Love the new roadmap update. Especially the probably undervalued thing compared to multiplayer:
Sources and Sinks (in progress)
Yay for waterfalls and accidentally forgetting to place the sink and flooding everything 
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Thanks! Yeah, I was basically envisioning it as part of the “end game challenge” – like, ok, you’re finished, now the challenge going forward is to keep it protected, and Titans start showing up to knock down your tower and gobbo armies show up with catapults and so forth. And so you have a reason to keep playing even after your town is “finished.”
It wouldn’t have worked with the prior/current building system because order of operations mattered too much – you often couldn’t “Rebuild” something you’d built without deconstructing EVERYTHING and restarting from square 1 – but if the new system is robust enough it should be at least somewhat practicable from a gameplay standpoint.
After all, you get to destroy the goblin buildings.
Yeeeeeupp. Though the “sink” could just be evaporation and the edge of the map. They’ll also need to get water tied into the appeal system (my suggestion: moving water or multiple voxel deep water, pretty; stagnant water or very shallow water, negative).
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why would stagnant water be negative? people often find lakes ect beautiful… even if they are often full of parasites.
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I’d agree – I don’t think water itself should have a positive or negative effect, it’s simply a feature of the land. A canal might be flowing gently/peacefully, but it might still also be ugly and industrial.
I’d much rather see water features which require a connection to water to run, though – fountains and such which actually consume water to operate (we can assume that water evaporates from the bowl, some splashes over the side or is carried into the air as spray – these are genuine concerns IRL, the fountains in many lakes and park ponds local to me have to be turned off in summer to help preserve the water level.) So it’s not just a matter of running water through the city, you have to a) get it to the place that your fountain is most effective (e.g. pipes and pumps, and then hiding those potentially ugly pipes), b) have the crafters to build these decorations, and c) ensure adequate supplies of water for continued operation.
Of course, these decorative water features would need to have significant appeal benefits (probably some of them add gameplay benefits too e.g. public drinking fountains to deal with thirst if we get that) in order to justify their cost.
I think the only natural water feature which should have appeal is a waterfall, but even then I’d be ok with them not having any boost. I would like to see a boost for them though, simply because it rewards players for making artificial falls (which requires significant effort – not only getting the water up high to fall, but also maintaining flow and preventing flooding and so on.)
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re: stagnant water –
Yeah, that was just a spitball idea, but the thought process was that stagnant water collects parasites, algae, and trash, and the game doesn’t really have a cleanliness mechanic yet, so flowing/stagnant as a proxy for clean/ dirty.
I hope we get some kind of wall grate, so we can route running water through channels in houses. Medieval style running water!
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I’d love for stagnant water to be a thing, particularly as a start towards some hygiene/sanitation gameplay. Unfortunately it would mean the game needs to keep track of all the water to see whether it’s stagnant though… it would probably be easier to have special stagnant water which is created under certain conditions (e.g. rain or flooding), and which “blends into” normal water so it can easily be cleaned en-masse by simply washing it into a river.
The stagnant water could then spawn clouds of mosquitoes or similar, and they can pass on disease effects. Fresh water could be used for things like public baths (useful for leisure/happiness as well as hygiene), creating another “quality of life” metric which ties into survival and comfort nicely (but is a fair bit later-game than, say, creating nicer furniture.)
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I am picturing the swamp biome and how this would add an extra layer of difficulty. @BrunoSupremo have you thought about this at some point? 
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I have thought about mosquitos and diseases for the archipelago, where the herbalist would make repellents and cures for it, but it can be done better in the swamp. The water dependent spawns will not matter as the entire map have water anyway.
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Then our swamp biome will really be catering hard-mode players.
What a harsh marsh! Get it? See what I did there? Eh?.. Ok I’ll stop now.
Jokes aside, I think mosquitoes would add a new hazard that the player need to be careful of. I imagine them being a cloud of cubemitters (sorta like the flies of rotten foods, but more annoying),that normal physical damage won’t harm them. They are only vulnerable to fume-weapons, fire and fly swatters.cuz why not?
Oh and one last thing, aren’t we suppose to discuss about this on our separate project thread 
*wink *wink?..
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perhaps the talk of how we’d implement it should go on the project thread…
but there are some ideas which tie back into the base game; e.g. how to turn flooding into “a series of interesting choices” rather than a simple nuisance. If there was some penalty for having stagnant water sitting around (e.g. clouds of mosquitoes, or happiness drain), then the player wants to deal with any local flooding ASAP… but you don’t want to just send hearthlings to do it “the hard way” since that risks them being more effected by it. So instead, the player would weigh up the choice between manual clearing, investing in a pump, spreading the water out so it evaporates faster… or maybe something even more long-term, such as filling in/leveling out the floodplain so that it not only gets rid of the stagnant water but prevents it filling up next time there’s a flood too.
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Ahahaha no please continue…
Funny how a thread about DT 2018 update created sparks. I will follow up on this in the swamp project thread, so we dont hijack this here, as you point out 
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Here I’d ask myself what kind of problems arise with flooding in real life, to see if some of the consequences or processes that lead to said consequences can be brought into the game. I don’t have the time to do the reseach right now, so I’ll do it later.
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You could ward mosquitoes off like the zombies in Candledark. The radius on the Hearth could be generous but in order to expand and protect, you would need other things. Brazers could provide a smaller radius of protection.
One individual thing that Hearthlings could do to protect themselves is light burning punks/cattails to ward off mosquitoes. Don’t ask me about the logistics in coding that. Maybe they’d be considered a shield but it’d have a countdown before it wore out?
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The bad (side-) effects of flooding are:
- Physical damage: Damage to buildings, infrastructure and possesions. This is I guess due to the force of the water rushing in, due to some substances being affected/altered by water and due to the water taking with it rubble which further destroys things.
- Chemical damage: Contamination of the water by whatever nuclear particles/chemicals/pathogens are around.Think bacteria from the sewer being laid over the streets, chemicals being dissolved in the water, doing a reaction here and there and going to the same place the sewage goes to, and of course lots and lots of mud. Also, Fukushima, let’s not forget that one.
- the negative side effects of previous point: sickness and disease. "military fever, pneumonic plague, dermatopathia and dysentery. "
- Animals being swept away/killed in the flood, disrupting the ecosystem. The same obviously counts for people and pets, since they are at hearth also animals, and thus no less immune from the stuff that kills animals. I guess what kills animals is the rubble and water force from point 1, as well as getting stuck underwater and drowning.
- Ecosystems, as well as communities will also stuggle to survive because amenities are lost (ecosystem: food sources, sources of clean water etc. Community: electricity, sewage, travel infrastructure to hospitals/food stores.)
- Also there is the problem of animals (snakes/insects), coming into places where tghey should be, like homes.
But there is also a plus point: remember the crates and crates of mud from point 2. Yea, they carry nutrients, which are yummy for your crops, if they where laid onto you fields. Of course, you only flood your fields, not your crops, because those get destroyed, but if you keep fields fallow (finally a use case for fallow fields), then it could be a good idea for crop yield.
This is what I got from this website (and some reasonable think on top of it): http://eschooltoday.com/natural-disasters/floods/before-during-after-floods.html
Citronella candles? (herbalist)