Summer. Wildfires

[thegreatJash]

19 hours ago, Atkvin said:

heard plenty others asking for something like it elsewhere, but a late-game item or method of summoning rain would alleviate summer and dealing with wildfires greatly. Or

I'm working on a mod with this with the help of modder Hornet. This is the main reason why I want an item like this so bad. Wildfire begone.

[sinisterrkid]

As long as we get some means to make it rain so wildfires won't happen I will be fine with it. Currently its just a mechanic that makes me always choose the Oasis as a base location.

[Yuuko]

ppl in thread: Wildfires are easy just GO TO SPECIFIC AREAS OF THE GAME TO COMPLETELY AVOID THEM lol so ez lol

I've long thought wildfires were a mistake.  They can be very punishing, easily overlooked, and when DST throws several things at you it can be the straw the breaks the camel's back.  I love challenge, but I hate cheap shots and wildfires are a bit of a cheap shot as far as difficulty is concerned.  The amount of ambiguity and tediousness they add to the game far outweighs any fun that comes from building flingos, luxury fans, or water balloons.  I think replacing it with a better thought out mechanic that was more involved between the players and the game, with different layers of counter-play would be FAR better than wasting a single line of text defending what we have now.

I get that many people are ambivalent about it, but doubt anyone could make a case its actually a *good* mechanic.

Fortunately Klei did a great farming rework that took away many problems with farming, while giving us a more creative and interactive system.  Hopefully they'll tackle wildfire in the same way...

On 6/11/2021 at 5:32 AM, Well-met said:

It targets some things more than others so it can be controlled

Is there anything other than lureplants that have priority though?  Lureplants are a bit awkward to set up, and its a bit ambiguous where the lines of their protection can be drawn.  I've seen ppl lose bases by following guides about how OP lureplants are in controlling wildfires lol

On 6/11/2021 at 7:29 AM, Wardin25 said:

i watched a video where a guy trapped some angry ducklings and used them to start rains on summer, but I dont really know if thats possible

This involved glitching the mossling eggs so you could crack them open after Summer began allowing you to keep them through the year.  It doesn't work anymore.  You can still get rain by spamming telelocator staves, but it takes a few of them to get a rain going.

On 6/11/2021 at 7:32 AM, Cheggf said:

I don't like it but it's not that I think it's unfair, like your poll would force me to vote for. It's perfectly fair. You have about 460 minutes to gather 2 gears & 15 ice, a trivial task with an extraordinarily long time allowed to do it. If you fail to do it in that timespan then your punishment is having to be vigilant and manually extinguish the fires. Nothing unfair about that, it's a really easy mechanic to play around. Just refuel the flingomatics every once in awhile and everything's fine since fires only start near you so even if they ran out of fuel you can still refuel them before things burn so long as you have fuel available near them.

I don't like it because it's so easy to play around. I have 460 minutes to kill a single clockwork, or spend 5 minutes in the desert? That's the challenge? It's not a challenge at all, it just requires me to put these ugly flingomatics everywhere. I turn the mechanic off because all it does is discourage creativity and encourage ugly copy paste base designs.

"You only have to gather 2 gears and 15 ice" vs "wait I have to build these everywhere?" lol which is it?

[ArubaroBeefalo]

8 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

the torch is indeed a thing that exists

So? Use it. Im talking about fire damage in general

Also, for how cheap it is, the fire staff is way better since you dont need to waste time to get close to him if you are chopping a far a way mushtree or whatever

[Be2014]

Wildfires are part of summer.  I like so many use the time to explore the cave and the ruins.   I would like the wildfire to not burn boats.  Seems that sailing on water should lower the temp.  The boats are one Wildfires should not happen.  

[Pig Princess]

7 hours ago, Shosuko said:

I think replacing it with a better thought out mechanic that was more involved between the players and the game, with different layers of counter-play would be FAR better than wasting a single line of text defending what we have now.

 

7 hours ago, Shosuko said:

Fortunately Klei did a great farming rework that took away many problems with farming, while giving us a more creative and interactive system.  Hopefully they'll tackle wildfire in the same way...

I can't agree more with these, even though I choose to deal with wildfires on the surface and outsude of oasis more often than not. There are 2 main reasons for that, and neither of them can be used to say something good about wildfires themselves:

1. Cave activities quickly become repetetive if I try to do them every single year, moreover, it feels like I'm forced to go underground and do something productive rather than my choice to experience some content.

To be clear: I prefer to do ruins in spring as any character with morning star, for a lot of reasons; I don't need much stuff from there, in fact, even first clearing in terms of resources feels unnecessary to me, I do it for fun only, which quickly becomes routine, and being in the caves just for the sake of being there also quickly becomes boring (+moleworm burrows quickly become eyesore just like rot on the surface). Also I like dry season from SW so much more (so it's not like I dislike summer because it's is too hard for me), I even played as Wormwood and Wigfrid (in single player version) with dry season start + only dry season enabled, and I can't see myself do that for RoG summer.

2. I dislike alternatives allowing to avoid wildfires more. Even in solo worlds fishing for goggles is boring, purely RNG thing, somehow both one-time thing and repetitive, and after crafting desert goggles there is no engagement with sandstorm mechanic, goggles become weak tam o'shanter with annoying sandstorm overlay, sandstorm - that thing that does not allow you to use head slot for anything other than goggles. No thank you. And with multiple people it's so much worse, being it players who fish simultaneously for blueprint, or necessity to craft, wear and repair that goggles for each person. As for caves, I like them, but not to extent to go there every single summer.

What I started to do is sailing during summer after RoT changes (luxury fan and/or ice staff as fire fighting means), but I also use flingomatics in base design, which is convenient whenever I don't want to sail/go to the caves. So I engaged with wildfires a lot, and have some thoughts about them.

In my opinion, problems of wildfires are the following things:

1. It's simple, not very creative, overtuned mechanic;

2. There is no reward for engaging with them, only punishment; to lesser extent that can be said about summer;

3. Game encourages player to avoid that mechanic at all.

Note: compare with dry season and it's mechanics: temperature and withering are the same, instead of cacti flowers there are coffee plants (both are nice additions to their respective seasons), but volcano and trawling are more creative and have good rewards for engaging, not avoiding them.

What can in my opinion make summer more interesting and make wildfires specifically a feature, not a nuisance/limiting factor:

1. Get rid of offscreen wildfires. That is just cheap shot, game supposed to be uncompromising survivial as stated in describtion, but uncompromising and unfair are different things, just like hard and tedious are also different things.

2. Make wildfires come in intense periodic waves with warning and/or some other condition under which they would happen, and other period - safe from them. That way player would be encouraged to pay attention to the world, not just forget about feature by using caves/flingos/etc., or constantly be in fear of not being able to prevent something of burning in time. It would help regardless of whether one decides to engage with them or avoid.

3. Make heat waves and wildfires high risk/high reward feature:

3.1. During heat wave allow food that is left on the ground for a couple of seconds turn into it's cooked version with 100% freshness, but make it so that after additional few seconds it becomes ash unless picked. It could work for stacks of any size without limits, just like Packim Baggims works, but could also require conditions, like: specific turf (dark) used, enough glassy things nearby during heat wave (glass shard, moonrock, moonlense, gems and gem-containing structures, etc.), different things one needs to do (not just wait a couple of seconds) to obtain that result, such as maintain certain moisture of objects (add or remove water via different means), defend it from different mobs spawning and trying to infest/eat that food, do something at different stages of cooking process like apply different spices/salt to obtain unique foods (it doesnt necessarily mean that should make sence in real life) with unique combinations of crock pot value types (like eggnified mushroom which could be both veggie and egg, something like that, so one can cook pierogie with eggnified meat-like carrot and 3 honey).

3.2. Allow drying racks to work significantly faster during heat wave. For example: day is 8 minutes, heat waves happen once every day and last for 1 minute; during heat wave drying rack works with 500% effectiveness, so a piece of monster meat would require 4 minutes in summer to dry if player times it to dry during heat wave. That is just an example, player can be given ability to make their own local heat wave to their benefit or loss (maybe using yellow moonlense, and with additional resources in lights out?).

3.3. Allow some things to be dried only during heat wave, like mushrooms and vegetables. With new recipes/crafts/other uses these can be decent reward for engaging with heat waves. Alternatively, some things can be made susceptiple to smoldering in summer, and once they smolder naturally, catch fire and are extinguished in time, they could give new products (like new types of seeds, wood, stones, etc.)

3.4. Make ice-flingomatics modifiable, for example, with gems. They could have indicator how much "gem power" is left inside them, and once it runs out, revert to unmodified type. With blue it can have bigger AoE for snowball, freezing power, create mini-geysers which won't freeze players, but create temporary places with temperature lower than overheating treshold (where snowball would fall), spend fuel slower (maybe 2 times slower); with red they could make structure/object/mob being immune to catching fire naturally for some time after it being extinguished (so one can use different approach to save fuel and resources by litting everything on fire, extinguishing, then turning flingo off for some time), but maybe make extinguishing power weaker (so it won't be superior compared to blue one in terms of safety/fuel usage, it could encourage player to help flingo with water balloons, ice staff, luxury fan). For green gem such flingo could create illusions during heat wave in addition to extinguishing things, which could deceive and even hurt player if ignored, however, it would also create second illusion on the map (rules could be adjusted), and if one manages to bring first one to the second (during chasing or some sort of minigame), object becomes real; among possible things could be cacti plant, cacti flower, beefalo + herd spawner, berry bush, tallbird nest, reed plant, etc. Orange could make flingomatic teleport it's snowballs outside of range to extinguish things even if flingo is offscreen/unloaded, as long as 2 points of the map are connected via portal made with orange gems/orange moonlense or something else involving heat wave, with maximum portal limit per flingo. Yellow can give flingomatic power to reduce regrowth time, increase mobs speed, speed up their animations for set amount of time provided they cought fire and were extinguished by that kind of snowball (so it would increase honey and plant life products production). Finally, purple could be used to modify shape of flingo-protected area with the same area, purple gem or purple gem-containing structures could be used to define such shape.

In general, wildfires and summer need more rewards, just like winter and spring do (not a new boss though, we have plenty already), be made more fair, encourage player skill and/or knowledge, involvement. My ideas can be not well thought of not fit into the game, but general rule needs to be changed from "deal with it, otherwise be punished" into "deal with it and learn how to use it to your advantage".

[JWalker1311]

Keep this discussion up guys and wildfires will meet the same fate as disease

[QuartzBeam]

55 minutes ago, JWalker1311 said:

Keep this discussion up guys and wildfires will meet the same fate as disease

A man can dream...

[rainman895]

52 minutes ago, JWalker1311 said:

Keep this discussion up guys and wildfires will meet the same fate as disease

How this specific discussion can affect that decision? Disease was an unavoidable mechanic and that's why it was removed. As i said already i don't want devs to remove this mechanic because they made it completely optional in world settings, this topic was created because i am genuinely interested in hearing other people's opinions

[Well-met]

disease was certainly avoidable

[ArubaroBeefalo]

10 minutes ago, Well-met said:

disease was certainly avoidable

in a tedious only way

wildfire has many paths to be avoided

[Yuuko]

I think wildfires are way more tedious then disease was.  First off bunnyman farms were meat and veg, constantly available.  Pigman farms just as easy, gives pigskins to keep building football helmets / hambats.  You get plenty of free monster meat from hound attacks, just convert a pig to werepig, kill and profit.  After they added lunar biome and ocean content you had the real winner was kelp though - immune to disease, wither, AND smolder lol.  You can stack up 40 of them in a single space, makes harvesting a breeze.  You could eat them to bomb sanity as well as cook up perogies, meatballs, ect.

Disease discouraged using plants, which sucked because using plants was already pretty bad lol  I never relocated any berry bushes ever.  Grass and twigs I'd relocated - but I'd use it with wicker to get a thousand or so and then put them away in a fireproof chest.  Basically when disease was removed it was cool, but my play style didn't actually change much.

If smolder were removed my playstyle would change a lot though.  I'd enjoy building more elaborate bases with more interesting designs.  I'd be more willing to venture out on the ocean in summer.  Solo sailing is difficult enough with managing all the tasks to run a ship, new sanity monsters on the ocean AND smolder is more than I want to deal with.  Sucks because the ice breams would otherwise create a perfect opportunity to unload the summer stress on the high seas!

[ArubaroBeefalo]

36 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

I think wildfires are way more tedious then disease was.  First off bunnyman farms were meat and veg, constantly available.  Pigman farms just as easy, gives pigskins to keep building football helmets / hambats.  You get plenty of free monster meat from hound attacks, just convert a pig to werepig, kill and profit.  After they added lunar biome and ocean content you had the real winner was kelp though - immune to disease, wither, AND smolder lol.  You can stack up 40 of them in a single space, makes harvesting a breeze.  You could eat them to bomb sanity as well as cook up perogies, meatballs, ect.

Disease discouraged using plants, which sucked because using plants was already pretty bad lol  I never relocated any berry bushes ever.  Grass and twigs I'd relocated - but I'd use it with wicker to get a thousand or so and then put them away in a fireproof chest.  Basically when disease was removed it was cool, but my play style didn't actually change much.

If smolder were removed my playstyle would change a lot though.  I'd enjoy building more elaborate bases with more interesting designs.  I'd be more willing to venture out on the ocean in summer.  Solo sailing is difficult enough with managing all the tasks to run a ship, new sanity monsters on the ocean AND smolder is more than I want to deal with.  Sucks because the ice breams would otherwise create a perfect opportunity to unload the summer stress on the high seas!

sailing in summer is actually a good way of spending that season, all that can burn is near you. A fan can extinguish the whole boat

the only problem is fishing at day without an iceflingomatic

[chirsg]

I feel like i'm cheating when I switch off wildfires, but honestly they exist literally just to give you worry and stress. If you put out a smolder, that's well and good but usually when the fire is taking place, it's too late. 

Having said all this, It does feel like i'm robbing the game when I do have it switched off. It's an OG challenge, but I'd like to see ways of more sensible fire fighting than living like a gremlin in your base, being locked in the oasis or living below ground like a germ. 

Give us more generous methods of fire fighting. A luxury fan clone that does less for temperature and more for extinguishing. That's a start. Or just scrapping the fireproofing of fireproof falsetto and just designating it to be a fire extinguishing machine.