[Suggestion] Make dwarf stars and scaled furnaces heat thermal stones to the same temperature as burning trees

[Frogzard]

If you keep a thermal stone near a dwarf star or scaled furnace its temperature will usually plateau at anywhere from 35 to 50 degrees and never go any higher.

If you keep a thermal stone near a burning tree, its temperature will always max out to the cap of 90 degrees. To my knowledge, the only other heat sources capable of doing this are lava ponds.

Doesn't it make more sense to let scaled furnaces and dwarf stars max out thermal stones to 90 degrees too since, at the very least, they're harder to get?

[Cheggf]

Make multiple of them. It's way easier to place a few furnaces than repeatedly plant trees and burn them.

[Frogzard]

18 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Make multiple of them. It's way easier to place a few furnaces than repeatedly plant trees and burn them.

It takes 5 furnaces to equal one burning tree. I don't think it's easier to kill dragonfly up to 5 times than it is to plant some trees every winter.

[00petar00]

That's why i sometimes make my base near dragonfly and use lava pools to heat thermal stones.

[Guille6785]

it's fine for 1 scaled furnace not to overheat you at every point of the year, you only need to kill dfly once then deconstruct scaled flooring to build more furnaces, dfly drops green gems anyway so this shouldn't be a problem

dwarf stars are the underwhelming ones for me

[GelatinousCube]

Can someone confirm my strategy as effective or a waste? I have four furnaces placed closely together. I leave multiple thermal stones in the middle of the four and swap them out on rotation during winter. 

Is this doing more than just having one furnace or is it a waste and not doing more heating than one? I'm on console so can't test numbers/behind the scenes stuff etc.

Should I add more furnaces or be doing something else for maximum hotness of the thermals? Would placing a dwarf star in the middle during winter make them last longer?

Thanks in advance.

[Frogzard]

1 minute ago, GelatinousCube said:

Can someone confirm my strategy as effective or a waste? I have four furnaces placed closely together. I leave multiple thermal stones in the middle of the four and swap them out on rotation during winter. 

Is this doing more than just having one furnace or is it a waste and not doing more heating than one? I'm on console so can't test numbers/behind the scenes stuff etc.

Should I add more furnaces or be doing something else for maximum hotness of the thermals? Would placing a dwarf star in the middle during winter make them last longer?

Thanks in advance.

Yes, scaled furnace heating does stack. However, you will get diminishing returns. I'll let you decide for yourself how many furnaces you want (for reference, the cap is 90 degrees):

1 furnace: 55

2 furnaces: 72

3 furnaces: 82

4 furnaces: 87

5 furnaces: cap

[Cheggf]

14 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

It takes 5 furnaces to equal one burning tree. I don't think it's easier to kill dragonfly up to 5 times than it is to plant some trees every winter.

She drops more scales if you do more damage and you can get infinite scales by deconstructing the flooring. The furnaces burn at a 100% uptime for free with no cost or maintenance, it is way easier to just leave stones near them and quickly swap rather than plant trees, burn them, then afk near them until your stone is warm.

[Guille6785]

7 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

Yes, scaled furnace heating does stack. However, you will get diminishing returns. I'll let you decide for yourself how many furnaces you want (for reference, the cap is 90 degrees):

1 furnace: 55

2 furnaces: 72

3 furnaces: 82

4 furnaces: 87

5 furnaces: cap

keep in mind this is also influenced by world temperature, 4 furnaces will reach 90 degrees at most points of the year except when winter gets really cold

[Frogzard]

13 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

She drops more scales if you do more damage and you can get infinite scales by deconstructing the flooring. The furnaces burn at a 100% uptime for free with no cost or maintenance, it is way easier to just leave stones near them and quickly swap rather than plant trees, burn them, then afk near them until your stone is warm.

To be clear, I didn't make this post with the assumption that the alternative to furnaces would be an array of trees at base that you would burn one at a time everytime you leave base during winter. Is getting multiple scaled furnaces harder than maintaining an array of trees at base that you burn one by one everytime you leave base? Maybe, but is it harder than just burning a random naturally spawned tree that you happened across? Absolutely. Before I address your point by getting into the nitty gritty about the difficulty of getting multiple scaled furnaces versus maintaining this array of trees (if that's what you're interested in, skip to the next paragraph), I want to address the main topic for a moment by saying that I merely made the observation that a burning tree burns hotter than a star and thought it should be changed and figured I'd throw in the furnace while I was at it. You've made the excellent point that furnaces offer something burning trees don't (convenience) and I think that could be fair grounds to argue that they shouldn't burn as hot as trees. That said, I want to make sure we're on the same page with regards to the scale of heating going on: if my testing was correct, it takes roughly 90 seconds for a stone to go from 0 to 90 degrees at a burning tree, whereas it takes roughly 3 minutes to decay from 90 degrees to 50 degrees out in the cold (about the amount the furnace would heat it to.) If your excursion away from base lasted long enough, you would have been better off just waiting for the stone to warm up at a tree rather than quickly swapping one out. This is not to say that trees are strictly better than furnaces, (for example, if you had to return to base for something that had nothing to do with warming up, a furnace would allow you to refresh your stone and have better mileage than a tree) just that I'm not sure how much that convenience is worth if trees are this much more effective. Also, as Guille rightly pointed out, there are variables to this so I am open to being proven wrong if my testing was flawed by failing to take something into account. These things are very easy to test thanks the the console (unless you're not on pc) so you don't have to take my word for it.

As a side note, I want to partially retract what I said earlier -- I was correct that it technically could require 5 furnaces to equal one burning tree, but due to diminishing returns, in reality it'll be more like 3. Anyways, I think our disagreement when it comes to the difficulty of acquiring multiple furnaces versus maintaining trees stems from the fact that I'm thinking about it from the perspective of the entirety of the player base. The problem is that once you're skilled enough that killing dragonfly is just part of your pre/early winter routine, it becomes just a matter of deconstructing some scaled floors (in which case I of course agree with you.) But this becomes less realistic as the skill level of the group of whoever is playing goes down, eventually becoming an impossibility. When I initially disagreed with you on this, it's because I was trying to factor in the skill level of the player base as a whole.

Sorry if this post was too verbose, I deemed it necessary to be as clear as possible.

 

[00petar00]

3 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

it's fine for 1 scaled furnace not to overheat you at every point of the year, you only need to kill dfly once then deconstruct scaled flooring to build more furnaces, dfly drops green gems anyway so this shouldn't be a problem

dwarf stars are the underwhelming ones for me

I disagree with you about star caller/moon caller staff being underwhelming. If you use star caller staff until it has only 1 use left, it will last 66.5 days and if you turn it into a moon caller staff that will last another 100 days and that can cool you down for 5 summers if you aren't in the caves.

In total 166.5 days of light with heating/cooling and the recipe is 4 nightmare fuel, 2 living logs and 2 yellow gems that you can cut in half with construction amulet. 

[Guille6785]

27 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

I disagree with you about star caller/moon caller staff being underwhelming. If you use star caller staff until it has only 1 use left, it will last 66.5 days and if you turn it into a moon caller staff that will last another 100 days and that can cool you down for 5 summers if you aren't in the caves.

In total 166.5 days of light with heating/cooling and the recipe is 4 nightmare fuel, 2 living logs and 2 yellow gems that you can cut in half with construction amulet. 

I was talking about the max heat per dwarf star

[00petar00]

7 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

I was talking about the max heat per dwarf star

I understood that but if we are talking about balance of an item, it is pretty considerable how long it lasts and how many uses it has, it would be too much if on top of that, it heated thermal stones to maximum temperature, the durability would probably need to be 1/3 of what it currently is if that was added.

[Frogzard]

5 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

I understood that but if we are talking about balance of an item, it is pretty considerable how long it lasts and how many uses it has, it would be too much if on top of that, it heated thermal stones to maximum temperature, the durability would probably need to be 1/3 of what it currently is if that was added.

I think from a balance standpoint an item is not overtuned until it significantly detracts from meaningful decision making. In this case, I don't think it does that because there is still good incentive to burn a tree instead of using a star caller staff. If you have a torch and a star caller staff and you're out in the middle of winter on the way back to base and your thermal stone just turned white, giving +40 temperature is not going to cause you to use the staff over a tree. You're still going to burn the tree instead because it costs almost nothing and they're everywhere.

[00petar00]

1 minute ago, Frogzard said:

I think from a balance standpoint an item is not overtuned until it significantly detracts from meaningful decision making. In this case, I don't think it does that because there is still good incentive to burn a tree instead of using a star caller staff. If you have a torch and a star caller staff and you're out in the middle of winter on the way back to base and your thermal stone just turned white, giving +40 temperature is not going to cause you to use the staff over a tree. You're still going to burn the tree instead because it costs almost nothing and they're everywhere.

You are just taking into consideration something very specific and i usually never carry torches once i have star caller staff, so i'd still use that instead although what you said can happen but star caller or moon caller staff have other uses too for example to stay within the temperature range during boss fights or to light up an area where you'll spend some time in.

You can't really just gloss over that it can last 166.5 days, even if you are not using it to that degree where you stay near every dwarf star for the maximum duration for the full value, it still lasts a long time.

[Frogzard]

13 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

You are just taking into consideration something very specific and i usually never carry torches once i have star caller staff, so i'd still use that instead

It's not specific at all, if you're away from your base during winter and you're not in the caves there's a pretty good chance that there are trees at least a few screens nearby. Are you telling me that everytime you need to recharge your thermal stone and you're away from base you use your star caller staff instead of just gathering a few grass and twigs and lighting a tree on fire?

25 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

 but star caller or moon caller staff have other uses too for example to stay within the temperature range during boss fights or to light up an area where you'll spend some time in.

This is a pretty good argument. Afterall, if the main reason you're going to use the staff is to light up areas and be warm enough to not freeze, why does it matter how hot it is a long as it warms you up? I think the main reason it should warm you up even more is to make certain parts of the caves more accessible during winter. Have you ever tried running to the ruins to make an item at the station during winter while it was raining in the caves? Thermal stones excel here because you already have to sacrifice a head/body slot to deal with the rain, and with my proposed change dwarf stars would allow about an extra 3 minutes before the stone turns cold.

35 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

You can't really just gloss over that it can last 166.5 days, even if you are not using it to that degree where you stay near every dwarf star for the maximum duration for the full value, it still lasts a long time.

I think that in this case you can gloss over it for pretty much the same reason I made in my previous post. What other way is there to determine if an item is OP besides comparing it to the other options that it competes with? The reason burning trees remains a viable alternative is because it's cheap and readily available. Making the star hotter will not change this, it'll just make traversing the caves during winter (a situation in which there are already no trees anyway) less of a pain.

[00petar00]

2 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

It's not specific at all, if you're away from your base during winter and you're not in the caves there's a pretty good chance that there are trees at least a few screens nearby. Are you telling me that everytime you need to recharge your thermal stone and you're away from base you use your star caller staff instead of just gathering a few grass and twigs and lighting a tree on fire?

I play Wanda a lot so i can teleport and don't need to travel long distances and even when i don't play her, i usually build my base in the middle of the map, i very rarely need to use a tree to heat up. Using beefalo hat and thermal stone lasts me enough to not need any more heating before coming back to base, if i am fighting bosses i use star caller's staff and that is the only situation where i usually need it.

6 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

This is a pretty good argument. Afterall, if the main reason you're going to use the staff is to light up areas and be warm enough to not freeze, why does it matter how hot it is a long as it warms you up? I think the main reason it should warm you up even more is to make certain parts of the caves more accessible during winter. Have you ever tried running to the ruins to make an item at the station during winter while it was raining in the caves? Thermal stones excel here because you already have to sacrifice a head/body slot to deal with the rain, and with my proposed change dwarf stars would allow about an extra 3 minutes before the stone turns cold.

Because it is already a pretty strong item, it doesn't need buffs and winter is the worst season to ruins rush, i personally never do it during winter so i can't comment on that.

9 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

I think that in this case you can gloss over it for pretty much the same reason I made in my previous post. What other way is there to determine if an item is OP besides comparing it to the other options that it competes with? The reason burning trees remains a viable alternative is because it's cheap and readily available. Making the star hotter will not change this, it'll just make traversing the caves during winter (a situation in which there are already no trees anyway) less of a pain.

it already has enough uses in the game, it doesn't need more, especially with the durability it currently has. If it ever heated up so to maximum like lava ponds, it would need to be nerfed to have 1/3 of the durability it currently has to be balanced.

It would make winter even easier and seasonal temperatures are so easy to deal with.

[Frogzard]

25 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

it already has enough uses in the game, it doesn't need more, especially with the durability it currently has. If it ever heated up so to maximum like lava ponds, it would need to be nerfed to have 1/3 of the durability it currently has to be balanced.

It would make winter even easier and seasonal temperatures are so easy to deal with.

I wanted to reply to the rest of your post, but in the interest of productivity, I'll only reply to the most important part. It sounds like your issue here is that it gives an item that already has lots of uses even more uses. That being the case, I ask you this;

Do you think the ruins shouldn't be as restrictive as it is during winter, but that buffing the staff isn't the way to go about it because it already has so many uses? If so, then I'm open to suggestions.

Or do you think the ruins should be as restrictive as it is during winter (not just during a ruins rush, but during any winter in any year)? I understand that you can just plan things out better or wait 2 hours until it's the next season, but maybe it's just me, but I feel like I never see anyone in the ruins during winter. I wish there were more feasible ways around it aside from just waiting until it's not winter, that way there are more strategies available. I like that it's harder in some seasons than it is in others, but I feel like the scale is tipped so far in one direction that people would rather just never do anything down there during winter and that makes me kind of sad. Plus, it would still be hard with my proposal, just more manageable. That said, this is just anecdotal so if you think it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be then fair enough.

[00petar00]

14 minutes ago, Frogzard said:

Do you think the ruins shouldn't be as restrictive as it is during winter, but that buffing the staff isn't the way to go about it because it already has so many uses? If so, then I'm open to suggestions.

Or do you think the ruins should be as restrictive as it is during winter (not just during a ruins rush, but during any winter in any year)? I understand that you can just plan things out better or wait 2 hours until it's the next season, but maybe it's just me, but I feel like I never see anyone in the ruins during winter. I wish there were more feasible ways around it aside from just waiting until it's not winter, that way there are more strategies available. I like that it's harder in some seasons than it is in others, but I feel like the scale is tipped so far in one direction that people would rather just never do anything down there during winter and that makes me kind of sad. Plus, it would still be hard with my proposal, just more manageable. That said, this is just anecdotal so if you think it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be then fair enough.

I would like if ruins were easier to locate and clear in winter maybe even disable rain in caves during this season to make it accessible but this would just make cave bases much more viable, which may not be a bad thing but summer is already easy since it has no effect and i often build my main base in caves.

It isn't good that we are limited to just ruins rushing and killing dragonfly before first winter if we want to spend less resources on temperature management.If ruins rushing wasn't as bad during winter while i am able to do something else during Autumn it would be a nice change as currently every first Autumn for me is so linear.

[Friendly Grass]

From my post/guide/thing a while back:

Quote

Heat source comparison table

Heat source	Notes	Max temp raised (with -20 ambient)
Magma (500)	Up to 7.5 unit distance	90
Burning tree (220 heat)	Up to 3 unit distance	90
Level 2 campfire/fire pit (85 degrees)	1 unit distance	32.1
Level 4 campfire/fire pit (115 degrees)	1 unit distance	46.9
Dwarf star (100 heat)	Directly underneath	40
Scaled furnace (115 heat)	1 unit distance b/c furnace hitbox. Same as level 4 fire pit.	46.9
1 scaled furnace (115) + thermal on ground (60)	ONLY for players; thermals can’t warm other thermal stones.	53.6
2 scaled furnaces (115)	Both 2 units (.5 tile) distance	66.9
3 scaled furnaces (115)	All √8 unit distance	74.4
4 scaled furnaces	All √8 unit distance	80.6
Carried orange thermal stone (60)		34.2
Carried yellow thermal (40)		20.6
Carried sunfish (70)		40
2 carried orange thermals (60)		44.6
2 carried sunfish (70)		52

 

*Generally, as ambient temperature decreases to -25 and -30 during night, most of these temps will decrease by 2-6 degrees during the night.

These are realistic values calculated from an algorithm based off the source code and verified in game, and these are at a forgiving world temperature of -20 (it usually gets even colder in mid-winter).

Even a 4 scaled furnace setup doesn't max out temp in these conditions, but it gets pretty close at 80.6 / 90 in this scenario. On paper the dwarf star looks pretty sad; only raising up to 40 degrees.

The thing to be careful about when increasing warmth values is that if something can warm a thermal stone to 90 degrees, it can also warm a player to 90 degrees (difference being that the player starts dying at 70 degrees). I'd find it super annoying to have a single furnace overheat you. If a furnace could fully warm up a thermal stone then that special extra warmth should be unique to thermal stones.

[Frogzard]

11 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

I would like if ruins were easier to locate and clear in winter maybe even disable rain in caves during this season to make it accessible but this would just make cave bases much more viable, which may not be a bad thing but summer is already easy since it has no effect and i often build my main base in caves.

It isn't good that we are limited to just ruins rushing and killing dragonfly before first winter if we want to spend less resources on temperature management.If ruins rushing wasn't as bad during winter while i am able to do something else during Autumn it would be a nice change as currently every first Autumn for me is so linear.

Fair enough. I am OK with keeping the dwarf star as is if this happens.

6 minutes ago, Friendly Grass said:

The thing to be careful about when increasing warmth values is that if something can warm a thermal stone to 90 degrees, it can also warm a player to 90 degrees (difference being that the player starts dying at 70 degrees). I'd find it super annoying to have a single furnace overheat you. If a furnace could fully warm up a thermal stone then that special extra warmth should be unique to thermal stones.

This is actually something that I didn't realize until I read some of the responses. I happened upon the same conclusion as you -- that only thermal stones and not players should be heated this much. Otherwise you can't cook anything on the furnace without overheating, and you also can't place furnaces on boats because you'll always be overheated.