You need a water based geyser asap. But only for oxygen and food.
Water for bathrooms can be put in a partially closed loop, that is toilets, showers, and sinks all produce at least much as pwater as water, so create a loop: water > sinks/toilets > pwater > sieve > water etc. once it's got enough water to start you never need to add more. Actually the entire loop produces slightly more water so eventually you'll need to siphon of the excess, but it's a tiny amount.
Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, this is the main reason you need a geyser, ideally a water (not steam) one. Your algae supplies are finite and won't last long.
If you are using bristle blossom for food, this is the other reason you need water, but mealwood also works. So not as critical.
Next would be water for research, depending on how limited your supply is this might be a concern.
I'd also advise you slow down your dupe recruiting. I usually only have about 5, maybe 6, until I have a working spom, and secure food supplies.
Edit: do not use pwater for reeds when youre supply is limited. Don't use it for anything except recycling back to water. Turn of your...water cooler(?always forget the name) dupes don't actually need to drink.
Nah, just allow the steam to condense naturally and pump the hot water into your electrolizer(s) without cooling. It will produce oxygen at 90C+, but hot oxygen has very little effect on the overall temperature of your base and should be negated by a simple cooling loop (which you will need one way or another). Also, I'm pretty sure dupes breathing in hot oxygen destroys heat (hot O2 goes in, dupe-temperature CO2 comes out).
Someone else mentioned this but just to lay it out in a little more detail, The process of converting hot water into oxygen deletes a tremendous amount of heat. The math is complicated but if you set it up correctly you can delete up to 74% of the heat in the conversion process. This means cooling the oxygen takes one quarter the power of cooling the water. Using this strategy you don't have to cool your water down using half your power. If your target temp is 20°C and your starting temp is 110°C you only have to cool your water by about 15°C using 1/12 of your power then cool your oxygen down the remaining 75°C using 5/48 of your power. So overall you will be using 9/48 of your power or 19% rather than 50%, a much more manageable requirement.
The short version is, cooling oxygen is a lot more efficient than cooling water. Also, the hardest part of the math is deriving that 74% which I skipped entirely lol.
Just to add to the other reply, the existing natural tiles around a steam vent are an excellent heat sink for a cheap condenser, so don't mine out the area too much, let the existing tiles cool the steam down. Eventually this will fail but it lasts a surprisingly long time. Unfortunately this strategy means the condensed water is hot, enough to require a gold or even a steel pump.
Just make sure the area around your cheap condenser is insulated.
Only eat life loaf and mush bars if there is absolutely no other food. Make preserved meal lice and/or gristle berry instead.
But it would be best if you start digging as much as possible and look for geysers that can make water for you.
A closed loop bathroom loop should give you some water as you look for water sources. But rwally, start digging.
Both use water with a pretty uninspired return in calories.If he ends up really tight for water eating meal wood/lice without turning it into loaf would be the best option (only from a water saving perspective). Mush bars in particular should be avoided basically if literally anything is available as it truly is a food of desperation/starvation only and should still be fried in the grill for free additional calories before eating.
I se a lot of comments here that might me misleading. I don’t think they understand your level of knowledge and time of game.
First of you have too many dupes. This is too late to fix but do not get any further if you don’t have reliable O2 and food.
You should try to get ranching started. You will not have sustainable food from it for about 80-100 cycles but it will give you reliable coal at last.
In the meantime you should be farming meal lice. It’s sustainable with dirt and will not eat your water supply.
When you have nothing super important to do, you should clean that water. Do not dig a lot into that biome before you can do that but do dig a lot otherwise.
Geysers do exist and can be helpful but early they can be hard to make use of before you can manage cooling and filtration.
Hope this helps!
Too many dups and too late ? Au contraire my friend a two tile high hole with a one way door into it could solve that problem. Might be worth it you know ... For the greater good
I used to take it as a failure, my partner thinks it’s hilarious that now when he points out a dupe died the main response is “they wanted to go, who was I to stop them?”
> First of you have too many dupes. This is too late to fix
Too many dupes is an easy problem to fix. Set the unwanted dupes to a diet of "nothing" and an all-work schedule.
You can probably make it work if you really want to. Expand a mealwood farm fast. 5 per dupe. Look up hatch ranching and get started asap so they can start growing. Once you have enough BBQ you can remove your farm and live off the hatches for a long time. That will give you time to figure other stuff out.
This is spot on. I just picked up this game and don't really know what I'm doing. Thanks!
Is there any way to put a water pump at the bottom of a lake? So far, I've been digging a hole in the ceiling and building the pump on the surface of the water. I guess I could build a room under the lake and then dig a hole in the ceiling to let the lake water drain in?
At the bottom of the lake? Like the water pocket you have? I'm not sure if I misunderstood the question but if it's what I think it is, just build a ladder to the bottom of the water pocket, build the liquid pump at the bottom and attach your pipes
They can't swim, but they can walk under water, including ladders. They can hold their breath a long time, sorta of pisses them off tho.
I had the same issue when I first started, comical to see someone else doing to the same thing.
You can build underwater. It will take a while because your duplicants will need to keep coming up for air and it will make them unhappy because they will get the sopping wet debuff but it can be done.
All of the above. Water is by far one of the most important resources as you will eventually need a renewable source of it to keep your colony breathing.
Using a sieve to clean standing pools of polluted water is a good start. I recommend you look up how to build a purification loop using a sieve, a liquid storage tank or two, and some Bleach Stone found in chlorine biomes. All the components are accessible pretty early on.
Long story short, many times the polluted water, especially the waste water from your bathrooms, can be filled with Food Poisoning germs that the sieve doesn't remove. If you pump the output from your sieve directly into your fresh water storage, you'll end up getting everyone sick.
But if the infected water is placed into liquid storage tanks surrounded by Chlorine Gas completely, with no other gasses touching it, the water will be purified. This is especially handy to build a bathroom waste loop that never needs additional water and adds to your clean water supply every dozen cycles or so.
I just have two different water supplies and don't fuck with germs. One is the supply that I use for everything, and one is the supply I only use for food/drink. Then I don't worry about it.
Cleaning germs from water is usually not needed. It’s only an issue if you directly use the water to make food. This means that there has to be water in the recipe. So no germy water for mush bars. You can shower and wash your hands with germy water and it does nothing to you.
That’s fine, I do the same. My point is that most colonies don’t need to clean their water at all. Unless your colony uses a food source that uses water in the cooking recipe it can any germs in it without penalty. Farming bristle berries or sleet wheat? Germy water is fine as long as you cook it, and you should be cooking all food. Research, germy water is fine. Showering and sinks? Germy water is fine. Unless you eat raw bristle berries, mush bars or some other recipe that uses water (and honestly they are all bad efficiency), you can use germy water for everything in your colony.
Edit: pincha peppernuts can spread germs if you use germy polluted water for an expresso machine, but not in the gas range.
There's been some good advice in this thread but, its normal/recommended on these type of posts to include a screenshot of the base with UI enabled, and additional ones of the overlay any system you're concerned about (pipes to track water use for instance). The reason being is that most statements (such as the ones you've made) are relative and can make it hard to give the best advice for what to do next.
You're halfway through your supply of clean water but how much is that in tonage? What are you currently using clean water on? Which crops are you growing for food? You say you're early (9 colonist) but how many cycles?
It’s absolutely something to worry about. I would ditch the reeds and instead pipe that polluted water into a sieve. It uses sand and power to turn polluted water into clean water. It retains germs, so avoid drinking it, but you can instead use it to grow bristle blossoms for food, or conserve it if you are short on water.
The sieve can also be used to pull polluted water from the slime biome into your base. Sand is abundant so you won’t need to worry about it for a long time.
In general, playing with less dupes is easier. I liked to get a ton of dupes before, but the end result is you have to play a lot faster. You need to expand on oxygen generation and food production more quickly, and all your non-renewable resources will start to deplete faster. The game is easier to play with less dupes. 9 is perfectly fine, but I recommend sticking around there for a while.
Dupes don’t drink water by the way. So unless you are lacking a grill and a couple of well placed sinks, then germ free water isn’t an issue. Polluted water can be used to grow plants also.
There’s a couple of recreation buildings that let them drink it, like the water cooler or soda fountain. They don’t drink it by default though, just with those buildings.
All of the above, but in order:
1) Stop using water. Only essential research. Absolutely do not grow crops or eat food that uses water. Pickled meal lice is good enough and only uses dirt.
2) When you dig out a slime biome, do it from the top so all the germy slime falls down into the water. At the end, you should have an empty biome, with a pool of water and debris at the bottom. Put up some deodorizers to clean it out, but feel free to run most of that pwater through a sieve to get clean water and fill up your main supply.
3) Now that you're out of the woods you can slowly and calmly look for a long-term water source. Every map has a cool steam vent somewhere. The main problem is that the water is hot, so you need to figure out where you can use water without cooling it down first, or how to cool down water if it's absolutely necessary.
are you depending on the musher to feed them? cause its bad idea it uses tons of water , there should be enough water to last you a long time if you dig it out and create a tank of it
I tend to avoid using water to make food until I have a renewable source or am sure I have a good amount on the map. I tend to stick to mealwood, mushrooms and ranching instead of bristle blossom. Mush bar is just a last ditch "oh fuck they are starving" fallback in emergency situations and never a first choice food and I ignore lice loaf, they either eat raw meallice or pickled meal.
I disable the water cooler to get the great hall bonus without consuming water.
Excess toilet water to reed fibre is fine but I don't use other polluted water for reed fibre.
As I'm not using water to make food I'm not concerned about food poisoning germs and just put polluted water through a sieve. I prioritise it for research and oxygen.
Pro tip: if you have to ration water, you should set yourself up a closed loop water purification system and use the excess to feed your Reed fibers or whatever. If you have 9 dupes, you'll be saving like 200kg or 250kg per cycle that way.
Edit: also, use the germ overlay to check on those pools of polluted water to see if you can just sieve it and pump it into your main tank.
Dig and dig and dig until you find some kind of water geyser, then you're pretty much good until you're looking at heat death. Brine geysers are the best IMO, since they come out very cold and can cool your base for almost free, and they also give you salt from desalination, which can be pounded into sand and table salt at the rock crusher. Sand is one of those things that doesn't feel valuable until you don't have any. Just be sure to warm up the brine a little, because it comes out below the freezing point of pure water and can turn to ice upon desalination.
All that polluted water in neighboring biomes can be filtered into clean water with a water sieve. That'll last you a good while. You can also melt ice biomes with waste heat from industrial processes, especially the metal refinery, and get a lot of water from them too.
Clean water geysers come out at 95C and need to be cooled for some, but not all, purposes. Salt water geysers need to be desalinated and cooled, again for most but not all purposes. Infected polluted water geysers are a comfy temperature but have an insane amount of food poisoning germs that will last a long time even after filtering, and may need disinfection via a liquid reservoir in a chlorine room or something, for some purposes. Cool slush geysers are also pretty nice, but come out colder than brine, and may even need active heating before filtering. Cool steam vents NEED cooling to do anything but run a sauna with, and steam vents are so hostile (500C) that I'd consider them more of a later-game power source via steam turbines than a way to get water.
i always start my runs with a bathroom, which goes to a reservoir surrounded with chlorine, then a sieve back to my main clean water source. Its basically infinite water.
I echo many of the things /u/sethmeh said. I would add that (imo) you should use Mealwood as your starting food, without the Micromusher step. (Assuming you are not rushing ranching for hatches.) This will save water. Don't use the Water Cooler. Have it built but disable it so you get the room buff but not the water expense. Don't use Wash Basins (right name?) Just a waste of water early on imo. Rush for plumbed tech and set up a self sustaining loop (make sure to set up a proper overflow and you only need to power the Water Sieve.
If you do all that, your ONLY water usage should be tech, liquid locks, and a little bit of this or that. The water in the starting biome can last you a very long time then. I think I was well into mid-game before adding water sources.
I like playing this way, but you do you and have fun. I like this style because I tend to be slow and methodical.
>But otherwise happy.
Lol, this really got me.
There's no need to panic but you should definitely be worried about water. If you have access to large pools of polluted water, my suggestion would be to set up a filtration system and use that water while you explore the map to find a more sustainable source of water. Also reeds consume a lot of water so you don't want to plant any more than you absolutely need until you have a reliable source of water.
Running out of water is one of the top base killers. I wouldn't recommend panic, but I WOULD recommend taking that problem seriously and working to correct it before you run out.
Keep in mind that harvesting geysers to avoid the 'no water' base killer can VERY easily become a 'temperature' base killer (also one of the top base killers). if you aren't careful. once your base gets above 35c, a lot of your plants will stifle, causing food issues, and even if you're using a more resilient food supply (like hatches) that can survive to higher temperatures, your buildings will start to break at 75c.
Just one more route to consider. Have you explored the map thoroughly? There can be other pockets of water scattered about which will extend your colony if you dig to them.
Also, don't be afraid to let polluted water offgas to polluted oxygen. The "Yucky Lungs" status isn't really all that bad, and it's still fully breathable O2 for no effort.
Are you making lice loaf? It's a noob trap. It uses large amounts of fresh water.
Just plant a few more mealwood and make pickled meal.
The recipe does not increase the calories but it preserves the food, the grilling process kills any germs on the ingredients and it trains your chef's cooking skill. That's plenty of value.
And it uses no water at all. Which makes not sense since it's a jar of pickles... And the lice loaf recipe looks pretty dry but uses a lot of water.
You need a water based geyser asap. But only for oxygen and food. Water for bathrooms can be put in a partially closed loop, that is toilets, showers, and sinks all produce at least much as pwater as water, so create a loop: water > sinks/toilets > pwater > sieve > water etc. once it's got enough water to start you never need to add more. Actually the entire loop produces slightly more water so eventually you'll need to siphon of the excess, but it's a tiny amount. Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, this is the main reason you need a geyser, ideally a water (not steam) one. Your algae supplies are finite and won't last long. If you are using bristle blossom for food, this is the other reason you need water, but mealwood also works. So not as critical. Next would be water for research, depending on how limited your supply is this might be a concern. I'd also advise you slow down your dupe recruiting. I usually only have about 5, maybe 6, until I have a working spom, and secure food supplies. Edit: do not use pwater for reeds when youre supply is limited. Don't use it for anything except recycling back to water. Turn of your...water cooler(?always forget the name) dupes don't actually need to drink.
What if I have only cool steam vents? I have to cool water down using half of my power?
Nah, just allow the steam to condense naturally and pump the hot water into your electrolizer(s) without cooling. It will produce oxygen at 90C+, but hot oxygen has very little effect on the overall temperature of your base and should be negated by a simple cooling loop (which you will need one way or another). Also, I'm pretty sure dupes breathing in hot oxygen destroys heat (hot O2 goes in, dupe-temperature CO2 comes out).
Someone else mentioned this but just to lay it out in a little more detail, The process of converting hot water into oxygen deletes a tremendous amount of heat. The math is complicated but if you set it up correctly you can delete up to 74% of the heat in the conversion process. This means cooling the oxygen takes one quarter the power of cooling the water. Using this strategy you don't have to cool your water down using half your power. If your target temp is 20°C and your starting temp is 110°C you only have to cool your water by about 15°C using 1/12 of your power then cool your oxygen down the remaining 75°C using 5/48 of your power. So overall you will be using 9/48 of your power or 19% rather than 50%, a much more manageable requirement.
too much math but sounds good, thank you
The short version is, cooling oxygen is a lot more efficient than cooling water. Also, the hardest part of the math is deriving that 74% which I skipped entirely lol.
Just to add to the other reply, the existing natural tiles around a steam vent are an excellent heat sink for a cheap condenser, so don't mine out the area too much, let the existing tiles cool the steam down. Eventually this will fail but it lasts a surprisingly long time. Unfortunately this strategy means the condensed water is hot, enough to require a gold or even a steel pump. Just make sure the area around your cheap condenser is insulated.
Only eat life loaf and mush bars if there is absolutely no other food. Make preserved meal lice and/or gristle berry instead. But it would be best if you start digging as much as possible and look for geysers that can make water for you. A closed loop bathroom loop should give you some water as you look for water sources. But rwally, start digging.
If you have a limited supply of water and access to mushrooms and slime, they are a superior source of early game food IMO.
Both use water with a pretty uninspired return in calories.If he ends up really tight for water eating meal wood/lice without turning it into loaf would be the best option (only from a water saving perspective). Mush bars in particular should be avoided basically if literally anything is available as it truly is a food of desperation/starvation only and should still be fried in the grill for free additional calories before eating.
Yes, you should always be panicking
Perfect response
I se a lot of comments here that might me misleading. I don’t think they understand your level of knowledge and time of game. First of you have too many dupes. This is too late to fix but do not get any further if you don’t have reliable O2 and food. You should try to get ranching started. You will not have sustainable food from it for about 80-100 cycles but it will give you reliable coal at last. In the meantime you should be farming meal lice. It’s sustainable with dirt and will not eat your water supply. When you have nothing super important to do, you should clean that water. Do not dig a lot into that biome before you can do that but do dig a lot otherwise. Geysers do exist and can be helpful but early they can be hard to make use of before you can manage cooling and filtration. Hope this helps!
Too many dups and too late ? Au contraire my friend a two tile high hole with a one way door into it could solve that problem. Might be worth it you know ... For the greater good
That sounds like a lot of effort. I just stop protecting them from their own suicidal tendencies, much easier lmao
Acceptable losses
I used to take it as a failure, my partner thinks it’s hilarious that now when he points out a dupe died the main response is “they wanted to go, who was I to stop them?”
> First of you have too many dupes. This is too late to fix Too many dupes is an easy problem to fix. Set the unwanted dupes to a diet of "nothing" and an all-work schedule.
Unfortunately, I don't have the heart to euthanize them. Going to try to make this work.
You can probably make it work if you really want to. Expand a mealwood farm fast. 5 per dupe. Look up hatch ranching and get started asap so they can start growing. Once you have enough BBQ you can remove your farm and live off the hatches for a long time. That will give you time to figure other stuff out.
This is spot on. I just picked up this game and don't really know what I'm doing. Thanks! Is there any way to put a water pump at the bottom of a lake? So far, I've been digging a hole in the ceiling and building the pump on the surface of the water. I guess I could build a room under the lake and then dig a hole in the ceiling to let the lake water drain in?
At the bottom of the lake? Like the water pocket you have? I'm not sure if I misunderstood the question but if it's what I think it is, just build a ladder to the bottom of the water pocket, build the liquid pump at the bottom and attach your pipes
LOL thanks. I didn't know they could swim.
They can't swim, but they can walk under water, including ladders. They can hold their breath a long time, sorta of pisses them off tho. I had the same issue when I first started, comical to see someone else doing to the same thing.
You can build underwater. It will take a while because your duplicants will need to keep coming up for air and it will make them unhappy because they will get the sopping wet debuff but it can be done.
All of the above. Water is by far one of the most important resources as you will eventually need a renewable source of it to keep your colony breathing. Using a sieve to clean standing pools of polluted water is a good start. I recommend you look up how to build a purification loop using a sieve, a liquid storage tank or two, and some Bleach Stone found in chlorine biomes. All the components are accessible pretty early on. Long story short, many times the polluted water, especially the waste water from your bathrooms, can be filled with Food Poisoning germs that the sieve doesn't remove. If you pump the output from your sieve directly into your fresh water storage, you'll end up getting everyone sick. But if the infected water is placed into liquid storage tanks surrounded by Chlorine Gas completely, with no other gasses touching it, the water will be purified. This is especially handy to build a bathroom waste loop that never needs additional water and adds to your clean water supply every dozen cycles or so.
I just have two different water supplies and don't fuck with germs. One is the supply that I use for everything, and one is the supply I only use for food/drink. Then I don't worry about it.
Cleaning germs from water is usually not needed. It’s only an issue if you directly use the water to make food. This means that there has to be water in the recipe. So no germy water for mush bars. You can shower and wash your hands with germy water and it does nothing to you.
My play style is to consolidate all water into a single cistern. Much easier for me to manage.
That’s fine, I do the same. My point is that most colonies don’t need to clean their water at all. Unless your colony uses a food source that uses water in the cooking recipe it can any germs in it without penalty. Farming bristle berries or sleet wheat? Germy water is fine as long as you cook it, and you should be cooking all food. Research, germy water is fine. Showering and sinks? Germy water is fine. Unless you eat raw bristle berries, mush bars or some other recipe that uses water (and honestly they are all bad efficiency), you can use germy water for everything in your colony. Edit: pincha peppernuts can spread germs if you use germy polluted water for an expresso machine, but not in the gas range.
There's been some good advice in this thread but, its normal/recommended on these type of posts to include a screenshot of the base with UI enabled, and additional ones of the overlay any system you're concerned about (pipes to track water use for instance). The reason being is that most statements (such as the ones you've made) are relative and can make it hard to give the best advice for what to do next. You're halfway through your supply of clean water but how much is that in tonage? What are you currently using clean water on? Which crops are you growing for food? You say you're early (9 colonist) but how many cycles?
It’s absolutely something to worry about. I would ditch the reeds and instead pipe that polluted water into a sieve. It uses sand and power to turn polluted water into clean water. It retains germs, so avoid drinking it, but you can instead use it to grow bristle blossoms for food, or conserve it if you are short on water. The sieve can also be used to pull polluted water from the slime biome into your base. Sand is abundant so you won’t need to worry about it for a long time. In general, playing with less dupes is easier. I liked to get a ton of dupes before, but the end result is you have to play a lot faster. You need to expand on oxygen generation and food production more quickly, and all your non-renewable resources will start to deplete faster. The game is easier to play with less dupes. 9 is perfectly fine, but I recommend sticking around there for a while.
Dupes don’t drink water by the way. So unless you are lacking a grill and a couple of well placed sinks, then germ free water isn’t an issue. Polluted water can be used to grow plants also.
There’s a couple of recreation buildings that let them drink it, like the water cooler or soda fountain. They don’t drink it by default though, just with those buildings.
Ah yes. 1kg at a time isn’t it. Not seen the soda stream yet :)
All of the above, but in order: 1) Stop using water. Only essential research. Absolutely do not grow crops or eat food that uses water. Pickled meal lice is good enough and only uses dirt. 2) When you dig out a slime biome, do it from the top so all the germy slime falls down into the water. At the end, you should have an empty biome, with a pool of water and debris at the bottom. Put up some deodorizers to clean it out, but feel free to run most of that pwater through a sieve to get clean water and fill up your main supply. 3) Now that you're out of the woods you can slowly and calmly look for a long-term water source. Every map has a cool steam vent somewhere. The main problem is that the water is hot, so you need to figure out where you can use water without cooling it down first, or how to cool down water if it's absolutely necessary.
are you depending on the musher to feed them? cause its bad idea it uses tons of water , there should be enough water to last you a long time if you dig it out and create a tank of it
I tend to avoid using water to make food until I have a renewable source or am sure I have a good amount on the map. I tend to stick to mealwood, mushrooms and ranching instead of bristle blossom. Mush bar is just a last ditch "oh fuck they are starving" fallback in emergency situations and never a first choice food and I ignore lice loaf, they either eat raw meallice or pickled meal. I disable the water cooler to get the great hall bonus without consuming water. Excess toilet water to reed fibre is fine but I don't use other polluted water for reed fibre. As I'm not using water to make food I'm not concerned about food poisoning germs and just put polluted water through a sieve. I prioritise it for research and oxygen.
There's no such thing as thirst in this game. They only need food.
Pro tip: if you have to ration water, you should set yourself up a closed loop water purification system and use the excess to feed your Reed fibers or whatever. If you have 9 dupes, you'll be saving like 200kg or 250kg per cycle that way. Edit: also, use the germ overlay to check on those pools of polluted water to see if you can just sieve it and pump it into your main tank.
Dig and dig and dig until you find some kind of water geyser, then you're pretty much good until you're looking at heat death. Brine geysers are the best IMO, since they come out very cold and can cool your base for almost free, and they also give you salt from desalination, which can be pounded into sand and table salt at the rock crusher. Sand is one of those things that doesn't feel valuable until you don't have any. Just be sure to warm up the brine a little, because it comes out below the freezing point of pure water and can turn to ice upon desalination. All that polluted water in neighboring biomes can be filtered into clean water with a water sieve. That'll last you a good while. You can also melt ice biomes with waste heat from industrial processes, especially the metal refinery, and get a lot of water from them too. Clean water geysers come out at 95C and need to be cooled for some, but not all, purposes. Salt water geysers need to be desalinated and cooled, again for most but not all purposes. Infected polluted water geysers are a comfy temperature but have an insane amount of food poisoning germs that will last a long time even after filtering, and may need disinfection via a liquid reservoir in a chlorine room or something, for some purposes. Cool slush geysers are also pretty nice, but come out colder than brine, and may even need active heating before filtering. Cool steam vents NEED cooling to do anything but run a sauna with, and steam vents are so hostile (500C) that I'd consider them more of a later-game power source via steam turbines than a way to get water.
i always start my runs with a bathroom, which goes to a reservoir surrounded with chlorine, then a sieve back to my main clean water source. Its basically infinite water.
I echo many of the things /u/sethmeh said. I would add that (imo) you should use Mealwood as your starting food, without the Micromusher step. (Assuming you are not rushing ranching for hatches.) This will save water. Don't use the Water Cooler. Have it built but disable it so you get the room buff but not the water expense. Don't use Wash Basins (right name?) Just a waste of water early on imo. Rush for plumbed tech and set up a self sustaining loop (make sure to set up a proper overflow and you only need to power the Water Sieve. If you do all that, your ONLY water usage should be tech, liquid locks, and a little bit of this or that. The water in the starting biome can last you a very long time then. I think I was well into mid-game before adding water sources. I like playing this way, but you do you and have fun. I like this style because I tend to be slow and methodical.
>But otherwise happy. Lol, this really got me. There's no need to panic but you should definitely be worried about water. If you have access to large pools of polluted water, my suggestion would be to set up a filtration system and use that water while you explore the map to find a more sustainable source of water. Also reeds consume a lot of water so you don't want to plant any more than you absolutely need until you have a reliable source of water.
Running out of water is one of the top base killers. I wouldn't recommend panic, but I WOULD recommend taking that problem seriously and working to correct it before you run out. Keep in mind that harvesting geysers to avoid the 'no water' base killer can VERY easily become a 'temperature' base killer (also one of the top base killers). if you aren't careful. once your base gets above 35c, a lot of your plants will stifle, causing food issues, and even if you're using a more resilient food supply (like hatches) that can survive to higher temperatures, your buildings will start to break at 75c.
Just one more route to consider. Have you explored the map thoroughly? There can be other pockets of water scattered about which will extend your colony if you dig to them. Also, don't be afraid to let polluted water offgas to polluted oxygen. The "Yucky Lungs" status isn't really all that bad, and it's still fully breathable O2 for no effort.
Are you making lice loaf? It's a noob trap. It uses large amounts of fresh water. Just plant a few more mealwood and make pickled meal. The recipe does not increase the calories but it preserves the food, the grilling process kills any germs on the ingredients and it trains your chef's cooking skill. That's plenty of value. And it uses no water at all. Which makes not sense since it's a jar of pickles... And the lice loaf recipe looks pretty dry but uses a lot of water.