Ship’s Water

After air, water is the most important need we have as humans, and right now the water system feels only half-complete, so I made this mod. I appreciate Ostranauts is not a hard sim and I understand why the devs simplified it, but this one is for those who want to manage the extra resource.

Ship’s Water turns drinking water into a bulk ship resource you manage. Install tanks, keep the crew hydrated and clean (nobody likes smelly crew), recycle what you can, and top it all up at the station refuel kiosk.

• Water tanks — Small (1×1, 200 L) and Large (3×3, 1,000 L) installable tanks. Take one off a derelict (about a third spawn with a part-filled tank aboard), or buy the whole line — tanks, shower, recycler, waste tanks and filters — from furnishing, supply and general-goods kiosks at every faction and station.
• Shower — a 2×2 stall that restores full hygiene for ~35 L a wash, fed automatically from your tanks. Crew now head to the shower on their own when they get dirty and fall back to wipes only when they can’t. No water aboard, no shower, and they’ll grumble accordingly.
• Real plumbing — the vanilla sink and toilet now draw from your tanks (~6 L a flush). No water in the tanks, no water in the taps.
• Drinking fountain — the installed Small tank doubles as a water fountain: crew drink straight from it, and you can fill containers from it too. You decide where thirsty crew look first — the fountain, a flask in their own pockets, or simply the nearest water — so a personal canteen can keep them drinking on the spot during long salvage or mining runs instead of trekking back. By default the ship’s sink is not a drinking tap, which keeps the fountain worth installing — flip on Allow Drinking From Sink in the config if you’d rather have sink drinking back.
• Kiosk refill — buy Potable Water by the kg at any station refuel kiosk (this reactivates a service the devs left half-built in the refuel panel).
• Water recycling — capture shower and toilet water in a Waste Water Tank, and a powered Water Recycler treats ~60% of it back into your tanks. Stretch a long haul; the loop never fully closes.
• Repair, restore & dismantle — every piece of water hardware can now be serviced like the rest of the ship: restore a worn item back toward pristine with tools, repair a worn-out one (they degrade to a repairable Damaged state instead of just vanishing) with a few parts, or dismantle any of it into components.
• Cleanliness pays — clean crew are more charismatic and fight off infection faster.
• Thirstier crew — +25% thirst by default, so water is worth planning around, on a 0–10× multiplier you can dial down (1× vanilla, 0 = never thirsty) or up.
• Tune everything — shower, flush, tank capacities, thirst, pricing, drink priority and more are all config options, so you can set the water economy to taste. The defaults keep the original feel.

Tanks hold litres. Under-deck plumbing quietly tops up the shower, sink and toilet from any installed tank. Refuel kiosks sell water straight into your tanks at ~8.4 cr/kg — 1.5× the game’s own internal water valuation, putting it above nitrogen but below oxygen (it’s abundant out there, but it’s dense and someone still has to haul it). You need at least one tank installed to buy. Tanks and the shower install the same as any furnishing. Stations run on their own municipal mains — station toilets and sinks have infinite water, station NPCs are unaffected by your supply, and your tanks are never drained into a station.

Shower and toilet water now drains into a Waste Water Tank (Small 1×1, 200 L or Large 3×3, 1,000 L), and a powered 2×2 Water Recycler reclaims about 60% of it back into your water tanks — enough to stretch a long haul, never enough to stop buying water. The recycler fills any installed tank, Large or Small, so it works even on a compact ship. It is a real wired appliance: connect it to your power grid (it has a power node on every side), drop a Water Filter (a ~6,000 L consumable) into its slot, and switch it On or Off from its panel. While On it runs only when there is waste to treat and tank space to fill. No filter, no reclamation. Waste that won’t fit a full tank is lost, so size your storage and treatment to your crew. Derelicts sometimes carry a recycler or waste tank too — occasionally damaged, occasionally with a part-used filter aboard.

The plumbing, kiosk refill and derelict salvage live in a code plugin. Subscribe to the BepInEx Mod Loader and complete its one-time setup first — without it you get tanks and a very decorative shower.

Everything lives in BepInEx/config/com.ostranauts.shipswater.cfg. Every figure below is a default, and all of them retune live in a config manager — the defaults are tuned to keep the original feel:

• Water economy — crew thirst (1.25×, adjustable 0–10×), water per shower (35 L), water per flush (6 L), and the kiosk water price (1.5× the game’s H2O valuation).
• Tank capacities — small 200 L, large 1,000 L, waste 1,000 L, small waste 200 L.
• Drinking — set where crew look for a drink first (the fountain, water in their own pockets, or the nearest reachable water), and whether they can drink straight from the ship’s sink (off by default).
• Recycler — throughput (120 L/day) and recovery fraction (60%).
• Salvage — the derelict tank, large-tank, waste-tank and recycler spawn chances, plus how often a salvaged recycler is damaged or arrives with a part-used filter.
• Plumbing and debug — plumbing tick (3 s), verbose salvage/recycler logging, optional hygiene-AI and drink-AI debug logs (the latter reports exactly why crew do or don’t use the fountain), and three one-shot triggers (tick on, they flip themselves back off): instantly fill all water tanks, clear all waste tanks, or reset every setting to this version’s defaults.

• Water hardware is sold at furnishing, supply and general kiosks across every faction and station, but deliberately not at the specialist vendors — weapons, medical, food, clothing, fusion or nav kiosks — where it would look out of place.
• The numbers are defaults under active tuning — feedback is very welcome.

Overrides the core toilet (ItmToilet01), the DefecationFinish interaction, the hydration tick and the clean-hygiene buff; seeds the shower into the human AI profile (Abner) so crew prefer it over wipes; removes the sink’s water-wash option; and patches the drink AI (the PledgeDrink item search) so crew prefer the ship’s taps over stored and pocket water by default (a Drink Water Priority config lets you put pocket rations first, or fall back to vanilla nearest-water drinking). Mods changing the same entries or the drink pledge may conflict. Plays nicely with other shop mods in any load order — kiosk stock is added at runtime instead of overriding the shared shop pools. Fine to add to an existing save (restock a kiosk to see the new stock).