Air dampers on Stoves (not rim grills, fire barrels, fireplaces, campfires, etc.)

[UTC-10]

I can foresee that this could be rather over-powered given it can add seriously to a character's capacity to conserve matches and fire starters.  

If the devs decide to expand the concept to other than stoves, i.e. one can bank a fire to try to keep embers going for a prolonged period, that would be up to them to work out the details of the implementation.  

Basic idea: Air damper on the inflow of air into the firebox of the stove.  

Normal/default/fail-safe is for the damper to be OPEN which allows normal operation of the stove as per how the game currently works.  

If the damper is CLOSED what happens is the fire in the stove is immediately turned into embers whose duration, as opposed to embers when the damper is open, will be a multiple of the remaining fire duration up to a hard limit based on the particular save game difficulty.  

For example (subject to dev decision on implementation):

Ember duration = fire duration times nine (9) minimum of one hour. 

Difficulty    Hard Limit (plus 15 minutes)

Interloper    3 hours
Stalker        6 hours
Voyager        9 hours
Pilgrim        9 hours 

When a fire is desired, the damper is set to OPEN and the fire starting process is started with the embers serving as the fire starting ignition source.  

The Hard Limit can be "reset" by starting another fire with damper OPEN with a duration of at least one hour then set the damper to CLOSE.  

Dev decision - these embers do/do not have a duration shown in the game to the character.  The reason for an additional duration before the embers go cold was because sleeping occurs in one hour increments.  

If the character wanted to maybe light a torch, he would set the damper to OPEN, then try to light the torch (almost certainly successful), then must quickly set the damper to CLOSED or the embers would die out per the normal short duration of embers in regular game play.  

The intent would be to preserve the embers not to expect, for instance, that food or drink could be kept hot for extended durations while the character sleeps or is away from the stove unless the devs decide otherwise.  Nor will embers keep up the radiant heat output once that mode is enabled other than at some nominal level.  

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I figure that the devs have their hands full as is.  Just a thought.