No Such Thing as Dehydration

Yeesh.

"In real life, people don't only need food to survive, they also need water! But in Minecraft, only food is needed."

— Paraphrased from someone on Reddit

In survival games one of the first challenges to overcome, even before fending off the murderous wildlife, is providing for your character's basic human needs. These include the need for food, acceptable temperature, a shelter, and later on basic entertainment and hygiene. But one thing many survival games lack is ironically the need for water, which in real life is one of the most important needs any organic life form has, second only to the need for air.

This is also the case in other video games, especially those involving nurturing or life simulation, where characters need to be fed, entertained, nursed, put to bed, etc, but you don't need to give them liquid. And sometimes, you can give them liquid, but it isn't necessary and/or is treated like food (sometimes the drinking animation is even the same as the eating animation).

Even in deserts, nobody needs to drink, unlike in other media, where needing to drink is basically the whole point of deserts.

The most likely reason for this is that drinking is relatively boring. Eating requires a player to either build and maintain a farm, to hunt for wild animals or gather plant-based food, or, in games set in civilisation, to cook and/or buy food. A shelter requires a player to build a base with defensive structures. Entertainment, by definition, is entertaining. Sleep is relatively boring, but that's what Time Skips are for. Medical treatment has a sense of urgency involved. Drinking on the other hand, only requires one to either seek out a water source, juice a fruit, milk a cow (often made all-too convenient since she's a Constantly Lactating Cow), or, if shops are present, buy a drink, and ... well, just drink. Especially since we typically need to drink more than we need to eat (depending on our activity levels combined with our fitness, the weather, etc). In the case of water in survival games, if a developer goes for realism, the game will require one to cook the water first^note Unless they collected rainwater in a container., but even that gets repetitive really fast. Some games also just assume that the characters drink while they are eating.

While non-game works sometimes have characters not drinking anything, they don't count because we can assume they drink offscreen.

Compare Nobody Poops, No Periods, Period, Eating Optional, Batman Can Breathe in Space, Exposed to the Elements and its subtrope Frigid Water Is Harmless (which are essentially "No Such Thing as Hypothermia"), Made of Iron, Perfect Health, Super Not-Drowning Skills, Angst? What Angst?, and The Sleepless. See also Bottomless Bladder for when video game characters not only don't need to drink, they don't need to eat, sleep, wash, or go to the bathroom either and There Are No Bedsheets for another trope about a lack of something that's exclusive to video games.

This often overlaps with Wizard Needs Food Badly mechanics when the characters don't need to drink but need to eat. It's also commonly averted with baby characters, who are shown drinking from bottles. Sub-trope of Acceptable Breaks from Reality, The Needless, and Artistic License – Biology.

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Examples:

Straight Examples

• In 60 Parsecs!, the crew members of your ship need to eat food to survive, but don't have to drink water, and there's no mention of water bottles whatsoever. This contrasts the game's predecessor, 60 Seconds!, which featured water bottles as an important item alongside soup cans and had thirst meters for each of the family members.
• In Age of Empires, you need to build houses and obtain food to get more people, but don't need wells or other water sources.
• The objective of the NES game Chubby Cherub, a localized version of a game based on the anime series Little Ghost Q-Taro, is to eat everything (which keeps the cherub alive). The cherub can eat lollipops and five other types of foods, but he does not need to drink anything.
• In Club Penguin, your puffles have to eat to stay healthy, play to stay happy, sleep, and need to be kept clean, but they don't need to drink.
• In the Donkey Kong games, the Kongs eat bananas for restorative purposes. Not only do they not need to drink anything, but bananas are the only thing that Kongs like to eat, due to being apes.
• Don't Starve: The game requires the player to manage hunger and sanity, but not thirst.
• Dragon Quest Builders 2 has the ability to create a wide variety of both food and drinks, but they both fill the same hunger meter. You could theoretically go through the entire game without consuming a single beverage (in fact, you don't even have the ability to make them until the second chapter). The first game didn't even have the ability to make drinks, though that can be excused by the fact that the main character is a Revenant Zombie.
• In Drawn to Life it's explicitly mentioned that the villagers were eating much less without the banya crop/Chef Cookie around, but the lack of water is only mentioned when the village needs rain. However, it only needs rain to get a break from the sun and water the banya, rather than to have something to drink.
• Duke Nukem: In his first adventure, a DOS-based scrolling shoot-'em-up, Duke can replenish his health by eating a cold turkey drumstick (+100 points and one health block), or zap it with his blaster gun to convert it to a hot turkey dinner (+200 points and two health blocks). Duke will also encounter cans of soda in his travels. Duke can drink the stuff as is (+100 points and one health block), or go for a maximum score by zapping it with his blaster and quickly snagging what's left before it flies out of reach. This is worth +1000 points, but adds no health. Going for a maximum, therefore, means eating only cooked turkey and zapping all the soda cans rather than drinking them.
• Egg Cave: The creatures die if you don't feed them, even before they're hatched, but you never need to water them.
• In The Elder Scrolls, all of the games, dehydration is never an issue. Even with Skyrim and its Survival Mode.
• The original Elona featured a hunger feature but no thirst, though you could drink potions with various effects, water which can cure confusion, soda which restores stamina, milk which makes you fuller and can change your height if blessed or cursed, coffee which staves off sleepiness, and various types of booze which makes you drunk. The popular fanmade expansion pack Elona+ added a hydration mechanic that drains your stamina if you don't drink and it was very poorly received, to the point where there are mods that get rid of it.
• In Eye of the Beholder, your characters need to eat food in order to survive but don't need to drink any kind of liquid.
• Fallout:
  • The first half of the plot of the first game is about finding a water chip to stop the Vault from dehydrating to death. This isn't a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation however. Dehydration is actually a random encounter (one of many, ). Triggering it consumes one water flask item. If there aren't any, then the game rolls for Outdoorsman skill where your character will forage for water, which can take a few hours, and can fail, which inflicts damage (which is affected by armor).
  • Fallout 3 makes access to clean water one of its major themes, but drinking water is only useful for restoring Hit Points. It's perfectly possible to finish the game without drinking a drop of water.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, dehydration is only a feature of the "Hardcore" and "Survival" modes. However, in 4, you do need to provide drinking water to settlements so they can thrive.
• The Gauntlet games have a time-based food counter that doubles as a health meter. The only foods that can be eaten are fruits and meats, but no beverages need to be drunk.
• Zig-zagged in King's Quest V: Graham will die if he wanders too long in the Thirsty Desert, but he otherwise never drinks a drop throughout the rest of the adventure.
• Despite being set in an arid wasteland, the only things in Kenshi that need water are crops.
• Minecraft:
  • In the non-modded game (up to version 1.14), you only have to eat to restore hunger to regain health. Besides potions, the only drinks you can have are water and milk, and those do not restore hunger so it is not required to drink them (milk can make Status Effects go away, but there are other ways to make them go away and some go away on their own). In the 1.14 update, honey was added, which restores hunger and removes the poison effect, and which can also be turned into sugar. It is still not necessary to drink any of these drinks aside from using their special effects.
  • In the mod RL Craft, the player must also manage their thirst; the Thirst level is above the Hunger level. Letting the player get thirsty too long will give them hallucinations before they die.
  • Mobs (which is Minecraft talk for NPC's) don't need water to survive either, with the exception of underwater mobs, but they breathe it rather than drinking it. Notably, Striders, Piglins, Hoglins, and Ghasts can survive in the Nether, where there is no water at all.
• Moshi Monsters: Zigzagged. Drinks exist, but your monsters don't need them. They also treat drinking as equivalent to eating (both fill the health meter and have the same animation). Averted for their pets, the Moshlings, who do get thirsty.
• Neopets:
  • Zigzagged. While Neopets cannot die, even from hunger, and drinks do exist, they only have a hunger meter, not thirst (despite occasionally claiming to be thirsty). If you give your Neopet a drink, it will treat it like food. Also, there is a random event where they ask for a specific "food" that is occasionally actually a drink.
  • In the game "Petpetsitter", the petpets can get hungry, bored, sleepy, and need to pee (and the robots can break down), yet they can't get thirsty.
  • Inverted in the games "Slushie Slinger" and "Meepit Juice Break", which are all about serving drinks.
  • With petpets, both food and drink is optional.
• Oxygen Not Included has elaborate water cleaning systems to produce clean water for bathing, growing food, and industrial use. Not a single duplicant drinks. Doesn't stop them needing to pee though.^note Somewhat truth in television. If you're very dehydrated, you'll still need to pee to get the waste products out of your blood, but you'll pee a lot less and your pee will be concentrated.
• You can buy Fresh Water from vending machines in the Pokémon games, however, they can only be used on the party Pokemon, not the player character. Even then, they just have the same effect as the Super Potion, a basic healing item, so the Pokemon can go the entire game without ever drinking.
• Played straight in most of the Quest for Glory video game series. While running out of food rations can cause death in any of the games, in 4 out of the 5 games there is no corresponding need to keep track of water (or any other beverage) while traveling in the monster infested wilderness. Only the second game, which takes place in an "Arabian Nights" Days setting and features plenty of treks out into the desert, requires you to actually keep your own water supply or to explicitly drink water at any time.
• In early games by Richard Garriott (AKA Lord British), such as Akalabeth and the Ultima series, if the player character ran out of food they would die of starvation. They did not need to drink at all.
• Rimworld: Establishing a constant food supply is one of the first challenges a new colony needs to overcome. The only drinks in the game are late game drugs (beer and go-juice) which can be avoided entirely.
• Downplayed in The Sapling. While certain animals do need water to either breathe and or lay their eggs, the game does not keep track of thirst in any way. Plants on the other hand do need to be placed in environments with the appropriate level of groundwater in order to survive.
• The Sims:
  • Sims only need food to survive, besides having some other needs required to not go insane. They can be ordered to drink at a sink, but will never do so on their own. It also has no effect on them.
  • Downplayed in The Sims 4; while Sims don't need water to survive, they do receive a negative moodlet (named "Dehydration") if they have not drunk enough recently. Drinking a glass of water removes this moodlet.
  • Inverted with plant sims, who only need to drink (or come into contact with water) to survive.
  • Zig-zagged for vampire sims, who drink blood, but don't need it in order to survive. They do become quite angry without it, however.
  • In the third and fourth games, mermaids avert this because they have the need for hydration instead of hygiene. They get hydrated when near water, or from rain if the Seasons pack is installed.
  • Averted for the babies, who need to breastfeed or drink from bottles.
• In Vet Set Go, you need to feed the pets, take their temperatures, medicate them, give them hot water bottles, play with them, sponge them (including the goldfish) down, and even give them potties (averting Nobody Poops) but not water them.
• SimCity 4 has water as one utility that can be provided. Unlike electricity, water is not strictly necessary, but only limited, low-wealth, low-density development will occur (the game just tells you that Sims dig wells) without water. If you have a late game Shining City with high-tech industry, skyscrapers and luxurious manors, a lack of water will kill your city.
• In Sid Meier's Civilization IV food is an absolutely critical, basic resource for city and empire growth, but fresh water access (from founding a city next to an oasis, fresh water lake or river) only gives a permanent +2 Health bonus and is not necessary.
• Valheim: Justified in that the player character is already dead and technically doesn't even need to eat either (eating increases total health, stamina and regeneration, going hungry makes them a One-Hit-Point Wonder). Drinks (mead) are a high-level deal that provide buffs instead.
• In Vintage Story food management is a major element. Securing a steady source of it is essential to making it through the early game, while gathering, preserving, and storing a variety of sources is essential to surviving the winter months. Water, by contrast, is only necessary for cooking some types of food and leatherworking; even farming can be done without ever exposing the crops to water.

Aversions

• Averted in ARK: Survival Evolved: in addition to food, stamina, and a few other attributes, the player character also has a thirst meter and will need to regularly drink water, either directly from a source such as a river, pond, swamp, or the sea, or from a waterskin, water jar, or canteen that the player has on their person, and the player automatically refills their water meter if they're submerged in it. This is only an annoyance on most maps, but is a more distint gameplay mechanic on the desert-themed Scorched Earth map, where water is obviously much harder to come by, it will run out faster, and uniquely it will slowly drain your canteens as well, in contrast to other maps where they'll never run out unless you drink from them. It's played straight with the dinosaurs and other animals, though, which have a food meter but no water meter.
• Averted in Battle Realms, where rice and water are the two main resources you gather, with the in-game explanation that your troops needs rice to eat and water to drink.
• City-Building Series: Averted, as wells are essential to your city's development (often the very first service housing needs in order to evolve).
• Dead In Vinland has two water supplies, Non-Potable and Potable, in addition to its numerous other survival-related resources.
  • Having a character gather water from a river adds to the Non-Potable supply; squeezing fruit into juice adds to the Potable supply; Rainy and Stormy weather add to both supplies. Turning Non-Potable water into Potable water requires boiling it, which eats up precious Wood. Non-Potable water can be used to brew beer or water the garden, but only Potable water can be used to remove levels of Dehydration from characters.
  • Dehydration levels 1, 2, and 3 cause increasingly severe penalties and damage to the Sickness bar; Dehydration level 4 kills a character outright if they aren't immediately rehydrated.
• Aversion: Dwarf Fortress models this along with practically everything else.
  • Dwarves need to drink twice as often as they need to eat, and pregnant dwarves or dwarf mothers carrying babies need to drink twice as much as other dwarves. Dwarves can drink water, but they prefer alcohol and they work slower and slower without it, in addition to getting unhappy thoughts about the lack of booze. Alcohol can be bought from caravans or brewed from plants or honey at a still (oddly not requiring water to do so), and drinking it straight from the barrel without a mug causes unhappy thoughts too.
  • You'll also need a water supply before too long, because injured dwarves resting in a hospital can't drink alcohol and need water to clean their wounds. Wells are highly recommended; they can be finely made to give dwarves happy thoughts from being nearby, and drinking water without a well causes unhappy thoughts. Salt water is undrinkable, and contaminated water causes more unhappy thoughts, possible infection if used for wound cleaning, and possibly your entire fortress turning into vampires if there's vampire blood in it (though maybe you want that).
• Aversion: Subnautica requires both food and water meters. Considering that the game takes place in an ocean planet and the waters are filled with foreign bacteria that may be harmful to human life, disinfecting the waters for consumption is required.
• Averted in Surviving Mars. Managing your water supply is crucial to the survival of the colony, and colonists can get dehydrated if they go too long without water.
• Averted in The Long Dark; going without water for too long is the second-fastest way to die, taking at most two days compared to four for starvation.
• Project Zomboid keeps track of your thirst, requiring a good amount of water every day as part of basic survival. Initially it's pretty easy to drink or collect water directly from taps and even toilets if necessary; However at some point the water in the pipes runs out, and the player must figure out a solution to this new problem in order to survive. The game provides several clever ways to generate clean water, such as collecting rainwater in barrels or purifying freshwater. Even food items can hydrate you to some degree if they contain plenty of juice.

Conversed, parodied, etc.

• In this Minecraft parody video, the game starts out as usual with a hunger bar and no thirst bar. When the creator, Notch, finds out he's getting fat, he decides to remove food. He replaces it with a thirst bar so the game is still challenging, but when told that water is everywhere so that won't make it challenging, he makes water rare and makes mobs get thirsty too. This results in an Enderman peeing in water so a human can't drink it, a human killing a snow golem for its water, Nether mobs being screwed because there's only (dangerous) lava to drink ^note Although Blazes and Zombie Pigmen probably wouldn't need water anyways since they're fire creatures and undead respectively. Ghasts, Piglins, Hoglins, and Striders might, but they were all introduced after the video was made, except for Ghasts. Moreover, Striders are immune to lava., Squid charging humans for water but then dying 'cause the humans drank all their water, Steve drinking "mountain dew" (which turns out to be hot sauce instead), and cows being happy to not be killed but hating how the milk demand has increased.
• Inverted in the first and second Shenmue. You can chug all the soda or coffee you want (though it still isn't necessary), but Ryo is unable to consume any of the snacks he's able to buy, so after you've drawn the raffle ticket their purchase entitles you to, the stuff just sits in his inventory forever.

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