What's a decent way to find quality water?

[Twerp]

So far I've been just boating through the river network and stopping every so often to fill a bucket, check the quality, then dump it out. Which has been largely ineffective for finding anything higher than q10. Searching by land seems like a hassle, too; am I correct in assuming that you can't check the quality of a spring you've found by dowsing until you've built a well on it? And as for river water, does finding higher quality water indicate that you're near a water 'node' (like with clay, where you can work your way towards higher quality by probing in different directions from a spot where you've found >q10), or is water quality completely random?

[Granger]

So far I've been just boating through the river network and stopping every so often to fill a bucket, check the quality, then dump it out. Which has been largely ineffective for finding anything higher than q10. Searching by land seems like a hassle, too; am I correct in assuming that you can't check the quality of a spring you've found by dowsing until you've built a well on it? And as for river water, does finding higher quality water indicate that you're near a water 'node' (like with clay, where you can work your way towards higher quality by probing in different directions from a spot where you've found >q10), or is water quality completely random?

Try: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9269&p=102819&hilit=water+node#p102819

[Twerp]

Oh, thanks, I only tried searching for 'water', which was too common a word to give any results. So water resources have the same big invisible circle of quality that clay does, which means I might have to move inland. Pity you can't sample the spring water to test the quality for those tracts of land far from the river, though.