Prehistoric ways to start a fire.

[Mpat120]

There are many ways that our ancestors used to make fire before matches ect. Include some of them with a calorie and time cost to match.

Some suggestions

1. Firebow

2. Fire Piston

3. Fire Plough

4. Concave Mirror

5. While not technically fire starting cause you already have fire

Ember/coal transport

[n0xiety]

Thing is, we are not in stone ages and frankly we shouldn't even need old ways of starting fire. Today starting fire is the easiest thing you could do in a survival situation if you are not in a remote forest. You could just use a piezoelectric spark generator which can be salvaged from every modern lighter or kitchen lighter and in theory could be used infinite times... Other than that any car battery would do the job quite easily... Hell even finding a diamond ring on a corpse and just scratching iron or steel with the diamond would do if you allready couldn't find flint to do that...

There are so many other ways to start fire that i am not even going to bother counting. They really should add simple lighters atleast. Don't anyone smoke in Canada or somethin? Hell you don't even need to smoke to have a kitchen lighter. It is a most basic tool. Literally every home has one sitting in one of the drawers forgotten, waiting to be used just in case an electric shortage happens or in my case i use it for starting the fire of outdoor grill.

[Hesha]

yeah, but a lighter would likely be used up after starting 3 or 4 fires...

[Wasteland Watcher]

I have to agree with the "lighters" idea.

I realize it'd take away from the whole feeling of "oh my God if I don't have matches I **will** die!!!" but I still think it'd be reasonable to have them ...somewhere.

If they were added one would assume the amount of lighter fluid inside would determine how many times it would light. Realistically a lighter would light a 100 times at 100%.

And I hate to use the phrase "for the sake of game balance" but ...

For the sake of game balance I would only add disposable lighters so they cannot be reused once drained and the random spawning chance would have to be less than 10%.

Just my two yen.

[Hesha]

I don't need "game balance" in a single player game. If you ask me, "game balance" is often used as an excuse to justify a game mechanism that is imperfect and doesn't reflect reality very well.

[Viktor Kvasnica]

1. Firebow

2. Fire Piston

3. Fire Plough

4. Concave Mirror

5. While not technically fire starting cause you already have fire

Ember/coal transport

Good ideas. I will also add the flint and steel method (which has good sustainability and can be used without a light source (or sun)). Matches do not grow on trees , so I am in for such a more sustainable ways of creating a fire.

[Amazombie]

There are many ways that our ancestors used to make fire before matches ect. Include some of them with a calorie and time cost to match.

Some suggestions

1. Firebow

2. Fire Piston

3. Fire Plough

4. Concave Mirror

5. While not technically fire starting cause you already have fire

Ember/coal transport

also if they were to add readable books, maybe these could be gated behind a book you have to find and read before you can use these methods? That way its not too easy to start a fire without matches at start but you can work to it.

[Viktor Kvasnica]

also if they were to add readable books, maybe these could be gated behind a book you have to find and read before you can use these methods?

There is already a similar topic on this: "A Survival Book (a new spawn item)?".

[SteveP]

Running out of matches is very real. I don't think we should refer to alternative fire starting as "prehistoric"; we used these methods for many years after we started recording things. :-)

Fire is such an important survival tool that we could certainly stand to have alternative methods of fire starting that require acquiring skill and crafting the tools to do it.

[Hesha]

Realistically speaking people in history would only have started a fire a couple of times in their entire lifetime. The point is in keeping a fire going, which is easilly achieved in reality, but impossible in this game, because even a fire with the burning time of 2h will be burnt out if you just walk outside the camp office to take a piss. I have lived in woodfire heated houses for most of my life and I am well able to prepare a fire before going to bed that will still have embers hot enough to get the fire going again without matches or kindling. I really don't see why the character in TLD cannot do this.

[Mpat120]

I grew up in wood heated homes, lived in the woods, hunted and fished before I went into the service. I can assure you coals in a heater/stove/campfire can burn for DAYS banked under the ash.

Matches and lighters become all but useless once you are so cold that you lose fine motor function, your only hope after that is a brute force technique (fire plough/fire piston/flint and steel) or finding something already burning.

[SteveP]

I grew up in wood heated homes, lived in the woods, hunted and fished before I went into the service. I can assure you coals in a heater/stove/campfire can burn for DAYS banked under the ash.

That's an excellent point; perhaps there could be an option to Bank Coals to preserve embers in a stove, not transport them.

Matches and lighters become all but useless once you are so cold that you lose fine motor function, your only hope after that is a brute force technique (fire plough/fire piston/flint and steel) or finding something already burning.

True enough. If one is already to numb, perhaps on Stalker level, only a fire striker or fire drill would be possible. Glen on Life Below Zero demonstrates a drill technique using a long cord wrapped around a peg and a pivot he holds in his mouth. He just pulls the rope back and forth with about 6-7 wraps using both hands and pegs tied to a raw hide twisted cord. Sometimes, up North, it is courtesy to leave a fire built with ready kindling and a match stuck through a packet so it can be struck, even with frozen fingers. I wish I could find an example picture however this is tougher to find on Google than I thought! Les Stroud mentioned this during his Newfoundland survival expedition with dogs.