Fountains as Rain Collectors

[Vundecat]

I've been playing a lot of the studio challenge map lately, and I've had a lot of time to look at that fountain in front of the office on the west side of the map.  At the current moment I think it's just a sprite, doesn't have a 3D model?  I've also noticed bird baths in some of the yards on the main Knox map as well, pictures below for reference:

 

https://imgur.com/a/aOIE2h3

 

There was a multi-week long drought on my Studio run, in which there was no rain for quite a while.  I was desperate for water, and I kept passing by that fountain on my scavenging runs and I kept thinking about how convenient it would be if that water fountain actually had water in it!  Admittedly this is a bit of a fluff feature but at the current moment, the only rain collectors are pots/bowls placed out by the player, and the collectors that the player builds normally.  I would love to see these fountains double as naturally-occurring rain collectors, to make it more viable for players who don't want to invest in skilling carpentry to have access to water sources without having to rely on wells/natural water bodies. 

 

Bird baths would be the easiest to implement; they're already 3d models and furniture you can pick up and place at a base.  Obviously bird baths don't hold much water, so they'd only contain something like 10-20 units of rainwater?  However from an implementation standpoint you'd only need to add whatever component makes a object a rain collector and change the value for the amount of water it can store.  I don't imagine that this would unbalance the game in any way, as the baths are too uncommon to be spammed, and the amount of water they'd collect would be too low to be exciting anyways.  It would require doing a variation of the birdbath that was empty, though, from an art asset point of view. 

 

The larger, decorative fountain would be the more impactful change.  Like with the birdbath it would need an 'empty' art asset, and my suggested version would require a small amount of recoding but nothing so low level that you'd need to rework the game's engine.  Here's what I suggest:
-At the start of the game, the fountains serve as an 'unlimited' source of tainted water, similar to a sink/toilet

-When the knox water grid goes off, the fountains transition from a water source to being a rain collector

-When it becomes a rain collector, it starts with a full container of tainted water

 

From a code point of view, it would start as a 'sink' for tainted water and need to have a one-way transition to a 'rain collector' after the water grid goes off.

 

Given the size of these fountains, I would suggest something like a ~200 unit water capacity for them.  This is more than the lvl4 rain collector barrel, but I don't think this would be OP as the fountains can not only not be crafted but also can't be moved, as they're cemented-in fixtures that are part of the location they start at.  They're also fairly rare and only appear in certain locations, kind of like wells. 

 

From an aesthetics point of view, I could totally see people relying on these old stone fountains as a source of rain water collection in an apocalyptic even if it's not one's sole source of water collection.  Plus they visibly contain water, so it makes sense that we should be able to use them for their water.  From a balance point of view, I could see fountain rain collectors changing the viability of certain locations as survivable bases, and give certain city areas passive supplies of water generation without needing rivers/lakes/wells/etc.