Ranakastrasz

Well, as a placeholder, put infinite water like the other block game, since we already have infinite water with buckets anyway, and then we can manipulate water or pan sand without ruining the water and ice in the area. Not for realism, but for suspension of disbelief. Once a better solution is developed, realistic or not, replace with that.

The other block game used to have water physics similar to the ones vintage story has now. Relevantly, random eddies/whirlpools, because the water duplication mechanic was slightly more restrictive. That was enough for me to never touch water construction if I could ever avoid it. The rule was, 2 source blocks adjacent to a flow block, with a solid block beneath, caused that flow block to become a source block. The change was also simple. The solid block could also be a water source block. It might have some method of filling water downwards, possibly removing a block below a water block which is surrounded on all sides by water or solids, at a guess. But at the very least, this fixes 90% of random water currents where they make no sense, without breaking waterfalls or casually flooding the world. It also means that water fills in squares, but not diagonal or linear extensions without bucket usage to force it to spread. No, it isn't realistic. But, neither game is really realistic in the first place.. Realistic isn't the goal. Suspension of disbelief is. You need to create and maintain the illusion of a world. Unless its a waterfall where you can pretend water is cascading down, likely draining from upstream, and hence never changing, or imagined pipes or other water sources to allow infinite flow, you expect water to level out and stop flowing pretty quickly. These things look blatantly artificial, in a way that the blocky graphics don't. That other game at least manages that to a decent extent. There is something kinda hilarious about someone asking why a water flow isn't filling in, and how to fix it, and people always say, use a bucket, or it is behaving like it should. If someone asks Which is great, except that the first time you mess with water is probably to pan for copper, i.e. before you have a bucket, so you end up making a huge mess until you finish, and then have to manually fix the messed up water. And best of all, once you have the bucket, suddenly you have infinite water anyway, so any rules that allowed water duplication aren't even restricting you anymore. I just don't understand it.