Harvest flaregun shells

[Boneviolin]

In the game, you can harvest rifle cartridges, and revolver cartridges, for the components and a tiny bit of gunpowder. But you can't harvest a flare gun shell. It's a very small change, but me personally, I use the other guns a lot, after finding guns and enough ammo, I basically never use the flaregun. Thus all the flares I find are rendered useless.

So I propose for the flaregun shells, and maybe even the flares too to be able to be harvested for gunpowder. It would give 0.01 kg of gunpowder. As I said, a very small change, but it would be logical, and suited for different playstyles everyone has. The flares would still serve a small purpose, either for making ammunition, accelerant for fires.

I know the bullets can be harvested for the reason of recrafting them in a better condition, but it would still make sense.

[Lexilogo]

It being more than 0.01g like 0.10 would be fine as well. It wouldn't be worth the tradeoff, but it'd be good to have the option available nonetheless.

[Boneviolin]

1 hour ago, Lexilogo said:

It being more than 0.01g like 0.10 would be fine as well. It wouldn't be worth the tradeoff, but it'd be good to have the option available nonetheless.

Agreed. I just thought it'd be balanced with the other bullet disassembling, which produce 0.01 kg (as far as I read the wiki correctly), but I agree, 0.05 or 0.10 would be fine as well. That way they could also be more efficient at being emergency fire accelerants basically. 

[The Feng Hunter]

Flares are most likely magnesium based, and would explode into flame upon exposure to air.

They wouldn’t yield black powder — which is what you’re creating when you mix sulphur and potassium nitrate. 

Completely different chemistry and beyond the scope of the available technology, unless you want to bring a vacuum chamber into the game. But that seems like far more hassle than it’s worth.

[Lexilogo]

On 11/2/2024 at 11:02 PM, The Feng Hunter said:

Flares are most likely magnesium based, and would explode into flame upon exposure to air.

They wouldn’t yield black powder — which is what you’re creating when you mix sulphur and potassium nitrate.

The projectile's magnesium based, but a flare gun's shell still needs an explosive chemical to shoot that projectile with force, and I think a lot of flare shells do use gunpowder for that.

[The Feng Hunter]

Either way, it’s an inordinate amount of danger and effort to put in for 0.01kg (or less!, if you’re talking a blank’s amount worth of explosive powder) whilst also ignoring the HIGHLY valuable main bit of material within. 

[ThePancakeLady]

To me, the main problem with this idea is that vanilla Interloper players are likely to hate it. They do not get firearms and ammo- except for the distress pistol and flare shells.

Add a "Harvest" action and someone accidentally harvests one or more of their only (and rare-ish) ammo? With no way to craft new ones? I am imagining the outcry and uproar that could/would happen. 

I can't support this idea because of that, ignoring the actual real-world issues it has. I don't play Interloper very often, but I know I would be quite irked and angry if I accidentally harvested my last flare shell and didn't know if I missed any while looting the world. Yes, the fault would be mostly mine for not paying attention, but it would be fairly easy if there was a "Harvest" button there, while there is not one there now. The same way some folks get mad if they use Auto-walk and go traipsing off the edge of a cliff- it doesn't matter that they should have been paying more attention. They are still going to be mad and post rant threads here and on Steam. 

[MrWolf]

14 hours ago, ThePancakeLady said:

To me, the main problem with this idea is that vanilla Interloper players are likely to hate it. They do not get firearms and ammo- except for the distress pistol and flare shells.

Add a "Harvest" action and someone accidentally harvests one or more of their only (and rare-ish) ammo? With no way to craft new ones? I am imagining the outcry and uproar that could/would happen. 

I can't support this idea because of that, ignoring the actual real-world issues it has. I don't play Interloper very often, but I know I would be quite irked and angry if I accidentally harvested my last flare shell and didn't know if I missed any while looting the world. Yes, the fault would be mostly mine for not paying attention, but it would be fairly easy if there was a "Harvest" button there, while there is not one there now. The same way some folks get mad if they use Auto-walk and go traipsing off the edge of a cliff- it doesn't matter that they should have been paying more attention. They are still going to be mad and post rant threads here and on Steam. 

I'm an Interloper player and I think it's the opposite - I wouldn't mind the idea of harvesting flare shells at all, and it would be interesting to have something else to use the shells for (like gunpowder for starting fires quicker maybe).  I ignore the flare gun and flare shells because I think they're useless weight (I know they can be used defensively and even offensively).  I doubt we'd accidentally harvest a flare shell - we never interact with flare shells except to pick them up or drop them.  If we had to select the flare shell and pick a "Load" option to put it in the flare gun, then I could see how adding a "Harvest" option could cause some accidental destruction.  And even then, it's possible to escape out of it before the harvesting completes.

At this point in the game, it's unlikely that new functionalities like this would be added, but it would be interesting to be able to harvest more things to get different types of items from them.

[ThePancakeLady]

3 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

I'm an Interloper player and I think it's the opposite - I wouldn't mind the idea of harvesting flare shells at all, and it would be interesting to have something else to use the shells for (like gunpowder for starting fires quicker maybe).  I ignore the flare gun and flare shells because I think they're useless weight (I know they can be used defensively and even offensively).  I doubt we'd accidentally harvest a flare shell - we never interact with flare shells except to pick them up or drop them.  If we had to select the flare shell and pick a "Load" option to put it in the flare gun, then I could see how adding a "Harvest" option could cause some accidental destruction.  And even then, it's possible to escape out of it before the harvesting completes.

At this point in the game, it's unlikely that new functionalities like this would be added, but it would be interesting to be able to harvest more things to get different types of items from them.

Ah, but we all have our own strategies and playstyles. When I play Loper, I want that flare gun asap (as well as a mag lens), so I have a weapon until I can get saplings and guts cured, find a hammer and can gather enough coal and scrap metal to start forging. And I know Loper vets who use a similar strategy (they taught it to me when I first started playing Loper). So I guess it could go either way, It's probably more correct for me to say "...some vanilla Interloper players are going to hate it", rather than making it seem like all Lopers will. But if you have two groups who don't agree, it still tends to lead to drama on the forums, especially on the Steam forums.

But about harvesting tiny bits of gunpowder for firestarting- how many would you need to harvest to have enough to use as an accelerant, though? It feels a bit off to think you would harvest 5-10 times as much gunpowder from a flare shell than from a rifle cartridge. I also didn't think about this until now- noisemakers.  Dealing with Timberwolves on Loper is a pain (on Stalker it is a real Real Pain), and noisemakers do help make them go away long enough to get the heck out of their area. So those are two uses that could be possible, but it all depends on how much gunpowder would be harvested from each shell. 

[The Ravages of Time]

Flare shells degrade over time, so harvesting them, even to get a marginal amount of gun powder, would be better than having surplus shells get ruined and serve no purpose at all, which is not uncommon on long interloper runs.