Probably Stolen Water: Test It, Filter It, Sell It

Water is not one item. It is a grade table. The water manual on the official store page grades drinkability in tiers, and the bottom two are labelled “Highly Toxic, Do Not Consume”. In the demo you meet base water, ghost water, high quality water, and Premium Spring Water — which carries the Water tag but ordinary customers will not accept.

What decides the price is grade and container state, not volume. The same jug is a household item while it is empty and a water good once it holds liquid — the developer patched exactly that on September 14, 2026: market events now reprice the liquid and the container separately.

Four kinds of tools, four different jobs

Testing. Test kits and strips tell you what you are holding without changing it. Verify first, then fix the label with the labeller.

Pitcher and filter. The cheap step. Filters have durability, and a worn filter visibly does less — which is why stores end up with a drawer of dead filters. Players trade them in at the underground exchange (three worn ones for a new one), but that is a player report, not a rule.

Tablets and purification units. For water that fails outright. The developer also fixed a bug where pouring a measured ration into a filter did not filter it at all, so old guides can send you in circles.

Machines. The Water Purifier panel takes a power source and modules, and the September 14 patch fixed a floating-point bug where the Hydratech Micro Purifier sometimes failed to reach 98% purity. A moisture farm is the other route: production instead of buying.

If you started the demo as the Water Merchant, the official announcement says the run opens with the water testing and purification kit — that is the shortest version of this pipeline.

The order that works

1. Fill. Put the liquid in a container. An empty container is not water goods.
2. Test. Confirm the grade before anything else. Ghost water and high quality water do not look obviously different on screen.
3. Purify. Pitcher filter or a machine. Check filter durability before you commit a large batch to it.
4. Relabel. Write the true grade on it with the labeller.
5. Sell by grade. Ordinary water to ordinary customers; Premium Spring Water only sells to Upper Level customers — everyone else refuses it.

Three checks before you sell

Is there actually liquid in there? Empty containers count as household goods, full ones as water goods. The offer changes completely depending on which one the game thinks you have.

Does the label match the contents? The developer fixed a bug where a customer confronted the player over an incorrect water quality label on an empty liquid container. A wrong label is not free money; it costs reputation.

Is this batch better spent on wine? The wine recipe uses 750 ml of liquid, and player testing found that higher-grade water produces higher-tier wine. Holding a few good jugs back usually beats dumping them cheap.

Four things that go wrong

• The filter barely moves the purity. Check durability, and check you are not pouring a measured ration (the old bug).
• The purifier stalls short of 98%. Fixed in the current demo build; on an older build it is a known bug, not your mistake.
• Upper Level customers refuse premium water. That is the item tag rule, not a bug.
• Dead filters pile up. Trade them in or sell them as household goods instead of hoarding them.

What the developer has not published

There is no official grade table — no tier names, no purity bands, no price multipliers — and no published filter counts or purification recipes. Every specific number in player guides comes from footage, not documentation, and machine output moves between builds.

Water is only half of the water line: it is also the input constraint for winemaking. If you want the business side instead of the mechanics, start with the water merchant guide. If the batch you are holding is contaminated waste rather than bad water, the disposal route is on the radioactive waste page.