Collecting wood is too easy (all versions)

[McGuffin]

The new update (235) is awesome and all changes and new balances are really great.

The one click harvesting, time to cook and collect stuff is pretty good.

However there is someting I really dislike from the begining: the wood collect. The actual way is heavily exploitable.

Say, you are in a middle of nowhere stucked in the blizzard.

Just go where wind can't reach you, near a rock,

Start a small fire, then gather new wood with a one click: done, even if you are far from any tree.

You can stay at any house door and gather wood

You can also go in the middle of CH lake, and gather wood.

This should not be allowed.

The game should check if the player is near a tree (let say 3-4 meters from any tree, then you can gather wood.

It's fine Indoor, because there is limited amout of ressource (even if I would prefer to be able to destroy crates or chairs), but outside this is non sense.

[octavian]

That's if the wind doesn't change direction and makes it all useless.

There have been several discussions about gathering wood and making fire in general. It's very easy to fall into the trap where either things were better the way they were, either they are good they way there are. What this essentially means is that the thing in question has no possible future, no way it could possibly be improved.

I'm going to be the bad guy here and say that if something doesn't work, it's not because of a "little thing". Just tweak this a little bit here, change that a little bit over there, and it's perfect. The reasons it doesn't work is inherent to the game mechanic. And they aren't possible to "fix". In other words, if you do "fix" them, you get a different mechanic, which in turn will have things associated with it that are not "fixable" and "imbalanced".

It's not even a question about the game being easy or hard, realistic or not, whatever that means. The question is are "these" problems that we have now fine or we would rather have a different set of problems, i.e. a new fire/wood mechanic?

[McGuffin]

This is why I just suggest to check if a tree is near the player.

I dont think this is difficult, and it's not a complete change of mecanism: it just check if the player is allowed to gather wood or not from his position. (When indoor this is exactly what it does, anyway)

I have not developping this specific game, so I dont know how is the inside api, but checking what is around a point in a 3d environnement doesnt seems hard to do (trees object are all instances of object ref, they are known)

I made a mod in skyrim that doest exactly that, it took me less than 10 lines in a script

[octavian]

Your idea is good however I question its benefits. Except a few notable locations, everywhere else you are near trees or in (very) short walking distance. So essentially you would introduce a gameplay mechanic specific for those places where trees aren't nearby. In any other case, at the worst would just have to walk a couple tens of seconds. I don't see what benefit this would bring.

Starting fire and gathering wood should be like hunting, not something you do through a UI. Just like you don't have a UI to "hunt for x hours", you shouldn't have a UI to gather wood and make a fire.

Your idea could be added, sure, I vote for it, but it wouldn't solve the fact that fire mechanics are not different enough. The art of TLD is different enough, and awesome at that. Same for fire. Should be something TLD does in a simple and unique way. Easier said than done.