Water breaks down into six tiers of quality.

- Water [Dirty]
Untreated ground, lake, sea or river water, and including the water that’s been sitting in the pipes of Boston since the bombs fell. Still heavy with radioactive particles from the war, and the various microbes and parasites that have adapted to the Rads and only grown nastier because of it. Unsafe to drink, but it’ll save you from dehydration if you’re desperate…

- Water [Boiled]
The most basic of water purification, but an effective one. Kills everything but leaves the rads, and a metallic aftertaste. Used to craft all recipes that require water (Except for Radaway and Refreshing Beverages, which now require Filtered Water.)

- Water [Filtered]
Boiled Water run through a makeshift, disposable filter. Still somewhat irradiated, but it won’t make you sick, and it’s relatively easy to do with the right materials.

- Water [Pre-War]
Water purified and Canned to remain secure, even through a Nuclear Apocalypse, by the MacDougal-Bernard Company. Almost clean and almost rad-free, but a bit stale. Good for hydration but not much else. Uncraftable, for obvious reasons.

- Water [Purified]
Water fully purified via reverse osmosis, which is nearly unheard of in the Wasteland. Vault-Tec included machines to process water in their Vaults, though the machinery requires an even more complex and rare component called a “Water Chip” in order to function properly. One particularly intelligent group may have fixed this problem, however…

- Water [Irradiated]
Made in batches of ten, some groups or Wastelanders such as the Children of Atom have begun adding more radioactive materials to their drinking water, to bring them closer to Atom… For better or worse. Unsafe to drink, unless you’re somehow immune to Radiation poisoning, or very desperate indeed.

Recipe Changes

Recipes that require water in Fallout 4 are all over the place, and Fallout’s method of purifying water is wasteful and doesn’t make a ton of sense in-universe or in terms of gameplay. Cook three dirty water results in one purified water. You lose two-thirds of the liquid via purification? What happens to the radioactive particles? This also made survival mode more of a bottle-hoarding game than anything else, as you needed to find three empty bottles to fill in the first place. What if you weren't playing in survival? You couldn't fill your empty bottles with water, that's what. Plus, you need dirty water to craft some food items, while purified water was more often used for Chemistry.

So, I added a recipe to craft brown bottles out of two glass (the screenshot is outdated,) found under the “Utilities” tab of the Chemistry station. All recipes that required water before, whether dirty or purified, whether food, drink or chemistry, now require Water [Boiled] instead.




Speaking of Water [Boiled], it can now be boiled at the Cooking Station, under the “Beverages” and "Utility" tabs. This makes it safe to drink in survival mode, but leaves the radiation. You can filter it using some improvised materials, namely cloth and antiseptic (to clean the cloth,) which removes some, but not all of the rads. Yes, this means that you can no longer make totally pure water and will always take rad damage from water (with one exception) but considering that this was the main plot of Fallout 3, it seems like a sensible change.




Players who would, for any reason, want more-highly-irradiated water can craft this as well, from the Chemistry Station. (Children of Atom may find this especially useful.)

In-World Changes

All pre-existing purified water has been changed to be Pre-War Water instead, which I feel fits thematically and makes slightly more sense. It’s still irradiated, of course, since this is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and sitting in a can for 200 years has made it significantly more rusty and less appealing. But, it’ll sate your thirst and won’t make you sick, so it’s a profitable thing for most merchants in the Wasteland to provide! In addition, I didn’t like the mesh of Dirty Water. It’s an old rotting milk carton, 200 years old, in a setting that already has Milk Bottles instead. So, the mesh has now been changed to a brown bottle instead. Keep an eye out!




(There may be some untested collision issues with changing the mesh, I’m not sure. This is my first full mod. Feel free to report anything like that in a specific cell and I’ll see what I can do.) Water pumps built by the player should now dispense dirty water on drinking and filling, and some sinks and fountains that previously dispensed purified water should now dispense dirty water instead. I also added versions of the Vault 88 Water Fountains and Sinks that dispense clean water while changing the originals to dispense dirty water instead, with the intention being that the purified water versions can only be built in Vault 88 itself, pulling directly from the Vault-Tec Pump. (However, this has not been properly implemented yet. If anyone has any idea how to do this, I’d appreciate a tip.)

BUGS

Only the one, so far, and it's due to how the game handles components. Essentially, when you craft a brown bottle, you use 4 glass to do so, which the game then reads as you having an item that can be broken down to make 2 glass. This is because, when breaking down bottles and to make bottles, you have diminishing returns by half, and the game doesn't recognize that it's breaking down the very thing you're trying to craft in the process.

Unfortunately, this is due to a limitation on the part of the game engine. The only fix I can see is make it so that bottles break down into the same number of components used to craft them, but mass crafting bottles is still annoying to do, as you'll just be breaking down crafting the same bottle over and over without any spare glass to use otherwise. Until I figure out another workaround, it's probably just best to place your empty bottles in a non-workshop container before crafting more. Sorry about that.

UPDATE: I have now changed Brown Bottles (emptybottle02) into a misc item instead of a junk item, which prevents it from being scrapped. This does mean that you can now turn ALL of your glass into bottles without needing to leave the menu or check what's being broken down, if you so desire. However, it also means that you will no longer be able to break this specific model of bottle back down into glass. So, uh, don't rely on finding these if you want to build some windows, I guess?


For now, this requires all official Bethesda DLC to work (though nothing from the Creation Club, for obvious reasons.) However, I can provide versions lacking certain DLC requirements upon request, and they’ll be added to the “Optional Downloads” section when they are made.

1.6 Update (The “Fallout 76 is actually pretty awesome as far as consumables go” update)

Removed “Distilled Water” from the mod.

This was an item that worked better in my head than in practice, as it punished the player for either boiling or distilling all their water. In addition, it didn’t make any sense that the player couldn’t drink the mythical “pure” water. This will, however, remove all instances of “Distilled Water” from your workshops and inventories—use it or lose it.

Updated all recipes from using “Distilled Water” to use “Boiled Water” instead.

AKA “how Fallout 76 does it and it works really well actually.” This will still kill the hypothetical microbes and make it safe to drink, but the radiation will remain. Speaking of...

Updated Radiation damage from consumables for consistency.

Specifically, this streamlines radiation damage across the board. Radiation damage is actually odd in that it’s not calculated quite like one would think; the natural assumption, upon ingesting a consumable that says “+10 RADS”, that one would, in fact, be afflicted with 10 Rads. That’s not how it works.

Effectively, what the game does is make you take a constant +10 rad damage for a duration of 0. This is just a flash of radiation, and often only totals three or four rads. This is before natural or adjusted Rad resistance, by the way, which can reduce this further to two or three rads total. This is why Radiation accumulation from most sources is actually a non-issue, as you need to really cuddle up to some plutonium for it to actually make a difference.

(On a side note, this is also how healing works. You’ve just never noticed because Bethesda refuses to give actual health/radiation values, instead relying on health bars without any sort of reference point. I am very curious how they managed to set up the Pipboy interface to accurately predict actual health gained in relation to your current health, however.)

To attempt to correct this, I’ve made it so all consumables added or tweaked by this mod (Dirty Water, Boiled Water, Filtered Water, Irradiated Water, as an example) instead give +10 rads for a much longer duration, with Dirty Water starting at 10 seconds. Conventional knowledge says this SHOULD result in 100 rads total, but Bethesda hates math and numbers, so this actually means about 30-40 Rads. For unfiltered, post-apocalyptic water straight from a pond, this sounds lenient to me, but also much closer to what I THINK was intended by the designers.

In addition, to reflect that you’re once again cooking with rads, all foods utilizing boiled water in their creation have had the appropriate radiation damage added to them. (RadAway and Refreshing Beverages are an exception, because they’re already removing rads; even if they’re adding a little, it’s still a net positive, so easier to write it off entirely. They’re also crafted with Filtered Water, because I’m not locking RadAway production behind the Institute.)

Updated all recipes added/tweaked by this mod to require wood for cooking.

Again, Fallout 76 does this, and I like the attention to detail of consuming wood to do the actual cooking, seeing as there’s no actual “Keep the fire burning” framework to use instead and this is a much more elegant solution even if there was one. This affects only recipes and liquids added or tweaked by this mod; I’m strongly considering doing the same with meats and everything else in a separate plugin, which would also modify and replicate several recipes present in Fallout 76, such as Teas. (Edit from the future: I chose to continue this idea through an optional patch to Wasteland Tea Time. Go check out their mod!)

Patches (and the current status thereof)

Reptileye's Better Immersive Survival (Food Module).

I have no idea what happened to this mod, and I can't remember why I made the patch in the first place. Presumably I had a good reason at the time. It looks like the patch still used Distilled Water as an item, so it's very definitely way out of date (at least pre-v1.6.) I would not recommend using this patch, and I've moved it into "Archived Files" just in case someone still has any need of it.

Reptileye's Immersive Canteens

Your guess is as good as mine, if you can still find the original. Which is a shame, because if I'm recalling this correctly, the mod added six different variations of each canteen depending on how full it was, ranging from 0/5 to 5/5? And I matched compatibility between our mods by adding all those canteens for each type of water in my own mod? That must have taken forever to do. What a shame.

FROST Survival Simulator

As I understand it, FROST has continued to evolve over the last few years, and this patch may or may not be out of date. My notes say that it was designed for Wasteland Hydration v1.8, and integrated changes made in the FROST Unofficial Patch. It was released on March 19th, if that helps anyone establish compatibility.

Valdacil's Item Sorting

...Probably out of date? I've never used VIS, but I think this still includes Distilled Water. If anyone uses both mods and there's now incompatibility because my patch is out of date, post a comment and I'll see if I can update it.

Wasteland Tea Time

Designed and released alongside Wasteland Hydration v1.92, almost entirely because I was getting frustrated with how I had a bunch of flowers and thistles and crap in my workshops that were totally useless unless I felt like eating raw radioactive flowers. The changes made to the original in this patch are EXTENSIVE, to the point where almost nothing of the original mod remains. I could probably split this off into a totally standalone mod, but I work better when I have someone's work to iterate upon, which is why I write fanfiction and make mods instead of creating totally original work.

In addition to changing basically every effect that the existing teas already had—mostly I shuffled the SPECIAL bonuses around, there's some thematic parity with Better Booze—I also updated the recipes to use boiled water instead of purified water, and added radiation damage accordingly, unless the Tea's effect was to remove radiation. (I'm not sure what would happen if you included both "RestoreRadiationDamage" and "DamageRadiation" effects on the same consumable, and I'm not really eager to try.) I also added teas using ingredients from Far Harbor and Nuka-World, with their own thematic effects!

To make a long list very short without providing actual documentation, teas now cover all SPECIAL effects, rad and damage resist, carry weight and XP gain, as well as providing about 20 HP per item (reduced from the 80 the mod originally had.) They're also...definitely not balanced, but they do fit the worldspace of Fallout a bit better, so they're much more useful as the player progresses through the game and explores the world. (All that Bloodleaf, Thistle, and Hubflower near 111 are going to be a huge help to fresh characters, for instance.)

v1.01
Added 1 wood to all tea brewing recipes, to reflect burnt fuel, just like in the main mod. Also split the tea brewing recipes into their own category, to reduce clutter in the "BEVERAGES" category.

Fallout 4 VR

Probably compatible? I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be. I've never gotten any reports as such.

PS4/XBox One

If you can navigate however the mod menu system works on these consoles, a version of this mod DOES EXIST, but it is wildly out of date. I'd really prefer not to go through the trouble of updating/remaking the mod unless I know someone's actually going to use it, so if that's a priority, please request as such. (A tip wouldn't go amiss either.)

Any other mods that add new recipes

Most things should be fine—expect added recipes to require Water, Pre-War in place of Purified Water, which will always be a little strange. However, it's an easy fix if you request a patch. The only thing I won't do is muck with scripts; I've never learned how to do scripting, the few times I've attempted to learn it's caused me psychic damage, and I'm perfectly happy doing things in a dumb, slow, but reliable way. Thankfully, that also means the mod tends not to break too badly when I mess something up.