Get rid of the intended cookng zones (the circles) on cooking surfaces

[Wintermut]

Allow us to place items on heated surfaces wherever they fit naturally without overlapping each other....

Like I don't think we should be able to dump 50 pieces of meat on top of each other on one pot belly stove....but we could probably fit 4 reasonably....

Especially for the forge....the forge is pretty sad with it's ONE cooking surface in Forlorn Muskeg....

I haven't been to the Riken yet since the update....does the oven in the kitchen on the ship work?

Should the forge cook things faster when using coal since the fire gets sooooo much hotter than normal fures? Normally increasing temperature cooks things faster.....or burns them, lol....

Do increasing cooking levels let you cook things faster?

It would be cool if we could add additional cooking surfaces to camp fires as your cooking/firestarting skill increases....

[Soul Sojourner]

Not gonna lie, I actually like it the way it is. I wouldn't mind (as in a previous discussion) having the campfire gain a couple additional cooking slots with the improvement of the cooking skill, and maybe some added slots in some other cooking places too, but that's really all, imo. I also think it should be specific to the cooking skill, and not the firestarting skill. Mainly because your ability to start a fire in a fire barrel does not, nor should it, affect the space you have to cook on. So to me it's only relevant to the campfire itself, which is always the same no matter how good your firestarting skill. So it's change of spaces should be impacted only by your ability to cook, imo.

[nicko]

maybe the cooking hot spots are needed? allows you to know where you can cook food items and also helps gamers with placement. But yes I would prefer the barrels (440 gallon drums) grill just be one hot spot that cooks anything. Dont forget this game is not a cooking simulator.

 

[Wintermut]

It's just disappointing that so many potential bases of operation on so many maps are now "less ideal" than the handful of bases with a proper stove...

Grey Mother's house has a fireplace AND a stove. The other farm on that SAME map also has a stove....

All the old maps have shelters with one or two stoves with one or two spots to cook on....or a fire barrel with one or two spots to cook on....

The intended cooking circles are very limiting....

Cooking in a tin can takes as much space as cooking in a pot that holds 4 times as much liquid....

You can't fit 4 or 6 tin cans on a surface that holds 2 big pots?

[Soul Sojourner]

16 minutes ago, Wintermut said:

The intended cooking circles are very limiting....

Cooking in a tin can takes as much space as cooking in a pot that holds 4 times as much liquid....

You can't fit 4 or 6 tin cans on a surface that holds 2 big pots?

Why would you lug around cooking pots if you could just use multiple empty cans? Especially when the cans are so much lighter.

[ajb1978]

1 hour ago, Wintermut said:

Grey Mother's house has a fireplace AND a stove. The other farm on that SAME map also has a stove....

Actually every location with a 6-burner stove also has a fireplace.  Grey Mother's fireplace is in the living room, Paradise Meadows is in the bedroom, the Hunting Lodge is next to the front door, Pleasant Valley has one in the living room AND an extra fire pit out back.  For sheer cooking power, Pleasant Valley can't be beat.  (Unless you drop a dozen campfires in a cave or something.)  You can cook an entire bear in an afternoon if you fire up the stove, fireplace, and fire pit.

Do increasing cooking levels let you cook things faster?

Yep--starting at level 3 reduces cooking time by 10%, 20% at level 4, and 30% with a bonus 20% extension to ready time at level 5.

[Soul Sojourner]

13 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

For sheer cooking power, Pleasant Valley can't be beat.

Agreed, though the drawback being that the place you're referring to is in the middle of a field and you have to travel further out for firewood, sticks branches and logs. Otherwise, the place does have a crapton of reclaimed wood options though, just not the best options... 

Lol nevermind, I thought you were talking about the farmhouse in paradise meadows.

[ajb1978]

13 minutes ago, Soul Sojourner said:

Agreed, though the drawback being that the place you're referring to is in the middle of a field and you have to travel further out for firewood, sticks branches and logs. Otherwise, the place does have a crapton of reclaimed wood options though, just not the best options... 

Lol nevermind, I thought you were talking about the farmhouse in paradise meadows.

Well actually you're not wrong--the Pleasant Valley farmhouse does not have firewood right outside.  You have to cross a field that sees both wolf and bear traffic to get firewood.  And the abundance of blizzards is no fun.  This isn't just anecdotal either; when I was on my quest to gather all the buffer memories, I also recorded the frequency of blizzards.  That area experienced about 33% more blizzards than any other region, and I was there for 80 days waiting so that's a good body of evidence to suggest that it's not just a string of bad luck.

[Wintermut]

Pleasant Valley has historically been know for particularly bad weather....your observations are not off....

I just started a new Interloper run and started in PV. My first day a blizzard started halfway through the day, just as I managed to get to the main farmhouse....so I looted it and began tearing cloth and breaking wood while going out to check the weather....

The blizzard continued till bed time...

I've had a full blown blizzard for at least part of the next two days as well....one of the days pretty much the whole day....I went out to harvest a deer and lit a fire, a blizzard started before I finished and blew the fire out even though I put it in the corner of a structure.....

Then I lit a new fire in a better spot and kept it going while I read....I read a whole five hour book, one hour at a time checking to see if it stopped and another hour of another book. Finally it went to heavy snow, by now it was almost night again so I ran until I got to somewhere I could sleep again....

So three blizzards for most of three days so far....I can't wait to leave Pleasant Valley....

[Soul Sojourner]

1 hour ago, ajb1978 said:

Well actually you're not wrong--the Pleasant Valley farmhouse does not have firewood right outside.  You have to cross a field that sees both wolf and bear traffic to get firewood.  And the abundance of blizzards is no fun.  This isn't just anecdotal either; when I was on my quest to gather all the buffer memories, I also recorded the frequency of blizzards.  That area experienced about 33% more blizzards than any other region, and I was there for 80 days waiting so that's a good body of evidence to suggest that it's not just a string of bad luck.

Indeed. And yeah, that's because I was talking about the right place. Must be my lack of sleep, as I was falling asleep when I typed that. Pleasant Valley was exactly where I meant, not paradise meadows. Meadows actually has some nearby woodery (lol).

The PV farmhouse is stocked and built and nice, but you're remote. Forget the fact that you're in the middle of the map, lol doesn't do a whole lotta good on it's own. I love PV for signal hill, hands down. Fricken great spot to base up. The rural houses are not terrible. I like the store actually, despite no bed, because of the car right outside (Outside + Car Trunk = Meat Locker). 88 lbs of meat right outside the base. It's a decent place to hole up for awhile, all things considered. (nearby bear + wolves, hence the meat locker love, haha, quarter it chop it up and store it all)

And yeah, the blizzards are baaad there. I found a bear cave (this one had bones in it) near the river (where the road curves and ends), and then proceeded to follow the nearby path for some ways. The path sloped and I saw a bear coming up the hill on the path, so I backed up and went the other way to say out of sight, climbed over the "ledge" of the snow path/road to walk through the open area instead and hopefully go around the bear, but a wolf was stalking around near that lone hay barn. This was after the little ruined building over there (that provides minimal shelter). Well, the wolf noticed me so I distracted it with a flare, then turned back to the road to go around the wolf, thinking the bear had to have moved on by now... I was wrong, and it came after me. A good shot to the face helped, but I still got mauled. Here I was nearly dead, watching the bear stumble around to die, with a nearby wolf, and I still had to get a few chunks of meat out of it because I knew I could use it. The nearest shelter was that broken building.... 2 days and 2 nights in that "shack" with constant blizzards and injuries, wind blowing out my fire even though it was built in under the upper floor and surrounded by walls. Ended up fending off the wolf too and trying to run out get wood make it back, dry out... thank god it stopped. I survived, went for skeeter ridge... ugh... skeeter ridge. lmfao

[Hotzn]

The cooking spots are a means of differentiation between potential bases. Much like the availability of beds, workbenches etc. If every cooking place had limitless cooking spots (or more than two) that would level the differences between bases and so throw everything off balance. As if you would place a bed, stove and workbench into every shelter, plus a little pond and fishing hut outside.

[Wintermut]

13 hours ago, Soul Sojourner said:

. The nearest shelter was that broken building.... 2 days and 2 nights in that "shack" with constant blizzards and injuries, wind blowing out my fire even though it was built in under the upper floor and surrounded by walls. 

So they have it so fires blow out even with a wooden wall blocking the wind direction? 

That's immersion breaking....

I thought my fire in the corner of that out building was just bad luck....

You are basically saying the game treats fires like they are out in the open even with wooden buildings around them....

So only trees and cliffs/rock walls count as wind breaks?

[Wintermut]

17 hours ago, Soul Sojourner said:

Why would you lug around cooking pots if you could just use multiple empty cans? Especially when the cans are so much lighter.

I don't know....because they have a cooking bonus I think, and it's less frequent management of the cooking musical chairs now when you are trying to multitask?

The volume in the cans is lower so the time it takes to boil the water in them doesn't allow you even an hour of reading....so they are a hastle to manage....

If you are managing six cans, pretty much all you can do is manage the six cans....

Most stuff takes longer to break down or mend than the time it takes to do something in a can....

So the return should be that you can use more of them than two pots at once....

[Soul Sojourner]

3 hours ago, Wintermut said:

So they have it so fires blow out even with a wooden wall blocking the wind direction? 

That's immersion breaking....

I thought my fire in the corner of that out building was just bad luck....

You are basically saying the game treats fires like they are out in the open even with wooden buildings around them....

So only trees and cliffs/rock walls count as wind breaks?

Yeah, it was pretty discouraging. The game said I was protected by wind the whole time, but my fire still got affected with certain actions.

The way it acted was odd. It wasn't blowing out the fire or affecting the fire at all as long as I was watching it burn. But if I did anything, like sleep, break something down, or skip time in any way, it would blow out my fire. And it would almost never go out entirely, but jump from like 8 hrs burn time to 12 mins just because I crafted a 15 min item, for example.

Honestly it's not the only wind problem I've noticed. Like how when you're a certain distance from a "rock wall" where you would most certainly be protected from wind coming from the other side of it, but you're not. The game requires you to be almost right up against it, but in reality, you should be able to be much further from it and still have it block the wind. At a certain distance the wind would come back down into the "valley" but I've clearly seen many examples where I should be protected and aren't.

I don't have a screenshot, I found this image on the web, but that's the kind of building I was in. It's just like the one in Forlorn Muskeg that has the forge in it. There is an upper level and a lower level on that left side, the upper level of this one was inaccessible and I went underneath the stairs to the lower level. There is a plastic container and some random loot lying about as well as a dead body in the lower level of the one I was in. I had my fire there, surrounded by four walls, with an opening to leave under the stairs, and loosely protected by the rest of the walls you see there with the large opening in the front and on the far side. Maybe at the perfect angle the wind could reach my flame, but it would be going through that center beam in the doorway and through the stairs and part of a wall before getting to it. By that point, I'd imagine the wind would have lost most of it's strength.

[Wintermut]

On 9/7/2018 at 6:16 PM, Soul Sojourner said:

 

Yeah that was basically the same type of building I was in too. There are a bunch like that in PV.

I had my fire in the corner and it should have been shielded based on the direction I saw the snow/wind blowing in, but it may as well not have been inside the building at all.

Pretty disappointing really. They have all these things implimented in the game like wind blowing out fires to make things difficult, but when you try to do something smart like shield your fire with a wooden wall....that mechanic doesn't seem to function.

Mine actually had a fire barrel in it too, which I COULD have used and it wouldn't have blown out. The reason I started it on the ground was because there was a frozen deer near one of the openings, but not close enough to the fire barrel for it to thaw it out. Also it wasn't even snowing when I started the fire.

I learned the hard way that the game typically will start a blizzard if you decide you are going to harvest an animal. So you better start a fire with a wind break if you want to harvest it and not die. I thought I did....but I guess I didn't...lol.