Without giving too much away...

Imagine being in a maze of rooms located under a massive rock formation that's in the middle of a very dry desert...

Now... for undisclosed reasons^, I need eight of those rooms to have some source or reference to water in the room - some physical object connected somehow to water. I have the obvious - a trickle of water, a cavernous pit with water at the bottom, etc, along with some not so obvious references which I shan't reveal.

Bottom line... I need one more, hopefully clever, object that in some form or fashion (obvious or not) has a reference to water.

Your help is appreciated and you will be recorded in the annals of X3 history for your assistance. Thanks!

^Disclosed reason - If by some chance you play this game upon release, I don't want you to cheat!

A low layer of mist?

A solar-powered sauna?

Carved representations of the constellations cancer, scorpio, and pisces?

A big ♆ symbol?

Tide marks on the walls that might indicate a room has been flooded in the past?

If you have a cave with natural (irregular) walls, a past flood could have left all the buoyant objects in the room around the edges, at the highest point it came to.

Stalactites and stalagmites? (hoping I spelled those right off the top of my head)

Ooh. I’m liking the past flood thing. I could even use one of the objects in the wall as an object I need later in the game. I’ll explore that.

Thanks!

1. sedimentary rock (similar to mrangel's tide layers)
2. aquatic organism fossils/bones in the rock
3. humid (high humidity: hot and wet) climate/air
4. smooth or rounded cave/tunnel (from erosion and/or a past river running through it, though this could be from lava/magma too, wink, hehe. Or any liquid state, doesn't have to be water... mercury or whatever poisonous, and/or corrosive:acidic/basic, chemical/element/compound, hehe)

A message in a bottle could be a past flood thing...

The letters HIJKLMNO written on the wall?

@Father,

Check your Quest Mailbox!

Magic rock that leaks water.
http://irishimbasbooks.com/irish-folklore-magic-rocks-bullan-stones-and-curses-part-1/

Actually, some rocks are made from a lot of water...

And underground rivers.

In the same vein as Father, the second of three volumes of an encyclopedia, going from H to O.

Duh!

I didn't get that until Pixie wrote it as "H to O"!

Is this your first text adventure?! Haha.

A Material Safety Data Sheet for Di-hydrogen monoxide?

Or hydrogen hydroxide. Or hydric acid :p

Ha. Those are both funny. I used MSDS sheets in X2. Not sure if that would be overkill or a nice tie in. Fortunately/unfortunately I’ve implemented the puzzle already, but thanks for the clever ideas!

I am officially protesting that I came here under false pretenses and even worse expectations and am very disappointed! >_<

However you could have a staff already lodged in a rock already with water gushing out or will gush once pulled or as a puzzle element the character has to perform tapping the rock or boulder twice with the staff. Then the rock face cracking and splitting in two and have water gushing out of it, unless I am missunderstanding the need of a reference to water.

Or maybe you need to stop the water flow from trinkling in from a couple to a few "finger" sized holes and the player would have to plug all or most to slow/stop the dike as it were or perish.

And I did not get the H20 reference at first either. =P