Water, Thirst & Vessels

Thirst only ever drops, and the water you find can cause sickness unless it is treated.

The thirst meter

The blue bar in the HUD is thirst. Unlike hunger, it has no natural way to climb on its own — it only drains, and it is topped back up by drinking.

• It falls steadily over time.
• It falls faster in the heat and during exertion (sprinting, hard work). A hot body sweats, and sweat costs water.
• Weakness sets in as it gets low, then Slowness and fatigue when it hits empty.

Water quality

Every drink and every vessel has a quality. It decides how likely a sip is to cause illness.

Quality	Where it comes from	Sickness chance
Raw	Straight from a river, lake, or pond	source-dependent (see below)
Tainted / murky	A dirty vessel, or warm stagnant swamp/jungle water	~45%
Clean	Boiled, or caught as rainwater	Safe (0%)
Salt	Ocean, beach, or shore water	Dehydrates instead of quenching

Drinking from a source

Pointing at a water source and right-clicking bare-handed drinks straight from it. It refills thirst, but untreated water carries risk — and where you drink matters, following the real rule that cold, clear, moving water is far safer than warm, still water:

Source	Bare-hand sickness chance
Swamp / jungle / mangrove (warm, stagnant, murky)	~45% — a bad idea raw
Warm, dry country (savanna, desert oasis)	~25%
Temperate (plains, forest)	~15%
Cold biomes (mountains, tundra, snowy)	~6% — much safer, but never zero

• Moving water is safer still. A river, or any pool with flowing water beside it (a stream or a fall feeding it), is aerated and keeps turning over, so it cuts the risk of whatever tier it's in by well over half. A cold mountain stream — cold and moving — is the safest raw drink there is (~2–3%), while a warm, still pond is the worst short of a swamp. It's the "cold and flowing" of the real rule.
• No source is ever truly safe raw — even a clear cold stream keeps a small floor of risk (giardia doesn't care how pretty the water is). Boiling is the only sure cure.
• A vessel filled from swamp/jungle water fills murky (tainted, the ~45% tier), so you must boil it before it's safe — via a fire-safe pot, or hot-rock boiling for a hide waterskin.
• Sickness is a lingering foodborne illness.

Eating snow

In snow country you can bare-hand right-click a snow layer or snow block to eat a handful. Snow is frozen precipitation, so it's clean — no sickness — but it's a poor way to drink: a handful melts to only a little water, and your body spends heat melting it, so it chills you (badly if you're already cold — which, in snow country, you usually are). It's an emergency sip, not a water supply. The real answer is to melt snow over a fire rather than eat it cold — exactly the survival rule.

Salt water

Ocean, beach, and shore water is salt water. Drinking it — bare-handed or from a vessel — dehydrates you instead of quenching thirst. Rivers and lakes stay fresh; only the sea is salt. Boiling does not desalinate it — salt water cannot be made drinkable. But it isn't useless: boiled to dryness, seawater leaves a crust of salt (see Getting salt) — the way to stock salt for preserving food.

Vessels

A vessel carries water for drinking away from a source. There are three:

• Waterskin — crafted from leather and string. Holds 3 sips. Not fire-safe: it can't go over a flame to boil.
• Clay pot — fired from clay. Holds 4 sips, and is fire-safe (can be boiled over a fire).
• Iron pot — crafted from iron. Holds 6 sips, and is fire-safe.

→

→

→ (campfire or furnace)

→

Both work the same way:

• Right-click a water source to fill the vessel.
• Right-click while holding it to drink. Drinking from a vessel is a timed action (~1.6 seconds), not instant.
• Each vessel shows a water gauge (like a durability bar) tinted by quality: blue for clean, murky for raw, sickly for tainted, teal for salt.

Vessels remember dirt

Vessels track whether they are dirty, and dirt spreads:

• Sipping raw or tainted water dirties the vessel.
• A dirty vessel taints the next fill — even clean-looking water becomes tainted (~45% sickness).
• Boiling sterilises the vessel, clearing the dirt.

Boiling water clean

Boiling is the way to make untreated water safe.

• A fire-safe vessel (the clay pot or iron pot), filled with raw or tainted water, is set on a lit campfire by right-clicking the fire with it; right-click empty-handed to lift it back off.
• It takes about 15 seconds on the fire to come to a boil, and then its whole load turns clean — raw or tainted water becomes safe to drink.
• Boiling also sterilises the vessel itself, so a dirty vessel comes out clean.
• Boiling does not remove salt — salt water can't be boiled clean. But boiling a pot of seawater all the way to dryness leaves salt behind (~2–3 per pot) — see Getting salt. Only fresh raw or tainted water boils safe to drink.

Hot-rock boiling — for the waterskin

The waterskin can't go over a flame, so you boil it the way people actually did with a hide or bark container: heat stones in the fire and drop them in.

1. Heat a stone. Hold a rock and sneak + right-click a lit campfire — it comes out a glowing Hot Rock (this costs the fire a little fuel). A hot rock cools as you carry it (its bar is the heat left) and turns back into a plain rock after about 2 minutes.
2. Drop it in. Hold the waterskin in your off hand and the hot rock in your main hand, then sneak + right-click. The stone hisses into the water, brings it to a boil, and the whole skin turns clean (and the skin is sterilised). The stone gives up its heat and cools to a plain rock.

The stone must still hold most of its heat to work — a nearly-cold one won't boil and asks to be reheated. Like fire-boiling, it does not desalinate seawater. (A metal or clay pot ignores all this — it just goes straight over the fire.)

One good stone boils a skinful in a go; real hot-rock boiling cycles several cooling stones, which this smooths over.

Rain catch — clean water without fire

Rain is already potable, so anything that catches it gives you clean water with no fire needed.

Set a pot out

Right-click the ground with an empty clay or iron pot to set it down under the open sky. It slowly fills with clean rainwater while it's raining — then right-click bare-handed to drink, or with a vessel to pour the clean water across.

• A bare pot catches only through its own small mouth, so it's slow (several minutes of steady rain to fill).
• Rig a tarp above it and the tarp funnels its whole catch into the pot — far faster. Put several pots under one tarp and they split its catch between them.
• Leaves are partial shelter, not a roof. Rain drips through a canopy: a pot under ~3 leaf layers catches about half as fast, falling off exponentially with more layers (6 → a quarter, 9 → an eighth). A solid block overhead catches nothing.

Water cauldron

A water cauldron fills from rain (as it does in vanilla) and is also a fuel-free clean source:

• Right-click it bare-handed to drink clean straight from it — no sickness; spends a level.
• Right-click it with a vessel to fill the vessel clean and drain the cauldron.

Related pages

• Fire — lighting and keeping the campfire you boil over.
• Food & Eating — food that dehydrates you, and washing dirty hands by drinking.
• Body Temperature — heat makes you sweat out water faster.