Hot water to boost warmth

[SteveP]

A faster way to recover from chills and hypothermia is to just drink warm water. A favorite of mine is to heat juice; very soothing on the throat.

[Tbone555]

yes! this is always something that has bothered me in this game

[bethany]

Thanks for the suggestion! The new polls can be quite interesting.

Just as a note for any unaware, it is possible to warm certain consumables to give a warmth bonus. Peaches, tomato soup, tea, and coffee will all give you a boost.

[Scyzara]

I'm not a big fan of a hygiene bar or anything along these lines (as important as personal hygiene is in real life, I see more disadvantages than advantages if these things were to be simulated in TLD), but I absolutely do support the idea that freshly-boiled water should provide the same warmth bonus like tea or coffee.

I'd also find it awesome if said warmth bonus (currently indicated by a tiny green plus next to the warmth bar) could reduce the time it takes to cure hypothermia by a few hours.

However, I really don't believe that filling bathtubs with hot water fits the game. As much as I love having a nice bubble bath irl, I doubt that it makes a lot of sense to melt several dozens of kg of snow (with a volume of god knows how many cubic meters^^) trying to fill up a bathtub in a TLD-like situation. Especially not if you've just contracted hypothermia and want to warm up as fast as possible (and not melt snow for the next 5 days first in order to get enough water). 

[cekivi]

Just a general note that heating rate matters if you're suffering from hypothermia or frostbite. You generally want warm - not hot -  things to warm you up. Otherwise you may burn yourself and do more harm than good. The general rule of thumb is to warm up at the same rate you cooled down.

I also agree with @Scyzara. Neat as it would be to incorporate hygiene elements into the game it would likely be more trouble than it's worth. 

Lastly, in my opinion, hypothermia should only last 8 hours, not 12. This way you can cure hypothermia with a single good night's sleep and it won't impact your play as much. Also, @SteveP is right. Drinking warm beverages should also help reduce the hypothermia timer.

[AverageGatsby]

Dinking warm water? Who does that? It just seems kind of cheesy and takes away some factors that one needs to consider (you can have warm water everyday all day, but do you have enough rose hips to make yourself a tea or are those bushes over there worth harvesting?). Just get out grab some mushrooms or rose hips and make yourself a tea (or have coffee/herbal tea handy). Those things would also lose parts of their (already small) importance if you could just boil water instead. The idea of warm beverages providing aid against hypothermia is a good one, but again, IMHO just add that to tea/coffee.

I do like the idea of hygiene or washing yourself with warm water. A bath seems kind of unrealistic as scyzara mentioned, but melting/heating 3-5 liters of water to wash yourself with a sponge (or something alike probably made out of cloth/fur) or to rest your feet in, should be possible! I think that actually sounds fantastic. 

[SteveP]

14 hours ago, Scyzara said:

However, I really don't believe that filling bathtubs with hot water fits the game. As much as I love having a nice bubble bath irl, I doubt that it makes a lot of sense to melt several dozens of kg of snow (with a volume of god knows how many cubic meters^^) trying to fill up a bathtub in a TLD-like situation. Especially not if you've just contracted hypothermia and want to warm up as fast as possible (and not melt snow for the next 5 days first in order to get enough water). 

Yes especially considering if you heat a cup of water, by the time you heat a second cup, the first one has cooled. If OTOH, there was a water kettle or a water tank as on old wood stoves, you could have hot water. You have to mix cool water with boiling water to get the right temperature but we don't have any method to asynchronously keep a large amount of water on the boil. Maybe with the addition of a bucket, you could heat enough water for a bath. You could also add unsafe water for bathing to cool the boiling water down. It does tend to make the whole process more cumbersome. Some maps entirely lack stoves and tubs too. All you have is a fire barrel or fireplace. The good old wood stove in PV could easily accommodate a large hot water cistern reservoir in it. I was unable to find an image of an old-fashioned wood-stove with reservoir however here's something representative. On the left are the main round holes used to feed the fire. To the right on this image are other cast ports that lie above the oven. To the rear of this would be a long rectangular removable port which lets you get access to the reservoir. The large door on the front is not for the fire; it's for the oven! At the top of this stove, you would see the warming cabinets where you might have sourdough or yeast bread rising (not sure) or just keep food warm.

If you Google wood stoves with water heaters, you're going to find really fancy stuff designed to continuously provide hot water that could be piped throughout the home to let you draw hot water from anywhere. The reservoir, I believe just let you get about 5 gallons of water heated to as hot as you cared. You could still use the stove without water, The water reservoir had to be kept filled at all times otherwise it could rust. Often there was a large two gallon kettle kept with water to be heated for baths in a galvanized tub. Perhaps some of our European members have actual stoves like this. Please share photos if you have a wood stove with a built-in cistern!

 

[SteveP]

A nice article about using and caring for an old kitchen wood stove of cast iron: http://countrysidenetwork.com/daily/homesteading/renewable-energy/learning-to-cook-on-a-wood-burning-cook-stove/

Another nice picture of the stove showing the flue, ports, cast iron kettle and an old fashioned iron used to press your clothing! Note the smaller door below the fire box where the ashes could be removed. Also take note of the handle for lifting the ports for adding wood or gaining access to the area above the oven which could get ashes and soot building up and causing trouble. No (cistern) reservoir on this stove either.

[LucidFugue]

It would be hard to take a photo of our slow combustion stove that would show this in detail, but it does have a water jacket and the inlet/outlet pipes to allow it to be connected to a cistern. The idea is you have the cistern at a higher elevation to the stove, and it uses thermal cycling to heat the water (i.e. the cooler water flows down from the cistern to the water jacket. Water there is heated by the fire, and rises back up to the cistern).

We don't have it hooked up as it is expensive and difficult to have a large enough cistern raised at such an elevation that you have sufficient hot water supplies, and good water pressure, particularly when we're only using the stove for maybe 3 months out of the year. You need a solar/electric system for the rest o the year, which turned out to be uneconomical in the long run.

 

Back on topic though - I think being able to get the warmth bonus by drinking boiling water is reasonable, but I do have sympathy for the view that it would marginalise the benefits of herbal tea. I'm very much a gameplay over realism person, and therefore I'm not fussed about whether it makes sense or not in reality. I don't think hygiene/baths is a good addition to the game, but I'm open to more uses for both potable and non-potable water besides drinking.

[SteveP]

I finally found a picture of a wood stove with a built-in reservoir. The reservoir is on the far right hand side, to the right of the oven. My 80 year old mother and I talked about these old reservoirs because having hot water for bathing and other purposes was a very common need in the days before electric and propane stoves. I like this picture because it clearly shows the flu and drafting controls as well.

See http://woodcookstovecooking.blogspot.ca/ for interesting story about this stove!