taking these bits of water and put them in a different bottle where I would get more and more quantities of it.

The most important tool of survival - improvisation. You take what you have, and you turn something dangerous into something fast, easy and safe.

[Mroz4k]

19 minutes ago, Thrasador said:

Bucket on a stick?

Pretty much. You better tie it to the stick, though, or you risk losing the precious bucket when the strong current of the waterfall yanks at it. And you better not put it directly under the waterfall or it will be ripped out of your hands, too - all we need is to catch those little bits of water from the side, anyways 

[Thrasador]

Just now, Mroz4k said:

Pretty much. You better tie it to the stick, though, or you risk losing the precious bucket when the strong current of the waterfall yanks at it. And you better not put it directly under the waterfall or it will be ripped out of your hands, too - all we need is to catch those little bits of water from the side, anyways 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too....

[cekivi]

8 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

Pretty much. You better tie it to the stick, though, or you risk losing the precious bucket when the strong current of the waterfall yanks at it. And you better not put it directly under the waterfall or it will be ripped out of your hands, too - all we need is to catch those little bits of water from the side, anyways 

It would still be very difficult and risky to do. The only reason its possible is due to there not being thin ice around the falls. In real life fast flowing water is always thin and if you fell in you'd be swept under the ice to a very unfortunate end... 

[Mroz4k]

34 minutes ago, cekivi said:

It would still be very difficult and risky to do. The only reason its possible is due to there not being thin ice around the falls. In real life fast flowing water is always thin and if you fell in you'd be swept under the ice to a very unfortunate end... 

Yes, but that is individualistic scenario. How dangerous it would be would greatly depend on the shape of the waterfall if we considered thin ice as a factor - certain waterfalls would be "accesible" from the shore - if the waterfall was small enough. 
If there were some rocks that the falling water got slowed upon, it might be safe to even cross on it. But most of the time the ice would be likely very thin.

I could get more creative on making some very primitive pulling contraption which would allow to gather water in this way from the safety of a shore. Would just once again require sticks, bottle and some cured guts. 
Another way would be to tap away some of the flow from the waterfall - by placing something big and heavy, like a cedar limb or a plank, into the path of the waterfall, and let the water flow down in a different path, because water always finds the path of the lowest resistance. You could create a long lasting "tap" this way, because the log would be too heavy to be swept under the water, and the running water of the waterfall too fast to freeze so quickly.

[Mroz4k]

11 hours ago, cekivi said:

Of course, eating snow should also be an option (with a major warmth penalty) but I don't know if that will ever be implemented 

Also, this I wanted to adress - this is a horrible idea. Even if you were dying of dehydratation, this is incredibly bad idea. It takes relatively quite a lot of energy to change the state of water, from "particle" to liquid. Meaning you would use up a lot of your body heat, converting the snow to water, very fast. It is very easy to get quickly hypothermic by eating snow. And once you ate it, it is not like you can "take that decision back". And you would not even get that much of a water in you - snow in itself is mostly air, not water. The snow you would find on the ground fallen from the sky, anyways. 

The "smart" way to do this is to take a bottle, fill it to brink with snow, pack it in as hard as you can (this increases the density of snow, which means there will be higher water concentration) and then tug it in under your parka and go on your merry way. As you walk around, the body heat you emit with your actions will be absorbed by the cold bottle, heating the snow inside and melting it for you. In a way, the more energy you emit doing tasks like walking, the more you will heat up the bottle. And the less you will sweat under your parka, because the bottle will take away some of the warmth, but not nearly as much as eating snow straight up - this is because you will be gradually heating up the bottle, but by eating the snow directly you are instantly cooling your core temperature down.

Straight up eating snow is a death sentence in survival scenarios. If it was implemented, it would need to not only take a lot of warmth, it would also need to give a negative affliction "chilled core" which would be somewhat opposite to the "warm core" affliction, but I imagine it would be more drastic. And the hydratation you would get would not be very high.

[cekivi]

5 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

Straight up eating snow is a death sentence in survival scenarios. If it was implemented, it would need to not only take a lot of warmth, it would also need to give a negative affliction "chilled core" which would be somewhat opposite to the "warm core" affliction, but I imagine it would be more drastic. And the hydratation you would get would not be very high.

This is actually debatable depending on the source you use. Les Stroud for instance ("Survivorman") recommends eating snow to stay hydrated and uses the method on his show. The caveat being that eating snow only makes sense if you are generating excess body heat (e.g. chopping down a tree for wood). Otherwise, you will get hypothermic. I've used it myself on long snow shoe strips and while ice fishing with no negative effects (I was still sweating buckets and had stripped down to a thin shirt). Again, it's very dependent on the situation. 

[Mroz4k]

5 hours ago, cekivi said:

This is actually debatable depending on the source you use. Les Stroud for instance ("Survivorman") recommends eating snow to stay hydrated and uses the method on his show. The caveat being that eating snow only makes sense if you are generating excess body heat (e.g. chopping down a tree for wood). Otherwise, you will get hypothermic. I've used it myself on long snow shoe strips and while ice fishing with no negative effects (I was still sweating buckets and had stripped down to a thin shirt). Again, it's very dependent on the situation. 

Yea I have actually used it once myself to help kick down high temperature for a sick person which was getting dangerously high. I know of Les, but I havent seen Survivorman in years, but it is possible - and I think most of us have at some point ate snow as kids. 

The slippery slope you are not mentioning is the fact you cant easily predict how bad of an effect the extra lost cold will have on you. You can be sweating buckets and yet you could have eaten a bit too much, and you would still contract hypothermia. Whereas turning it to liquid water lets you better control the temperature loss.

[CptLoon]

I'm not sure why boiling the water really matters at all.  I've been backpacking almost every summer in Ontario for over 2 decades, drinking straight out of the lakes the entire time.  Never had an issue, nor has anyone I have ever gone with in our group.  I heard about a friend of a friend who got sick once, but he was also not as healthy as most people.  The odds of getting sick from drinking un-purified water in this area should be incredibly low, especially for any normal healthy adult.

[Thrasador]

56 minutes ago, CptLoon said:

I'm not sure why boiling the water really matters at all.  I've been backpacking almost every summer in Ontario for over 2 decades, drinking straight out of the lakes the entire time.  Never had an issue, nor has anyone I have ever gone with in our group.  I heard about a friend of a friend who got sick once, but he was also not as healthy as most people.  The odds of getting sick from drinking un-purified water in this area should be incredibly low, especially for any normal healthy adult.

I've thought about that too. The odds of getting sick from melted snow and raw fish are in the game are stupid high.....hello sushi? Yes, I am aware in restaurants they use sushi grade fish, and the preparation is important too, but it's not like every fish you catch has worms....In the game the odds of getting food poisoning from raw fish or dysentery from melted snow seems to be 90% or higher. 

Saltwater fish are generally safer than freshwater, and also Atlantic water fish are safer than Pacific water. Lastly parasites are more likely to grow in warm water fish than cold water fish.....CH is saltwater fishing. Also, flash freezing is used to kill many parasites in fish served as sushi. A minimum of -4°C for a minimum of a week is one of the standards, but it can work even better at lower temperatures for less time. Leaving fresh fish out overnight in the snow during a blizzard would very likely be effective.....

A illness rate of 10% would be far more appropriate. 

Melted snow:

http://www.dryadbushcraft.co.uk/bushcraft-how-to/obtaining-water-from-snow-and-ice

[cekivi]

Welcome to the forums @CptLoon 

The best I can determine the "boil water" mechanic exists to add challenge to the game. If there was no need to purify water than you'd need far fewer resources to survive. As for drinking lake water... I wouldn't recommend it. I'm also in Ontario and we definitely have giardia in the province. Now, the odds of contracting it are far lower than the game portrays but it is not zero as my dad (an avid outdoorsman who caught beaver fever) can attest.