Campfires suck now


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So camp fires don't keep you warm anymore? What gives? Sure they give some warmth but now you can freeze to death...right beside a roaring fire. It doesn't make sense. Do I have to walk on it and light myself on fire to stay warm now?

If the devs wanted to make the game harder they should put in less guns. Fire should be the main way you survive the cold. As it stands now I can easily leave mystery lake with a full compliment of deerskin boots, rabbit gloves, wolf cloak and a bear bag. That's where the game is too easy. The whole fun of this game is using fires to keep warm (worrying about wind, collecting wood and the such). Otherwise this game becomes just another boring survival game with no new mechanics. This is supposed to be Canada anyway, why is there a gun in every second house?

If they want to make using fires harder change the foraging mechanic. Right now you can light a fire in the middle of a field, and then go forage and stay toasty. if you were actually foraging you'd have to hike off to actual trees and find wood. You wouldn't be able to stay near the fire thereby keeping it going indefinitely.

If anything I'd like to see fire become MORE important then it had been (not less). Fires should be required to heat up houses (as it stands the temperature inside houses makes no sense).

All in all I'm pretty disappointed with this change. Really seems to reduce the unique aspects of this game. It also lessens a players playstyle choices as before you could either go the animal clothing route (which is heavy) or stay light by using found clothing and fires. Now the animal clothing route is really the only option. Just seems silly to me.

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Or here's another option if the devs want realism: A campfire should still warm you but the difficulty of starting one should change depending on the cold. If it's really cold just make it really hard to start a fire. This would make items like accelerant more useful as well.

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Gonna agree and just paste what I wrote in other thread:

Since campfires no longer provide positive temperature, it's no longer possible to survive without using houses – you freeze to death even near the campfire (especially when there's a blizzard). On Stalker, you can no longer survive a single day outdoors (without top gear). Technically you can have several campfires going (as that one guy got 300°C or something), but it's just silly exploits when you have nothing interesting to do.

Difficulty should be increased via item scarcity and/or conditions. Heck, I would have just decreased general outside temperature by a ton but kept old campfires. Because as it is now, it severely limits gameplay, promoting easy, tedious hibernation. I used to have fun while playing with a rule of "no going indoors until you find >80% condition crowbar", but now it's impossible.

With this patch and erratic blizzards, all that's left is achievement farming. What's the point of having campfires if they don't warm? What's the point of having wind shelters if blizzards change direction every hour? This change doesn't increase difficulty, it just removes a gameplay mechanic.

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+1 to OP.

And you should not be able to forage for wood in the middle of a frozen lake. Also, you can't start fires on slopes... unless you do it an top a dead deer (perhaps wolves and bears too, never tried it), which is always funny.

The entire fire/wood gathering mechanic needs to be reconsidered and perhaps the sole focus for a big patch. Fire should not be a ho-hum mechanic, here you go, you can make fire. It should have depth and give the player both challenges and options. The ability to make and control fire is what got us to where we are in the first place. Fire got us through the 400.000 years since somebody figured it out.

Inside temperature should be a function of weather. You should need fire inside in certain weather, or any weather, not just use it for cooking. Just have a small fire. Especially with the pretty sounds and graphics.

I've never made fire, and people that know about the subject could correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you don't not need tons of wood and a huge fire to have it going for eight hours. I suppose loosely stacked logs would burn faster than a compact stack. And it should make sense, at least it does to me, to make a fire in your shelter, go out hunting or whatever, and have it still going when you come back.

Coming back frozen and having to start a fire seems awkward. Just make a fire before you go out and it will be there when you come back.

Gathering wood would be a good reason to go to those areas of the map where there's essentially nothing but trees and to which you never go if you know the map. Because there's no reason.

As chopping down a tree would be out the question, you would need to find a fallen tree. With all that bad weather it's to be expected that some will be taken down. You would harvest that and pieces of it would disappear. Hopefully it wouldn't be that hard to do. Have a few models for fallen down trees, with each having a few model variations depending on how much wood you take from them.

This would also mean that, for example, if you find a fallen fir and have no cedar or can't find one, starting a fire would be harder.

It would be unfortunate to leave fire as is.

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There are some points in this thread I have to disagree with, but there are also some great suggestions.

First: Campfires do not suck, and they do spend warmth. That was the case for me in v228 as well as the current v235. However, they only spend a certain amount of warmth, so you need good clothing as well if temperatures are low. This is realistic, as in a very cold environment you may well burn your face at the fire and freeze off your butt at the same time. If you are running around in jeans and a shirt at -20°C, a fire won't help you out.

Second: You can light a fire in a blizzard in the game, no problem. This worked for me in v228 as well as v235. You just need to place it in a spot out of the wind. You can see in the game which direction the wind is blowing from, and you can check a spot by standing there and bringing up the [tab] menue. If "windchill" is -1 or -2°C, you can light a fire there. If windchill is higher, you will have a problem.

Now to the suggestions I agree with: The fire mechanic could be expanded to make it more interesting. Because truly, making fire is something very fundamental both to survival in the cold as well as the development of mankind. First off, low temperatures could make it harder to light a fire, which would add value to the accelerant (which given current game mechanics is rarely valuable). It may also be worthwhile to reconsider the wood foraging mechanic, but mind you - having to actually venture forth in a blizzard to gather wood might make surviving a blizzard incredibly hard. One could also consider making it necessary to heat houses. But that would mean that houses would not be safe havens anymore, which again would have deep implications on gameplay mechanics. Those players stumbling into a house on their last few % might find themselves dying trying to get a fire going. But anyway, it's worth considering.

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Second: You can light a fire in a blizzard in the game, no problem. This worked for me in v228 as well as v235. You just need to place it in a spot out of the wind. You can see in the game which direction the wind is blowing from, and you can check a spot by standing there and bringing up the [tab] menue. If "windchill" is -1 or -2°C, you can light a fire there. If windchill is higher, you will have a problem.

Or you can just look for a place with "Warmer" indicator. Still, the wind direction will completely change after an hour or two and it all will be for nothing.

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Some decent points in here, and the feedback is appreciated. I read a decent amount of feedback/requests about making the cold a bigger threat, and some if these ideas feed directly into that. I'll be back to take some notes, so feel free to add any further thoughts!

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I would very much appreciate it if the amount of heat produced by a campfire would be influenced by the amount of pieces of firewood you add to it. Fires work like that in reality - the more fuel you add, the more heat they generate.

Right now, the amount of firewood added only increases the fire's duration, but has no effect on the heat. That's really odd in my opinion. I for one find it very counterintuitive that making two seperate fires next to each other (e.g. with one piece of firewood each) doubles the ambient air temperature bonus while adding a second piece of firewood to your first campfire doesn't increase the air temperature at all.

If more pieces of firewood gave a bigger heat bonus than e.g. 20°C for fir firewood, people could react to extraordinary low temperatures by adding more firewood to their campfires/stoves. Like they would probably do in reality.

I agree that cold should remain a serious threat, though. Maybe the heat bonus given by a fire fuelled with only one or two pieces of firewood could be decreased a bit to compensate for the fact that adding more pieces of firewood can generate a heat bonus higher than 20°C.

A system in which fir firewood mainly influences a fire's duration while adding cedar firewood mainly increases the heat would be awesome!

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Also, as I've hinted at here maybe the opinions people have about fire should not be taken literally because they could point to a deeper, inherent limitation of the mechanics, an obstruction which we cannot articulate.

Any game mechanic will have limitations and inconsistencies which are a function of their pure existence. To "fix" them would negate their existence i.e. change them beyond the point of recognition, essentialy the process of "fixing" would lead to a new mechanic altogether.

So perhaps instead of an approach of "fixing" or "balancing", it would be beneficial to at least just consider a new core game fire mechanic that's inherently "broken" in areas of the game that are of least importance, like "realism".

"Realism" is of the least importance, and is often misunderstood. Because of the suspension of disbelief you don't read Dracula saying every five minutes, but oh my God, how can this be, vampires don't exist. If it being "real" or not had anything to do whatsoever with vampires existing or not, literature would be incredibly dull.

So if somebody says, fire is broken, this is not right, this doesn't have to mean it's objectively "broken". It could also mean that suspension of disbelief is no longer working for them.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've found that in certain storms, you can use two fires to keep warm enough. This is a plus if you have degraded clothing. Also, it seems as if the game does add additional warmth when more fuel is heaped on the fire. It's usually a good plan to keep one chunk of firewood on reserve in case the wind shifts and the fire is blown out.

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