Ah, thanks for the response, appreciate the detail. For anyone coming into this forum with the same issue, I avoided it by just re-jiggering the console command to spawn oil to spawn mineral water as well. Here it is for posterity.
/c for y=0,2 do
for x=0,2 do
game.player.surface.create_entity({name="mineral-water", amount=100000, position={game.player.position.x+x7-7, game.player.position.y+y7-7}})
end
end