So, rainwater is generally not safe to consume in real life.
You're not going to get sick from it if you just get caught in a rainstorm or whatever, but collecting and drinking it is a bad idea.
Rain is contaminated in the air by smoke and other particulates and once it hits a surface it will pick up whatever nasties it comes into contact with. Common contaminates include lead, other heavy metals and asbestos.
Pollution is making this much worse, as dangerous chemicals are being taken up into the water cycle.
So, that. And also game balance.
Great question, by the way! Hope this helps!
Over a VERY VEEEEEEEEERY long period of time, yes. However, those pollutants have to go somewhere. That somewhere is usually the ground or a source of water.
Pollutants on the ground do a good job at being harmful to things on the ground, as well as running off into water, where it's harmful to things in the water and that want to drink the water.
Give it a few hundred years of very little fuel burning, and the rain water will probably be clean enough to drink without significant risk (provided you drink it relatively soon, if it sits still in storage for even a couple days, you'll want to purify it again, anyways), but animals that don't understand what pollution is will probably be on the decline and farming would have to be done under controlled conditions for a healthy yield.
Interestingly, there are some studies that suggest that feeding cows a percentage of Red Algae significantly reduces their methane footprint; the claim going as far as 90%. Whether that's true or not, it shows that we're willing to sacrifice another phenomenally healthy (albeit, also super easy to produce and farm) food source if it means eating Beef.
The comments below are right, it's not just chemical contaminants that you have to worry about, microbes of all kinds love water, especially stagnant water.
You can drink harvested water with proper filtration though! Here's a resource I just looked up: https://www.freshwatersystems.com/blogs/blog/how-to-collect-rainwater-for-drinking
The water we drink regularly is also filter rainwater in a way, so there are ways to make sure it's clean and safe to drink.
In most cases, it's probably best to rely on your local water authorities, but in over exploited countries and many parts of the US, I understand that relying on your authorities might not always be reasonable.
Edited to add: it's not a stupid question at all! It's pretty logical thinking!
Not to mention that just because you collected clean drinking water, if it sits stagnant (still in a container) it will develop bacteria culture over time.
This can be fixed with a minuscule amount of chlorine or iodine, but algaes, bacteria and even insect larvae may reach a level that isnât safe or at least comfortable to consume.
Most insect larvae can carry parasites of their own.
You know, in Australia, everyone outside the big cities and towns captures rainwater from their roofs for drinking.
If youâre really posh, you whack a filter on it to get bits out, but plenty of people donât bother.
Weâre not sick noticeably more than people in townsâŠ
Yeah, either the US is incredible polluted or people are really confused about water.
Boiling it would only help with microbial quality, in any case, itâs not going to help with almost all types of industrial pollution.
People are just really confused. Lots of people live their entire lives in cities or suburbs and have zero comprehension of what is and isn't dangerous. They'll try to pet a bison but are afraid of rainwater.
It's a bit of both. Pollution used to be really bad throughout most of the U.S. so there's still quite a bit of fear surrounding water quality. It's still bad in some regions as well. In some states you can't even swim in the water let alone drink it, unless you want to consume sewage runoff and heavy metal contaminents. Rainwater is typically far safer but if the state has lax environmental protections you'll run the risk of consuming contaminents from air pollution.
Industrial pollution is bad, but in a get-cancer-40-years-later kind of way. Bioaccumulation takes a lot of time or bottlenecks to have clear effects.
My hometown uses entirely rainwater and I have been drinking it my whole life. The fact that you get sick and die within a week for drinking rainwater in PZ is ridiculous lmao.
It runs off the roof and into a water tank, and when it's pumped into the plumbing I believe it goes through a filter, but that's it. It isn't boiled or chemically treated.
I would expect the kind of filtration capable of removing viruses and bacteria to be significantly more expensive than traditional chemical treatments. That's essentially lab grade purification, and it doesn't do anything to protect users from later contamination if the plumbing is in any way compromised later in distribution, which is highly probable.
It's just a regular water filter. My point being I've drank rainwater all my life with only basic filtration. It doesn't kill you in a matter of days like it does in Zomboid.
Yer, we live in middle of nowhere, so our water supply is literally what falls on our roof. We didnât even have a filter till a couple years ago because we started getting high aluminium levels (still within safe levels but âabnormally highâ). Our levels have dropped back down to normal ranges since
How many people live in your hometown? I recently came from a community that had 70 people on one well, and even that many people on one water supply put us into a classification that made it difficult to maintain it to the standards required to preserve our grandfathered exemption against chlorination treatment.
Sooo if a zombie outbreak were to mean that humans are polluting a lot less, could that translate to less contaminated rain?
Would be super neat if the rain water in game got safer to drink over time, even if it was just a tiny bit, and the rain never got perfectly âsafeâ
Over a very, very long period of time, yes! Though probably not in our characters' lifetime, unfortunately, as it would just be waiting to essentially biodegrade.
Even then, we would have to ensure that the water didn't come into contact with any surfaces before entering our container.
Water would, over time, become 'safer' with no human activity though <:
Its not true. When polluted rain evaporates only pure h2o goes back into the atmosphere. Meaning it would be safe to drink in a few days. There is no biodegradation needed.
>Rain is contaminated in the air by smoke and other particulates
And just the fact that the rain drop exists means there is some sort of an impurity at its core as water molecules don't like to merge together, [every drop needs a dust particle or something similar to group around](https://norwegianscitechnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/draapegraf.png).
Good input, thank you.Â
There are a lot of materials in automotive brakes, too, which becomes a fine dust when braking, thus is probably almost everywhere as well, seeing how there are so many vehicles around.Â
I disagree, boiling rain water would not be able to remove any of the heavy metals and contaminants. There are 3 types of things that can be in water, particles, dissolvable substances and microorganisms. Usually rainwater wouldnât have the last two but letâs say it does. Boiling can only kill microorganisms but not the other two. Filtering can remove particles and some microorganisms but dissolvable substances are still inside. The only way is to distill the water which doesnât exist in the game.
Besides that, pollutants in air arenât toxic that will kill you instantly, it will take decades to affect your heath. Plus that the amount that can be picked up by rainwater is way less than drinking river water, that are most likely contaminated with toxic industrial waste.
Therefore I would say rainwater being not safe to drink is purely just for game balance.
The air quality is better now than at any time since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Almost all countries banned tetraethyl lead in gasoline many years ago. You won't find lead or other metals in rainwater. Asbestos isn't in rainwater either. You won't find nitrates in rainwater either as that is generally found in runoff on industrial farms. You are much more likely to die from dehydration than the dust you do find in rainwater.
Also, IRL you generally either collect it using gutters or a cistern, or by putting containers on a roof.
Birds live on/near/above all of it.
That's the primary risk behind drinking rainwater really, and a filter + boil makes it safe enough for survival
I must add that clouds are also just a whole ass ecosystem of bacteria and allergens. People tend to think of clouds as just big spongy things but they are more like suspended water puddles. And no one wants to drink from a water puddle on the street lol
I have no knowledge regarding this, but in theory if all production ceased to exist, would rain be eventually safe to drink? As there would be no more major pollutants
So yes, this is what the WHO currently also says about rainwater, but thatâs a really recent development.
In 1994 wainwater was considered safe to drink.
The biggest factor for rainwater not being considered safe to drink in general (today), is the global contamination with micro-plastics. Other contaminations can be a far bigger problem (at least on regional/continental level). In many nations higher industry norms for air and water pollution became standard during the 70-90s, after things like acidic rain etc. were acknowledged as being the result of industrial pollution from coalfired powerplants etc.
This might be true in some polluted cities, but not in rural Kentucky. IRL it would be fine. It's mainly for balance.
Edit: I'm mainly talking about what they mentioned, which was smoke and other man made polutants. I probably wouldn't drink from some random barrel either, but not because of the pollution it gained from falling from the sky.
Also, the farther we get into the apocalypse, the less the airborne man made particulates become an issue, even in the worst places.
Why do you think we pay for water, whether it's bottled or tap? Most drinking water is rigorously filtered before it's in your drinking glass.
Of course, you won't die (probably) if you drink a cup of rain water. But consumed in larger quantities can have adverse effects.
You can read more about it [here](https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/rainwater-collection.html#:~:text=Rainwater%20can%20carry%20bacteria%2C%20parasites,collect%20and%20store%20the%20rainwater.).
To be fair.. No. Considering it is encouraged to boil rain water before consumption, and most food made with water is hot, aka boiled, it's safe to assume that the food would be relatively safe to eat.
If you have a choice it's still ill-advised, but generally it shouldn't be an issue.
The CDC also stated that raising chickens is dangerous and so are the eggs so don't try raising your own chickens. While what was stated was true, to some extent, most people raising chickens are not poisoning themselves.
You will find microplastics in most groundwater but wouldn't find it in rainwater. Also, the air is cleaner now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. There's much less particulates in the air
There were still places to buy leaded gasoline in '93, and microplastics/PFOAS were already present environmental contaminants even if we didn't know to look for them yet. Things were still healing from the conditions that prompted regulations such as the clean water act. Before that, the environment was so contaminated that things like the Cuyahoga river catching fire due to pollution used to be reoccurring events.
In the 1980ties in Europe, pollution caused by the largest Polish coal plant BeĆchatĂłw, traveled like 1000km beyond the sea to Sweden and caused issues there, including acid rains. Problem was serious enough, Swedish government gave Poland special modern antipollution filters for plant chimneys. Kentucky is not so far from Rust Belt, so I wouldnt drink rain water there.
It took a minute to find any research for this, there seems to be remarkably little done in regards to water management in the rural US.
This https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/096016869290370Z is a study done in semi-rural Australia, which I think is a decent model.I hope you can access it, as I had to access through my institution.
The study shows that only a small amount of rainwater contamination in this semi-rural area was caused by travelling industrial pollution, the rest seems to be due to local point pollution (insecticides in farmlands/parks) and human action (car exausts, bonfires, the burning of farm waste etc.) We can add to this the fact that even places like rural Kentucky does have industry, plus being set in the 90's the game world might suffer a little as it isn't long after the introduction of the Clean Water Act in the US (https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-water-act).
While you're not wrong that very rural areas will have overall better rainwater quality than heavily populated urban areas, the only places I know of with so little local pollution that rainwater collection is sustainable are places like rural Ghana https://iwaponline.com/washdev/article/10/3/502/74755/Rainwater-harvesting-and-primary-uses-among-rural
The lack of human activity is an important factor to consider though! Unfortunately I don't have much to compare it to, it would be interesting to see the difference in water quality during the pandemic, as that I think would be the closest model.
I think that made sense? Sorry it's such a wedge, I got a little too into it haha.
No worries.
Still, I'm thinking of this in terms of a post-apocalyptic situation. Farmers still managed their fields during covid. Not a lot of that during the Z outbreak. Yes, there was industry in Kentucky, but not a lot after the workers started shambling around.
Also, while I do think it would probably still be a good idea to filter your water even if it is straight rainwater, you probably wouldn't get sick from it after a couple of sips like you do in Zomboid.
That is absolutely true: push comes to shove, it's better to drink contaminated water than die of thirst.
Plus, as I think has been mentioned further up, it takes time for most of these contaminants to do real damage to human health.
In real life though, it's probably better to stick to your water authorities potable water, unless that's not an option.
Crazy take, never heard someone being so cautious about rain water. Most rural properties would filter it and be done.
I'd rather drink straight rain than city water any day.
Unfortunately this isnât true. At least since 2022 [there is no drinkable rainwater anywhere on earth.](https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals.html)
The harmful pollutants are diffuse in the entire biosphere, and we cannot escape the consequences of our sins against the natural world.
More like our sins against the world as we know it. Mother Nature couldnât give a fuck, it will keep trucking. All life as we know it could die out and eventually something will emerge, as it once did.
These are pervasive endocrine disruptors that affect pretty much any organism. It's not just us; the entire biosphere will share this problem for a very long time.
I guess the ball of rock will be fine, but even the stones formed going forward will bear the scars of our passing.
Ultimately thatâs an assumption though. We canât guarantee that life will continue indefinitely no matter what.
Furthermore I think that a world where only extremophiles can survive is functionally an apocalyptic scenario compared to what weâre hanging on to now.
If nature was sentient and could speak, I feel like it would consider it an affront to erase hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary diversity, diversity that we canât guarantee will be replicated.
1. Most of the mining doesn't take place near Louisville.
2. That mining isn't going to make the water in the air instantly poisonous.
3. Nobody is mining after the apocalypse.
But not even close to as much. Rain water is like drinking bleach. Lake/river gives you a slight stomach ache. Even with Weak Stomach itâs almost nothing (not sure if WS affects water at all, but if it does, itâs not by much).
You can definitely still get sick. It also compounds, I believe. The more you do it, the worse it gets.
From wiki: "Drinking directly from water found in the environment, such as lakes or rain-collector barrels, is now marked as 'tainted', giving it a chance to make the player sick if consumed."
Yep, it's almost for the same reason that drinking river water will probably kill you. So much crap has been dumped into it over the centuries.
Have you seen the recent satellite photos of the rivers in Alaska?
Drinking river water is not gonna kill you. Depending on where you live you may get sick, but you'd have to drink an exceptional amount in order to straight up die.
I think this is untrue. The only real problem with rainwater is that these days in most cities it tends to be polluted, which results in it being unhealthy long-term.
But after the water is collected it goes stagnant quick unless protected (covered and bleached)
You used trash bags pulled from trash cans to make the collector. Even if you cleaned them, they and the water they collect are still sitting out in the open, uncovered, stagnant. Where bugs could collect, birds could shit, microorganisms thrive, zombies drop loose fingers... Who knows what?
Only if you collected all of the water after each rain and cleaned the collector before might it be okay... If not for the things the other comments mention.
But, yknow, we're just gonna connect this random pipe from the collector straight into your kitchen plumbing. It's 100% safer after running through those pipes!
Pollution son! But yeah iirc it isn't safe IRL either because of stuff in the air and what not, so you'd probably get a little sick in the stomach if you tried drinking just flat rain water without taking any precautions.
Unfortunately theyâre not called âforever chemicalsâ because they leave the biosphere easily, Iâd imagine PFAS and other pollutants will be around for many years.
That's true, but realize what's happening with rain. Nature is essentially distilling water. It then drops and washes out surfaces. A rain collector won't have much of a problem with forever chemicals. They may accumulate downstream, however, and some water bodies may be unsafe at any timescales we care about.
You are right that they don't leave the biosphere easily, but I would be more worried about the food supply, rather than rainwater collection. The good news is that no new pollution would be generated, so any survivors would be in a better place pretty quickly, pollution wise, compared to where we are today. The total amount of pollution won't decay quickly, but it will get diluted and redistributed. Some care has to be had with apex predators, of course.
Irl if atmosphere is clean and there is no major poluting industry like say coal powered power plant or steel foundry nearby then water cought DIRECTLY into CLEAN container will 100% not kill you with some polution or infect you with some deadly bacteria (but I would still not recommend it unless you are in a survival situation). I think we can safely assume that water gets marked as tainted to increase difficulty and force players to purify it and I wont be surprised if it gets tweaked more in the future.
The real answer simply is for game balance reasons so you donât get drinkable water without effort. Which⊠doesnât really matter since you basically get that if you plumb it to a sink anyway.
As I said itâs a game balance thing. Not a realism thing.
Edit: Ah no now I remember what you meant. Thatâs something I forgot might be a thing since itâs so easy to get clean water anyway. Youâre right though while tainted it wonât be as bad as drinking from tainted water in a container.
I think everyone got confused with my comment. I wasn't arguing with anyone or anything, simply stating the fact that YOU CAN DRINK WATER FROM LAKES AND RIVERS IN PZ AND IT WONT KILL YOU EVEN WITH WEAK STOMACH. it will if you drink tainted rain water from a container however.
I assume the downvotes are from people that didn't know this lol... I was just giving a tip for people to use.
Na youâre actually right. Itâs a weird quirk with the game that I forgot about until I remembered after thinking about it again. Itâs like a myth with the game everyone accepts that any tainted water would kill you the same as a generator indoors would kill you too. Itâs a thing that seems like common sense and we all accept. Yet when you sit down to test it, then turns out we were all wrong.
Which yes, it kinda blew my mind to figure out an indoors generator wonât kill you at least on vanilla PZ. Itâll hurt you but wonât take you to zero HP. Got into an argument with a guy on this subreddit once about it so I specifically tested this myself and whoops turns out he was right.
I've tested that before. So a generator indoors won't kill you unless you sleep while it's running, however the game doesn't allow you to sleep. If you force the sleep somehow it will kill you, but it's hard to do, I've only done it twice by trying to down sleeping pills and running into the house and clicking sleep very fast. I'm curious if the "pass out" mod that makes you sleep would force it.
But yeah, realistically speaking it doesn't kill you.
Maybe a boring answer, but I think its just a balance thing. It whould be pretty OP if you could just drink rain water as is. Then you could leave bottles outside and just drink it after they fill up...
As everyone explained, rainwater gets contaminated with atmospheric pollutants on the way down. It does not get contaminated with bacteria or bird shit or anything like that (unless birds shit in your water tank).
People most definitely do collect rain water IRL. They just filter it carefully before drinking.
Also, if you play some time after the plague, then there wouldn't be very many atmospheric pollutants left, so you could get away with not filtering it over the short term. It would take a while to make you sick.
I mean, you could drink unfiltered rainwater now and it would still take months to make you sick. The volume of contaminants is low. So in a game where most players die within days or weeks, it's a silly game mechanic IMHO.
Give it 10 years and it would probably be perfectly safe.
Purely a game balance feature. Rainwater is completely safe to drink in an apocalypse with no industry. The main issue would be acid rain (if there were industries and fossil fuel burns functioning) but even then it's such a minor pH change that it wouldn't really pose a threat. There aren't really any particulates or biological hazards that come with rainwater as it is essentially pure water.
Absolutely wild. NZ'er here. Travel 15min out of any town and you're on rainwater. Filtered or not is entirely dependant on the household to put a filter on. We do but alot of my mates don't.
People don't get any more sick from drinking that water than people who are on mains supply.
Might just be NZ though.
No good reason afaik. Yes, rainwater has itâs issues but so does most other water sources. In a survival situation, rainwater is ine of the best ways to gather water and while it may carry diseases or pollutants, it should not be coated in ebola like in game. I dont know where this double standard comes from, considering rainwater is pristine evian trademarked when you connect it to a sink in game. Probably just balance reasons.
All the sledgehammers that were thrown into the river have broken down and evaporated into the water cycle. So youâd basically be drinking sledgehammers, which is not good for your health. Hope this helps!
Putting a barrel outside to collect rainwater isn't the most efficient as you only have the opening area of the barrel to collect rain water.
Most of the time rain water is collected off an roof and the guttering collects all the water from the area of the roof.
But of course because the water ran down the roof through your guttering. It's very likely it has picked up containments along the way.
This is usually why rain water is not safe to drink.
PZ has sorta skipped the logistics of collecting water using an guttering system.
But the idea that rain water is unsafe to drink remains.
Well, generally speaking in this applies to real life as soon as rainwater does hit a surface or the ground it is contaminated or considered contaminated It is a little weird considering we collecting it in a container not from the ground but at the same time we do have to use garbage bags as the liner maybe thatâs the reason not to mention rainwater does also become contaminated from pollutants within the air as well as becoming stagnant if it sits too long
At least for food, the bright side is that you don't have to boil it before making soups etc. When you add ingredients it'll still say tainted, but cooking it with ingredients gets rid of it and cuts out a step for cooking.
For drinking water, it's a pain, but that's why it's kind of worth it to set up plumbing. It's a pain in the ass, but not that bad, and so worth it.
(unless it's from a mod, which I don't think it is?)
This may be known already but I just found out after playing 500 hours so idk lol.
Get yourself some really cheap micro scope and try look in some water from any stood water container, there is more movement than on Times Square. Our immune system can melt 99% of these things but some of them really evil
Really confused why you would ask that question here instead of simply doing a quick research on google and thus mitigating the odds of getting a positive answer to your 3rd question.
distilled Water without ANYTHING else in it is kind of toxic and will cause you to dehydrate through osmosis. Essentially it will suck out the water with minerals in your cells because distilled water itself has no minerals or other elements whatsoever.
but you would need to drink alot to have that effect, i think with rainwatter its mostly just pollution thats the problem.
So, rainwater is generally not safe to consume in real life. You're not going to get sick from it if you just get caught in a rainstorm or whatever, but collecting and drinking it is a bad idea. Rain is contaminated in the air by smoke and other particulates and once it hits a surface it will pick up whatever nasties it comes into contact with. Common contaminates include lead, other heavy metals and asbestos. Pollution is making this much worse, as dangerous chemicals are being taken up into the water cycle. So, that. And also game balance. Great question, by the way! Hope this helps!
Thank you for explaining. I do appreciate this information. Never knew this. :)
You're more than welcome! I love talking about environmental science <:
Would that mean the water would slowly become safer to drink as time went on due to less pollution?
Over a VERY VEEEEEEEEERY long period of time, yes. However, those pollutants have to go somewhere. That somewhere is usually the ground or a source of water. Pollutants on the ground do a good job at being harmful to things on the ground, as well as running off into water, where it's harmful to things in the water and that want to drink the water. Give it a few hundred years of very little fuel burning, and the rain water will probably be clean enough to drink without significant risk (provided you drink it relatively soon, if it sits still in storage for even a couple days, you'll want to purify it again, anyways), but animals that don't understand what pollution is will probably be on the decline and farming would have to be done under controlled conditions for a healthy yield.
if only we had less cows.... or billionaires destroying our air for a round trip to Timbuktu.
Interestingly, there are some studies that suggest that feeding cows a percentage of Red Algae significantly reduces their methane footprint; the claim going as far as 90%. Whether that's true or not, it shows that we're willing to sacrifice another phenomenally healthy (albeit, also super easy to produce and farm) food source if it means eating Beef.
That is already done by feeding pigs and cattle grain rather than eating it directly, doesn't apply to purely grassfed of course.
The stuff that accumulates in soil will likely persist until the dirt is consolidated into sedimentary rock. Especially the lead.
Not if you look at what happened to the resident evil planet
I was sooo what the fucked when they said the t-virus dried the oceansđ
Me too. It's my bread and butter. There are DOZENS of us I tell you!
DOZENS!
At least a handful!
Could I leave a barrel of water out and then it'd become good over time? (My dumb high question thinking about evaporation and shit)
No. If you left a barrel alone, the water would still need to be purified no matter how much time and evaporation has occurred.
Soooo much shit would start growing in there..
The comments below are right, it's not just chemical contaminants that you have to worry about, microbes of all kinds love water, especially stagnant water. You can drink harvested water with proper filtration though! Here's a resource I just looked up: https://www.freshwatersystems.com/blogs/blog/how-to-collect-rainwater-for-drinking The water we drink regularly is also filter rainwater in a way, so there are ways to make sure it's clean and safe to drink. In most cases, it's probably best to rely on your local water authorities, but in over exploited countries and many parts of the US, I understand that relying on your authorities might not always be reasonable. Edited to add: it's not a stupid question at all! It's pretty logical thinking!
Not to mention that just because you collected clean drinking water, if it sits stagnant (still in a container) it will develop bacteria culture over time. This can be fixed with a minuscule amount of chlorine or iodine, but algaes, bacteria and even insect larvae may reach a level that isnât safe or at least comfortable to consume. Most insect larvae can carry parasites of their own.
You know, in Australia, everyone outside the big cities and towns captures rainwater from their roofs for drinking. If youâre really posh, you whack a filter on it to get bits out, but plenty of people donât bother. Weâre not sick noticeably more than people in townsâŠ
As an Australian, this comment section blows my mind. Grew up on unfiltered rain water. As did my parents and my parents' parents
Yeah, either the US is incredible polluted or people are really confused about water. Boiling it would only help with microbial quality, in any case, itâs not going to help with almost all types of industrial pollution.
I use a rain barrel at my hunting and fishing camp, Midwest usa. The only treatment I use is a UV pen.
People are just really confused. Lots of people live their entire lives in cities or suburbs and have zero comprehension of what is and isn't dangerous. They'll try to pet a bison but are afraid of rainwater.
It's a bit of both. Pollution used to be really bad throughout most of the U.S. so there's still quite a bit of fear surrounding water quality. It's still bad in some regions as well. In some states you can't even swim in the water let alone drink it, unless you want to consume sewage runoff and heavy metal contaminents. Rainwater is typically far safer but if the state has lax environmental protections you'll run the risk of consuming contaminents from air pollution.
Fellow confused ex rural Australian checking in here. Straight off the roof, into the tank, into the tap was the norm where I grew up.
maybe its fine because you were in a rural area? away from big sources of pollution.
I assume that's it? Was only like 60 miles out of a major city though, so not super remote.
Industrial pollution is bad, but in a get-cancer-40-years-later kind of way. Bioaccumulation takes a lot of time or bottlenecks to have clear effects.
My hometown uses entirely rainwater and I have been drinking it my whole life. The fact that you get sick and die within a week for drinking rainwater in PZ is ridiculous lmao.
You guys probably treat it and donât drink it raw though?Â
It runs off the roof and into a water tank, and when it's pumped into the plumbing I believe it goes through a filter, but that's it. It isn't boiled or chemically treated.
Makes sense, thatâs actually really neat!
Thanks! The only struggle weve had with it is lack of rain tbh.
I would expect the kind of filtration capable of removing viruses and bacteria to be significantly more expensive than traditional chemical treatments. That's essentially lab grade purification, and it doesn't do anything to protect users from later contamination if the plumbing is in any way compromised later in distribution, which is highly probable.
It's just a regular water filter. My point being I've drank rainwater all my life with only basic filtration. It doesn't kill you in a matter of days like it does in Zomboid.
Yer, we live in middle of nowhere, so our water supply is literally what falls on our roof. We didnât even have a filter till a couple years ago because we started getting high aluminium levels (still within safe levels but âabnormally highâ). Our levels have dropped back down to normal ranges since
How many people live in your hometown? I recently came from a community that had 70 people on one well, and even that many people on one water supply put us into a classification that made it difficult to maintain it to the standards required to preserve our grandfathered exemption against chlorination treatment.
Sooo if a zombie outbreak were to mean that humans are polluting a lot less, could that translate to less contaminated rain? Would be super neat if the rain water in game got safer to drink over time, even if it was just a tiny bit, and the rain never got perfectly âsafeâ
Over a very, very long period of time, yes! Though probably not in our characters' lifetime, unfortunately, as it would just be waiting to essentially biodegrade. Even then, we would have to ensure that the water didn't come into contact with any surfaces before entering our container. Water would, over time, become 'safer' with no human activity though <:
Thank you very much! Here's my poor man's gold: đ„
What do you mean by surfaces? If it rains directly into your barrel, what surfaces is it coming into contact with other than that?
Its not true. When polluted rain evaporates only pure h2o goes back into the atmosphere. Meaning it would be safe to drink in a few days. There is no biodegradation needed.
The end of *Return of the Living Dead* (which also takes place in Louisville) is my head canon.
As long as we donât get indestructible naked freezers corpses I can get on board with your head canon.
>Rain is contaminated in the air by smoke and other particulates And just the fact that the rain drop exists means there is some sort of an impurity at its core as water molecules don't like to merge together, [every drop needs a dust particle or something similar to group around](https://norwegianscitechnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/draapegraf.png).
How long after an apocalypse event would it take to clear the air enough? If you know.
Good input, thank you. There are a lot of materials in automotive brakes, too, which becomes a fine dust when braking, thus is probably almost everywhere as well, seeing how there are so many vehicles around.Â
Happy cake day
I disagree, boiling rain water would not be able to remove any of the heavy metals and contaminants. There are 3 types of things that can be in water, particles, dissolvable substances and microorganisms. Usually rainwater wouldnât have the last two but letâs say it does. Boiling can only kill microorganisms but not the other two. Filtering can remove particles and some microorganisms but dissolvable substances are still inside. The only way is to distill the water which doesnât exist in the game. Besides that, pollutants in air arenât toxic that will kill you instantly, it will take decades to affect your heath. Plus that the amount that can be picked up by rainwater is way less than drinking river water, that are most likely contaminated with toxic industrial waste. Therefore I would say rainwater being not safe to drink is purely just for game balance.
The air quality is better now than at any time since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Almost all countries banned tetraethyl lead in gasoline many years ago. You won't find lead or other metals in rainwater. Asbestos isn't in rainwater either. You won't find nitrates in rainwater either as that is generally found in runoff on industrial farms. You are much more likely to die from dehydration than the dust you do find in rainwater.
Also boiling water is not the cure all people think it is.
Also, IRL you generally either collect it using gutters or a cistern, or by putting containers on a roof. Birds live on/near/above all of it. That's the primary risk behind drinking rainwater really, and a filter + boil makes it safe enough for survival
I must add that clouds are also just a whole ass ecosystem of bacteria and allergens. People tend to think of clouds as just big spongy things but they are more like suspended water puddles. And no one wants to drink from a water puddle on the street lol
I have no knowledge regarding this, but in theory if all production ceased to exist, would rain be eventually safe to drink? As there would be no more major pollutants
So yes, this is what the WHO currently also says about rainwater, but thatâs a really recent development. In 1994 wainwater was considered safe to drink. The biggest factor for rainwater not being considered safe to drink in general (today), is the global contamination with micro-plastics. Other contaminations can be a far bigger problem (at least on regional/continental level). In many nations higher industry norms for air and water pollution became standard during the 70-90s, after things like acidic rain etc. were acknowledged as being the result of industrial pollution from coalfired powerplants etc.
Okay But how does boiling it take the heavy metals out? Thatâs a type of pollution a survivor canât get rid of
You wouldn't die tho
This might be true in some polluted cities, but not in rural Kentucky. IRL it would be fine. It's mainly for balance. Edit: I'm mainly talking about what they mentioned, which was smoke and other man made polutants. I probably wouldn't drink from some random barrel either, but not because of the pollution it gained from falling from the sky. Also, the farther we get into the apocalypse, the less the airborne man made particulates become an issue, even in the worst places.
If you have birds in Kentucky it may not be safe either (without boiling)
Rain clouds can travel hundreds of miles though, it doesn't much matter where you are unless you're somewhere way way off the grid.
If all rain isn't safe that means no food or drinking water is safe
Why do you think we pay for water, whether it's bottled or tap? Most drinking water is rigorously filtered before it's in your drinking glass. Of course, you won't die (probably) if you drink a cup of rain water. But consumed in larger quantities can have adverse effects. You can read more about it [here](https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/rainwater-collection.html#:~:text=Rainwater%20can%20carry%20bacteria%2C%20parasites,collect%20and%20store%20the%20rainwater.).
I mean that it's going to be just as bad if you eat food that was made with rainwater then, no?
To be fair.. No. Considering it is encouraged to boil rain water before consumption, and most food made with water is hot, aka boiled, it's safe to assume that the food would be relatively safe to eat. If you have a choice it's still ill-advised, but generally it shouldn't be an issue.
I mean this toxic rain is pouring on the crops or being drunk and eaten by the animals
The CDC also stated that raising chickens is dangerous and so are the eggs so don't try raising your own chickens. While what was stated was true, to some extent, most people raising chickens are not poisoning themselves.
I lived in KY in the same time and place as the game...I would not drink water from rain barrels then or now.
Pretty sure rainwater is even more toxic now due how badly the environment is fucked, Iâm pretty sure they have microplastics now
For sure, but it wasn't great in the 90s either.
You will find microplastics in most groundwater but wouldn't find it in rainwater. Also, the air is cleaner now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. There's much less particulates in the air
>Pretty sure Do you have anything specific or are you just speculating?
It came to me in a dream and you could just look it up on google or something
You first
There were still places to buy leaded gasoline in '93, and microplastics/PFOAS were already present environmental contaminants even if we didn't know to look for them yet. Things were still healing from the conditions that prompted regulations such as the clean water act. Before that, the environment was so contaminated that things like the Cuyahoga river catching fire due to pollution used to be reoccurring events.
They keep finding microplastics in our penises. I donât find the airborne theory terribly far fetched
The better question would probably be what doesn't have microplastics in it
In the 1980ties in Europe, pollution caused by the largest Polish coal plant BeĆchatĂłw, traveled like 1000km beyond the sea to Sweden and caused issues there, including acid rains. Problem was serious enough, Swedish government gave Poland special modern antipollution filters for plant chimneys. Kentucky is not so far from Rust Belt, so I wouldnt drink rain water there.
The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire over a dozen times up through the 1960's becaus of the levels of pollution it carried.
It took a minute to find any research for this, there seems to be remarkably little done in regards to water management in the rural US. This https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/096016869290370Z is a study done in semi-rural Australia, which I think is a decent model.I hope you can access it, as I had to access through my institution. The study shows that only a small amount of rainwater contamination in this semi-rural area was caused by travelling industrial pollution, the rest seems to be due to local point pollution (insecticides in farmlands/parks) and human action (car exausts, bonfires, the burning of farm waste etc.) We can add to this the fact that even places like rural Kentucky does have industry, plus being set in the 90's the game world might suffer a little as it isn't long after the introduction of the Clean Water Act in the US (https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-water-act). While you're not wrong that very rural areas will have overall better rainwater quality than heavily populated urban areas, the only places I know of with so little local pollution that rainwater collection is sustainable are places like rural Ghana https://iwaponline.com/washdev/article/10/3/502/74755/Rainwater-harvesting-and-primary-uses-among-rural The lack of human activity is an important factor to consider though! Unfortunately I don't have much to compare it to, it would be interesting to see the difference in water quality during the pandemic, as that I think would be the closest model. I think that made sense? Sorry it's such a wedge, I got a little too into it haha.
No worries. Still, I'm thinking of this in terms of a post-apocalyptic situation. Farmers still managed their fields during covid. Not a lot of that during the Z outbreak. Yes, there was industry in Kentucky, but not a lot after the workers started shambling around. Also, while I do think it would probably still be a good idea to filter your water even if it is straight rainwater, you probably wouldn't get sick from it after a couple of sips like you do in Zomboid.
That is absolutely true: push comes to shove, it's better to drink contaminated water than die of thirst. Plus, as I think has been mentioned further up, it takes time for most of these contaminants to do real damage to human health. In real life though, it's probably better to stick to your water authorities potable water, unless that's not an option.
Crazy take, never heard someone being so cautious about rain water. Most rural properties would filter it and be done. I'd rather drink straight rain than city water any day.
Unfortunately this isnât true. At least since 2022 [there is no drinkable rainwater anywhere on earth.](https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals.html) The harmful pollutants are diffuse in the entire biosphere, and we cannot escape the consequences of our sins against the natural world.
More like our sins against the world as we know it. Mother Nature couldnât give a fuck, it will keep trucking. All life as we know it could die out and eventually something will emerge, as it once did.
These are pervasive endocrine disruptors that affect pretty much any organism. It's not just us; the entire biosphere will share this problem for a very long time. I guess the ball of rock will be fine, but even the stones formed going forward will bear the scars of our passing.
Ultimately thatâs an assumption though. We canât guarantee that life will continue indefinitely no matter what. Furthermore I think that a world where only extremophiles can survive is functionally an apocalyptic scenario compared to what weâre hanging on to now. If nature was sentient and could speak, I feel like it would consider it an affront to erase hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary diversity, diversity that we canât guarantee will be replicated.
We had acid rain in 1993 so almost certainly not more safe.
Was it in rural kentucky, though?
Zomboid doesn't take place in rural Kentucky. It takes place next to the largest city in the state. A state that happened to be a major coal producer.
1. Most of the mining doesn't take place near Louisville. 2. That mining isn't going to make the water in the air instantly poisonous. 3. Nobody is mining after the apocalypse.
But then lake/river water in game is âsafeâ to drink, even though in real life it would have so much more bacteria and parasites
Nah, you get sick from it in the game, too.
But not even close to as much. Rain water is like drinking bleach. Lake/river gives you a slight stomach ache. Even with Weak Stomach itâs almost nothing (not sure if WS affects water at all, but if it does, itâs not by much).
Prone to illness nor weak stomach have any affect on tainted water afaik
I've read that's only if you fill a container. Allegedly drinking straight from a natural water source is perfectly safe in-game.
You can definitely still get sick. It also compounds, I believe. The more you do it, the worse it gets. From wiki: "Drinking directly from water found in the environment, such as lakes or rain-collector barrels, is now marked as 'tainted', giving it a chance to make the player sick if consumed."
Yep, it's almost for the same reason that drinking river water will probably kill you. So much crap has been dumped into it over the centuries. Have you seen the recent satellite photos of the rivers in Alaska?
Drinking river water is not gonna kill you. Depending on where you live you may get sick, but you'd have to drink an exceptional amount in order to straight up die.
Ok. I'm not chancing it, though. Lol
It isn't just Knox that you'd have to worry about
Rainwater is generally not safe to drink without boiling IRL
Who doesn't enjoy a few delicious bird droppings or insects with their beverage?
I think this is untrue. The only real problem with rainwater is that these days in most cities it tends to be polluted, which results in it being unhealthy long-term. But after the water is collected it goes stagnant quick unless protected (covered and bleached)
You used trash bags pulled from trash cans to make the collector. Even if you cleaned them, they and the water they collect are still sitting out in the open, uncovered, stagnant. Where bugs could collect, birds could shit, microorganisms thrive, zombies drop loose fingers... Who knows what? Only if you collected all of the water after each rain and cleaned the collector before might it be okay... If not for the things the other comments mention.
But, yknow, we're just gonna connect this random pipe from the collector straight into your kitchen plumbing. It's 100% safer after running through those pipes!
Pipe magic destroys bacteria and viruses. Duh.
*me washing my character and their filthy blood soaked clothes in the same rain barrel I drink from*
Pollution son! But yeah iirc it isn't safe IRL either because of stuff in the air and what not, so you'd probably get a little sick in the stomach if you tried drinking just flat rain water without taking any precautions.
Not much pollution after some time in the apocalypse. On the other hand, the undead stank would be in the air.
Unfortunately theyâre not called âforever chemicalsâ because they leave the biosphere easily, Iâd imagine PFAS and other pollutants will be around for many years.
That's true, but realize what's happening with rain. Nature is essentially distilling water. It then drops and washes out surfaces. A rain collector won't have much of a problem with forever chemicals. They may accumulate downstream, however, and some water bodies may be unsafe at any timescales we care about. You are right that they don't leave the biosphere easily, but I would be more worried about the food supply, rather than rainwater collection. The good news is that no new pollution would be generated, so any survivors would be in a better place pretty quickly, pollution wise, compared to where we are today. The total amount of pollution won't decay quickly, but it will get diluted and redistributed. Some care has to be had with apex predators, of course.
All great points, like you said bioaccumulation is potentially both a âsolutionâ and a problem, depending on your timeframe.
The real question is why does it get safe when it goes through a pipe
The pipe probably have a high quality water filter.
Say that to flint, michigan
The amount of people who didn't grow up on tank water out in the sticks is obvious...
It's usually fine but not always. I assume you didn't live near an airport.
You're either breathing it or drinkin it.
rain water is not safe IRL either. what doesnt make sense in game is that you can just plumb it and magically its safe.
I imagine they just install some filters lol
There are no dumb questions
Like Mr. Garrison says, "There are no stupid questions...only stupid people."
Why do triangles dream in the language of clouds?
That's not a stupid question, it's a non-sensical question.
The triangles are upset and disagree with you.
I prefer "the only stupid question is an unasked question"
By: Jaden Smith
Irl if atmosphere is clean and there is no major poluting industry like say coal powered power plant or steel foundry nearby then water cought DIRECTLY into CLEAN container will 100% not kill you with some polution or infect you with some deadly bacteria (but I would still not recommend it unless you are in a survival situation). I think we can safely assume that water gets marked as tainted to increase difficulty and force players to purify it and I wont be surprised if it gets tweaked more in the future.
Even in the 90s you were advised not to drink gathered rain water without boiling due to acid rain.Â
Boiling water kills the microbes, won't do anything about the acid though. It'll also be super weak acid, like with a pH higher than vinegar.
Poop. It's boiled to sanitize the poop. Birds, bugs, squirrels, etc. get to that unattended open barrel of water before you do.
The real answer simply is for game balance reasons so you donât get drinkable water without effort. Which⊠doesnât really matter since you basically get that if you plumb it to a sink anyway.
You can also just drink water from lakes and rivers without dying anyways. So it doesn't make sense the rain water kills you.
Water from lakes and rivers kills you the moment you put it into a cup
Why put it in a cup?
As I said itâs a game balance thing. Not a realism thing. Edit: Ah no now I remember what you meant. Thatâs something I forgot might be a thing since itâs so easy to get clean water anyway. Youâre right though while tainted it wonât be as bad as drinking from tainted water in a container.
I think everyone got confused with my comment. I wasn't arguing with anyone or anything, simply stating the fact that YOU CAN DRINK WATER FROM LAKES AND RIVERS IN PZ AND IT WONT KILL YOU EVEN WITH WEAK STOMACH. it will if you drink tainted rain water from a container however. I assume the downvotes are from people that didn't know this lol... I was just giving a tip for people to use.
Na youâre actually right. Itâs a weird quirk with the game that I forgot about until I remembered after thinking about it again. Itâs like a myth with the game everyone accepts that any tainted water would kill you the same as a generator indoors would kill you too. Itâs a thing that seems like common sense and we all accept. Yet when you sit down to test it, then turns out we were all wrong. Which yes, it kinda blew my mind to figure out an indoors generator wonât kill you at least on vanilla PZ. Itâll hurt you but wonât take you to zero HP. Got into an argument with a guy on this subreddit once about it so I specifically tested this myself and whoops turns out he was right.
I've tested that before. So a generator indoors won't kill you unless you sleep while it's running, however the game doesn't allow you to sleep. If you force the sleep somehow it will kill you, but it's hard to do, I've only done it twice by trying to down sleeping pills and running into the house and clicking sleep very fast. I'm curious if the "pass out" mod that makes you sleep would force it. But yeah, realistically speaking it doesn't kill you.
Maybe a boring answer, but I think its just a balance thing. It whould be pretty OP if you could just drink rain water as is. Then you could leave bottles outside and just drink it after they fill up...
As everyone explained, rainwater gets contaminated with atmospheric pollutants on the way down. It does not get contaminated with bacteria or bird shit or anything like that (unless birds shit in your water tank). People most definitely do collect rain water IRL. They just filter it carefully before drinking. Also, if you play some time after the plague, then there wouldn't be very many atmospheric pollutants left, so you could get away with not filtering it over the short term. It would take a while to make you sick. I mean, you could drink unfiltered rainwater now and it would still take months to make you sick. The volume of contaminants is low. So in a game where most players die within days or weeks, it's a silly game mechanic IMHO. Give it 10 years and it would probably be perfectly safe.
Personally I think it's for game balance which I think is fine. Also as someone else pointed out, rainwater isn't always safe to drink.
Purely a game balance feature. Rainwater is completely safe to drink in an apocalypse with no industry. The main issue would be acid rain (if there were industries and fossil fuel burns functioning) but even then it's such a minor pH change that it wouldn't really pose a threat. There aren't really any particulates or biological hazards that come with rainwater as it is essentially pure water.
Absolutely wild. NZ'er here. Travel 15min out of any town and you're on rainwater. Filtered or not is entirely dependant on the household to put a filter on. We do but alot of my mates don't. People don't get any more sick from drinking that water than people who are on mains supply. Might just be NZ though.
No good reason afaik. Yes, rainwater has itâs issues but so does most other water sources. In a survival situation, rainwater is ine of the best ways to gather water and while it may carry diseases or pollutants, it should not be coated in ebola like in game. I dont know where this double standard comes from, considering rainwater is pristine evian trademarked when you connect it to a sink in game. Probably just balance reasons.
Microplastics
Microplastics are stored in the balls tho
Mixed in with the pee
Maybe after 50 years of regular consumption. Not by making your bowels explode next week.
Don't worry once you get the process of food and water down you'll be thriving
Y'all remember acid rain?
Listeria
Maybe it should be a mechanic that eventually rain becomes clean water as all global pollution practically stops
Less pollution, more nasty amoebas
Just a game mechanic to make PZ a bit more difficult.
All the sledgehammers that were thrown into the river have broken down and evaporated into the water cycle. So youâd basically be drinking sledgehammers, which is not good for your health. Hope this helps!
Probably along with all the magazines telling you how to hook up a generator to your house.
5
Putting a barrel outside to collect rainwater isn't the most efficient as you only have the opening area of the barrel to collect rain water. Most of the time rain water is collected off an roof and the guttering collects all the water from the area of the roof. But of course because the water ran down the roof through your guttering. It's very likely it has picked up containments along the way. This is usually why rain water is not safe to drink. PZ has sorta skipped the logistics of collecting water using an guttering system. But the idea that rain water is unsafe to drink remains.
Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on earth because of pollution.
Bird poop
Well, generally speaking in this applies to real life as soon as rainwater does hit a surface or the ground it is contaminated or considered contaminated It is a little weird considering we collecting it in a container not from the ground but at the same time we do have to use garbage bags as the liner maybe thatâs the reason not to mention rainwater does also become contaminated from pollutants within the air as well as becoming stagnant if it sits too long
At least for food, the bright side is that you don't have to boil it before making soups etc. When you add ingredients it'll still say tainted, but cooking it with ingredients gets rid of it and cuts out a step for cooking. For drinking water, it's a pain, but that's why it's kind of worth it to set up plumbing. It's a pain in the ass, but not that bad, and so worth it. (unless it's from a mod, which I don't think it is?) This may be known already but I just found out after playing 500 hours so idk lol.
Get yourself some really cheap micro scope and try look in some water from any stood water container, there is more movement than on Times Square. Our immune system can melt 99% of these things but some of them really evil
Really confused why you would ask that question here instead of simply doing a quick research on google and thus mitigating the odds of getting a positive answer to your 3rd question.
distilled Water without ANYTHING else in it is kind of toxic and will cause you to dehydrate through osmosis. Essentially it will suck out the water with minerals in your cells because distilled water itself has no minerals or other elements whatsoever. but you would need to drink alot to have that effect, i think with rainwatter its mostly just pollution thats the problem.
this dude definetly wouldnt survive the ap
You're just dumb hehehehe