Would it be feasible to have 'testable' spring water?

[Twerp]

Apologies if this has been brought up before, but 'water' and 'well' are too common for search to bring up any results.

Currently, it's impossible to test the quality of land-based water nodes without having to build a well and fill a bucket. While you can attempt to determine the relative location of a node by taking water samples from nearby rivers with a kuksa or a waterflask, this isn't quite so feasible when you're far inland from any lakes or rivers. Having to build and abandon an entire well just to check if the local water is any good just seems a bit much. Perhaps once springwater has been located, a player could take a maximum of, say, 0.1 liters from it for the sake of 'sampling' the water?

[martinuzz]

I think this is a reasonable suggestion.
Ofcourse, you'd still have to locate the water with a dowsing rod first.
Perhaps, use a shovel to dig a 'water hole' that disappears after taking a small amount of water from it.

[magius]

+1

[niltrias]

Im not so hot on this.

Living inland gives the benefit of relative safety...I think the building of test wells to determine water Q is an acceptable trade off for that. Also, It doesnt make much sense to me, from a RL perspective. (Which of course should bever be the final say.)

[Twerp]

There are possible game balance issues, I'll agree. I didn't bring it up in the OP because I wanted things to be nice and concise, though my concerns were more economic, going by the wikis evaluation of the value of high-quality water.

I think the concern about people living inland just because of water quality is a little off the mark, though. People can just as readily build a settlement near any high-quality inland resource node. As for realism, it can't be all that difficult to get a fraction of a liters worth of water from a spring, can it? Not that I'm some kinda grizzled frontiersman or something.