Fire burn times... indoors vs. outdoors.

ThePancakeLady

By ThePancakeLady
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ThePancakeLady Pathfinder

ThePancakeLady

Posted
Posted

I know this has been covered before, or touched on in various threads. But it is the one thing that makes me a wee bit crazy in-game.

Wood burns slower when in cold locations. Ie\ outdoors. That makes perfect sense.

What never makes sense to me is that if I build a fire with 10 pieces of cedar, each one giving 60 minutes of burn time indoors, my fire burn time shows 10 hours (600 minutes). But will burn longer if it is an outdoor fire.

Same materials for a campfire or stove outdoors- 10 pieces of cedar, but they now have a 20% increased burn time (increased time % used as an example), the fire will still show 600 minutes of expected burn time, but will actually burn for 720 minutes in actuality (barring wind blowing it out). It should show the actual expected amount of burn time, based on the fire's location. Indoors- 1 cedar should show 60 minutes. Outdoors- 1 cedar should show 72 minutes. 

Nitpicky, I know. But the discrepancy always makes me feel like I just wasted fuel on a fire, if I set one to burn for 10 hours, and it still has 2 hours left on it, after those 10 in-game hours have passed. I dislike spreadsheets, and don't want to do in-my-head maths for each piece of fuel I use to make a campfire or put fuel into an outdoor stove, to try to calculate the time for a fire made from mixed fuels (cedar + sticks (x4) + fir + sticks (x11) + books (x3), for example). Just makes me twitch thinking about it, lol. My character has no Texas Instruments calculator with them, and pulling up an online calculator or the Windows calculator while I am playing, every time I want to build an outdoor fire... arrrrrrrrgh! I use fires for timekeeping, now that we can multitask when cooking, or making water. And the time difference not being shown correctly often causes a bit of frustration, often some laughter, but still a little break in immersion for me.


I know it is not a high priority wish, or something that is gamebreaking. It just weirds me out at times to have the difference in burn time not shown accurately for outdoor fires.

Okay... #</RantOver>

:p

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Doc Feral Pathfinder

Doc Feral

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Posted

What really makes me go "oh bother" about outdoor fires is that the confusing countdown more than once caused my pots of water to evaporate. I often time the fire to complete a last cooking action and then leave it alone, and if the time stretches I happen to be fooled. I may even have burned moose steaks one or two times.

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Pillock Pathfinder

Pillock

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The bit that I don't like about this system is that the burn time does not depend on how cold the location of the fire is: it depends on how cold the location of your character is. So, if you light an outdoor fire, and go indoors while your stuff cooks, the fire won't get any extra duration bonus; but if you stay outside, the fire will last longer.

To me this is utterly crazy.

You get more of a bonus to the duration of the fire the colder you are (or would be if you weren't next to the fire), so it's always more efficient to build a campfire in the coldest location you can find, as long as it's sheltered from the wind. It's supposed to be an incentive to building fire outside rather than inside, but it's just so counter intuitive to me that I can't really bring myself to engage with it for that purpose. I just put my fires wherever, and monitor them for burning time - if I overestimate how much fuel to add, I'll just harvest the remaining fuel into torches and then back into sticks. This is a bit of an unnecessary faff in my view, but it's a tolerable workaround for a very imperfect mechanic.

Edited by Pillock
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ManicManiac Pathfinder

ManicManiac

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Well, considering that this is a change that we wish will happen... I think it's appropriate to be here :) 

I would think that technical discussions would revolve around existing mechanics and how they work now, vs how we wished they would work or change in the future.

Also, you could always drop a question in the Milton Mailbag... ;)

Edited by ManicManiac
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