Finding fresh water should be more challenging

[More_tribal_interaction]

If you think about it, one of the harder aspects of survival is finding freshwater. Just watch any Bear Grylls documentary.

I think finding water should be much more difficult. You should have to trek long distances up river to the original mountain stream (the game doesn't have such a feature yet), dig a well, use the well water in villages, boil rainwater, or boil fresh snow.

If you drink mire or sea or river water, you should get a stomach ache and diarrhoea. Do you know how much moss, bacteria or animal waste there is in there?

[Ara D.]

I partially disagree. In modern times you are absolutely correct surface water is suspect do mostly to pollution caused by people, industry, intensive agriculture, and human sewage. Iron age Finland would not have theses problems except for possible around the villages. Also to a smaller degree a person who has been drinking from natural sources in one area since birth would be better adapted to  the microbes of that water and less like to get sick form it than a foreigner who has been drinking chemically disinfected water for their whole life.

[UniversalRanger]

If you think about it, one of the harder aspects of survival is finding freshwater. Just watch any Bear Grylls documentary.

I think finding water should be much more difficult. You should have to trek long distances up river to the original mountain stream (the game doesn't have such a feature yet), dig a well, use the well water in villages, boil rainwater, or boil fresh snow.

If you drink mire or sea or river water, you should get a stomach ache and diarrhoea. Do you know how much moss, bacteria or animal waste there is in there?

In the Iron Age, water was a lot cleaner. In fact, this easy life we have today is what makes water so dangerous. That and the fact that most live in industrialized cities. We're not used to the different bacterial pathogens or parasites that might be gotten from the water. That's why we have to clean it. if your society has been living that way for a long time, people born into it are not going to be so susceptible as we are today. Don't get me wrong, being so clean is what keeps so many of us alive, but at the same time, we're also less able to handle pathogens out in the wilderness. It's a better trade-off if more people survive due to no exposure to such pathogens, but then they are also weaker to those pathogens, therefore must take extra precautions like boiling water before drinking it or using Iodine tablets to disinfect the water.

Now, with that said, there are certain realities that this game seems to ignore. Standing water becomes poisonous because of all of the organic matter decaying within it. So, swamps and such should not be potable without some further treatment like boiling it for so much time. Drinking lake water without first treating it in some way, like boiling it, should have a minor chance of causing someone to contract a parasite or some sort of bacterial infection. But then, if they did that, they would need to make water requirements more realistic as well. That need water bar needs to be put on a more realistic time frame. The need food bar should also. I find I need food more often than I need water in this game. And this guy doesn't eat lightly either. He eats a pound+ of food each meal. On days I'm really doing stuff, he could eat like 5 pounds of food in a day. Did they really eat that much more back then? Maybe they did, I don't know.