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Rework Infinite Water Sources

Your trusty Bucket has just turned a gaping void into a saturated ocean in a matter of seconds. Your secret? A 2x2 puddle of water that it all came from. How did this happen? Minecraft has an outdated manner of handling water sources.

Infinite water has a clear place in the game. It is necessary, and believable- water is a plentiful resource, and there's no reason to fret about where you're going to get more of it.

But Minecraft flamboyantly materializes new matter from nothing in a fairly trivial fashion, and it doesn't have to. My proposal is that the mechanic by which new water source blocks are generated is simply removed. How will you access limitless water? When you pick up a water source block, the game will perform a check that it is connected to a larger body, perhaps the size of a medium lake. When it's within the threshold, it will simply never subtract from it when you pull from it via bucket. Below the threshold, it will behave as lava already does, and be freely subtracted from.

Maybe now you'll be a little more interested in setting up a route to your closest river, or farming some ice to store water source blocks in bulk! For those unaware, ice blocks can be easily converted into water.

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    It's a neat idea, but I personally have to disagree with it. It would just make the game too irritating

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    Jaguar Falcon I don't think it would be irritating simply because you would still have access to infinite water, the only change being that you're pulling it from an actual water source such as a river or lake, and you could manipulate or even create these sources in any number of ways. This applies to transferring water via bucket, but for more fine work you could just as easily place specific blocks of ice to break or melt them into their intricate positions. I would also propose buckets could be filled from flowing water as well, no longer requiring you to click on water sources themselves, this eases things even further as you could create a modest downhill stream stemming from aforementioned river, lake, or ocean, routing into your base an accessible and renewable source of water- an important resource to design gameplay around.

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    I actually like this idea, but surely it still wouldnt work, if you are filling buckets from a river or ocean, and then filling a trench with these buckets to create a completely new "river" or canal, at what point would the game check realise its still above or below the threshold for being connected to a larger body of water? If you created a large enough lake yourself, would it never be classed as infinite because you made it? Cause thats not rewarding the hard work

    I think we would also need something like the ability to pump water up hill better beforehand too, things like canal locks or even an archimedes screw would be great

    Also i'd like to see the same method applied to lava, so lava IS infinite at its source, but not when moving it yourself - the core of earth is lava 24-7 after all, it would make volcanoes a source of infinite lava

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    Maybe you can use Biome's simpler settings?
     
    For example: the creation and removal of infinite water
    In the desert infinite water needs three
    Two are needed in the forest and plain infinite water
    Ocean and river infinite water only need one
     
    The way to remove infinite water in oceans and rivers is to use Sponge
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    Rex Masters that's a good point about infinite lava sources, how they could simply follow the same rules as what is proposed for water here. Hope to see volcanos, would be cool.

    Also yes, I do propose player-made water sources could exist, and fairly easily still as well. Player-made pools of water would follow the same rules, if they made themselves a lake (by transporting an iceberg or something) it could act as a renewable source of water like any other. I actually would consider this a fairly fundamental point of progression in survival. Nothing of course stopping a player from just settling near a natural water source to begin with though (I think as a general rule survival Minecraft could benefit from having the environment control the player slightly more.) 

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    Love it Ryno, thanks for answering back to my comment. But yeah, I'm with you, totally 100% on board, now we just need way more people to vote^.^