Fire duration

[Klobberthon]

Ok so I know that fires 'timers' can be sped up by wind conditions.  What I am wondering is 1) are there other factors affecting the amount of time the fire actually lasts compared to what it initially says when you add fuel? 2) If a fire begins to become affected by winds after being lit for awhile, will the timer change to reflect the new conditions or will, for example, 20 min shown actually last 5 min in windy conditions.

I am finding that my cooking times will not always line up with my fire times.  This makes sense if the fire becomes affected by wind and the duration is reduced.  What doesn't make sense to me is when the fire actually lasts longer than it originally said (eg I fueled a fire for somewhere around 2hr 20min for a bear steak that was going to take 2 hours.  After passing some time, I found the bear steak was to be completed in 30 min but I still had 1hr 15min left on the fire.)  So the gap had increased.

TLDR.  What are the different factors that can affect an outdoor fire and do the timers shown reflect the current conditions?

Thanks to anyone that can shed light for me 

[EricTheGreat12]

9 minutes ago, Klobberthon said:

Ok so I know that fires 'timers' can be sped up by wind conditions.  What I am wondering is 1) are there other factors affecting the amount of time the fire actually lasts compared to what it initially says when you add fuel? 2) If a fire begins to become affected by winds after being lit for awhile, will the timer change to reflect the new conditions or will, for example, 20 min shown actually last 5 min in windy conditions.

TLDR.  What are the different factors that can affect an outdoor fire and do the timers shown reflect the current conditions?

Thanks to anyone that can shed light for me 

Yes, timers are based on the current conditions: I started a fire next to the Hunting Lodge a while back, and my 45 minutes easily went down to 10 and then diminished considerably quickly when the early blizzard winds started showing up

[Klobberthon]

Just now, EricTheGreat12 said:

Yes, timers are based on the current conditions: I started a fire next to the Hunting Lodge a while back, and my 45 minutes easily went down to 10 and then diminished considerably quickly.

So I suppose the opposite could be true then.  I started a fire that was sheltered by wind, but maybe it became even more sheltered over time, thus increasing the actual duration?

Side note: I guess cooking times are constant no matter the fire temperature?  Would be neat to cook meat faster with a hot fire but I haven't seen it work this way.

[EricTheGreat12]

4 minutes ago, Klobberthon said:

So I suppose the opposite could be true then.  I started a fire that was sheltered by wind, but maybe it became even more sheltered over time, thus increasing the actual duration?

Side note: I guess cooking times are constant no matter the fire temperature?  Would be neat to cook meat faster with a hot fire but I haven't seen it work this way.

Not sure how it's possible to increase time without adding wood..

 

Cooking times are not affected by the temperature of the fire. The only aspect of gameplay that changes the cooking times are the weight of the meat that you wish to cook

[Drifter Man]

Two things:

- Strong wind blowing at the fire can reduce the duration to 9-10 minutes. The fire can be then kept alive by feeding it stick after stick every time there is only 2-3 minutes left in the fire. The game may tell you that "it is too windy to sustain this fire" but just keep trying, eventually it will take the stick and give you another few minutes.

- The actual duration of the fire (the rate at which the fuel burns) depends on the air temperature the player would be exposed to if there was no fire. There can be up to 2x bonus in fire duration compared to the nominal duration that the game presents to you. This is an artificial mechanic that makes the game easier when it is very cold outside. Note that what matters is the temperature at the player's location, not at the location of the fire. So if you start the fire in a cold location, move away from it to a warm shelter, and return to the fire afterwards, it will not benefit from the bonus for the time you were in the shelter.

Disclaimer - the mechanics may have changed since the time I studied it.

See my post on this page (22 July 2017):

 

[Hotzn]

We used to have a number of discussions about fire duration at some point in the past on these forums. I have never understood why Hinterland made the fire duration a changing factor instead of a constant one. And I don't think the system is consistent either. So falling ambient temperatures make the fire extend its duration, I get it. But I strongly doubt that the reverse applies as well - otherwise we would have heard about people dying mysteriously in their sleep (under cold, but rising ambient temperatures). There should only be constant fire duration, depending on the fuel input and nothing else. That would be much less confusing.

[nicko]

15 minutes ago, Hotzn said:

There should only be constant fire duration, depending on the fuel input and nothing else. That would be much less confusing.

I disagree, a blizzard / strong wind should defiantly have and effect on  outside fires, just like it is now. If you have problems with fires under outside elements just find a cave or building where you are protected. or am i missing your point?

[Hotzn]

44 minutes ago, nicko said:

I disagree, a blizzard / strong wind should defiantly have and effect on  outside fires, just like it is now. If you have problems with fires under outside elements just find a cave or building where you are protected. or am i missing your point?

Sorry, maybe I was unclear - of course I think strong winds and blizzards should continue to extinguish our campfires. But I don't like how the remaining fire duration is extended by dropping temperatures. It's just confusing if you hold your cursor over the fire and are given a certain duration, and then you do something (like mending, reading, cooking) and discover that much more burning time remains than you have calculated. This mechanism is hard to understand.

[sierra 117]

I believe the longer lasting fires is an intentional bonus given for having a fire outside. 

I've never seen an indoor fire last longer than stated, however times that I have slept out all night I would put  9hrs worth of fire then when I wake up from a 9hr sleep (only in fishing huts. Never sleep more than a few hours if outside /in A cave, that'  how i got my 64 day interloper run ended) i usually have between 3-4hrs remaining.

I believe you also get this bonus in the fishing hut stoves but not sure if it' the outside fire bonus / If it's something to do with using coal. 

[Khan_Drichthyes]

1 hour ago, sierra 117 said:

times that I have slept out all night I would put  9hrs worth of fire then when I wake up from a 9hr sleep (only in fishing huts. Never sleep more than a few hours if outside /in A cave, that'  how i got my 64 day interloper run ended) i usually have between 3-4hrs remaining.

I've experienced the same thing.  In my case, it was camping out in the Riken's wheelhouse. 

[Hotzn]

If I put my memory of past discussions in the TLD science community together correctly, the extension of expected fire duration has nothing to do with coal being added. It's just the dropping temperature which extends the fire duration. Of course, if you sleep at night the temperature will drop - it's comparably warm in the evening and then starts dropping, with the hours before sunrise being the coldest. So under these "normal" conditions, you would currently see your fire burning time extended. In shelters with loading screens the temperature is stable. No drop, no extension.

I really am at a loss to understand what the purpose of the extension is.

[stratvox]

6 hours ago, Hotzn said:

I really am at a loss to understand what the purpose of the extension is.

It's to help make stone age living more attractive. If you build a fire on the slightly bluer apron at the entrance to a cave, you can get a fire to burn all night with significantly less wood. Do all your cooking there and roll out your bedroll next to it and you're outside all night with guaranteed wind protection for your fire, and generally it'll only cost you about six hours worth of wood, or alternatively pump it up to 11-12 hours and wake up with five or six hours left. Another feed and it'll still be burning when you return from wood gathering and hunting for dinner to cook it up. You can keep your raw and cooked meat on the apron as well and it'll keep like it's outside. Curing and storing goods that prefer indoor conditions wrt decay rate happens in the back of the cave.

A lot of caves are far better situated wrt day to day resources than the buildings are. Once you've got good clothing and a bear skin bedroll, living in a cave can be significantly better than living in a structure. A nearby crafting table can make it nearly perfect; if all you need is an hours walk to make more bows and arrows when you need them you can be looking at a seriously easy life.

[Jolan]

13 hours ago, stratvox said:

If you build a fire on the slightly bluer apron at the entrance to a cave, you can get a fire to burn all night with significantly less wood. Do all your cooking there and roll out your bedroll next to it and you're outside all night with guaranteed wind protection for your fire, and generally it'll only cost you about six hours worth of wood,

This is why some of my favorite camps are caves - there's one in ravine, waterfall cave on timberwolf, one near the homestead in FM (not the wolf infested one).  

My only addition to this would be pay attention to the weather!  Particularly if you don't have the bearskin sleeping bag yet.  Moving back further into the cave may be prudent during a blizzard.  Depends.

[Riotintheair]

It still mechanically works exactly as @Drifter Man says. It's still extended based on the ambient air temp the player would experience without a fire.

I'm not sure I want this mechanic to be changed. I haven't felt the new cooking has dramatically expanded my fuel  consumption because getting warm usually dictated how much fuel I used in the old system, and so most of the expansion in fuel consumption to cook on fired is covered because I need to get warm anyway. However, if I lost the bonus from cold temps I'd need to dramatically increase my fuel consumption to cook and I think that burden, at least at it's full impact, would push me a little too far toward fuel collection, which is already my most time consuming weekly activity. I think if fuel got a boost in burn time we could meet in the middle and it'd be fine.

[Pillock]

22 hours ago, stratvox said:

It's to help make stone age living more attractive. If you build a fire on the slightly bluer apron at the entrance to a cave, you can get a fire to burn all night with significantly less wood. Do all your cooking there and roll out your bedroll next to it and you're outside all night with guaranteed wind protection for your fire, and generally it'll only cost you about six hours worth of wood, or alternatively pump it up to 11-12 hours and wake up with five or six hours left. Another feed and it'll still be burning when you return from wood gathering and hunting for dinner to cook it up. You can keep your raw and cooked meat on the apron as well and it'll keep like it's outside. Curing and storing goods that prefer indoor conditions wrt decay rate happens in the back of the cave.

A lot of caves are far better situated wrt day to day resources than the buildings are. Once you've got good clothing and a bear skin bedroll, living in a cave can be significantly better than living in a structure. A nearby crafting table can make it nearly perfect; if all you need is an hours walk to make more bows and arrows when you need them you can be looking at a seriously easy life.

This is very helpful information for me. I've been consistently dying of cold in and around Valley Cave, purely because I couldn't collect enough firewood to last me the nights (and mornings!) on the first few days of my recent HRV-starts. The only time I've been able to stay alive for more than a couple of nights (I have bare-minimum condition regain in my custom settings, so 'spending' condition on freezing-exploration isn't terribly viable) is when I found myself at Ice Cave.

I knew fires often burned longer than the stated time from seeing it happen on hundreds and hundreds of occasions, but somehow I'd never put two and two together and used it to good effect for sleeping in a cave. I had always thought it was better to sleep (and therefore build the fire) near the back of the cave, where the ambient temp was a bit higher. I shall change tack and see if I can get any more success by sleeping nearer the entrance. How far back does this "bluer apron" you describe extend? How many temperature 'regions' does a cave have? And it's always better to sleep in the coldest place you can find that's reliably protected by wind, in order to save fuel, yes?

To be honest, this does seem pretty counter-intuitive to me. And I'm therefore pretty skeptical as to whether I like the mechanic. I generally think it's far better if players can use real-world logic to solve in-game problems, rather than having to learn abstracted mechanics that don't apply on Planet Earth in order to succeed.

[Pillock]

On 6/20/2018 at 9:09 PM, Drifter Man said:

Note that what matters is the temperature at the player's location, not at the location of the fire. So if you start the fire in a cold location, move away from it to a warm shelter, and return to the fire afterwards, it will not benefit from the bonus for the time you were in the shelter.

This... is bonkers!

[stratvox]

I don't think I want it to be changed. The Northern Lights don't cause lights to flicker, burnt out radios to start working, or drive predators into a frenzy either. It helps with the experience... it's very nice to sit in the entrance of the cave with some venison on the fire and watch the sun set while it cooks up. It's also really nice to have a fire going at the entrance when you're stumbling your way back because a blizzard blew up while you were out gathering wood, lighting your way back to warmth and life.

With the bonus, it's very easy to end up with fires running at full temperature (+80C) after keeping one going for a day or so. 

You've got to realise that without this doing things like living at the Mountaineer's Hut would be flat out impossible; there's not enough wood around to be able to keep the fire going so you don't freeze to death at night.

It's a game. Figuring out that fires in the entrances to caves were superior in every way to fires in the back of the caves was a huge game changer. Also noting that caves are (as I said earlier) often much better situated wrt access to wood and wildlife for hunting was another one.

I go to the old civilization buildings basically in the early game so as to not die, and after I get myself on my feet it's basically only for crafting bows and arrows and the occasional article of clothing. Oh, and to loot cloth to keep my clothes in shape.

Any clothing I find basically get instantly rendered down into cloth. I found that second Cowichan Sweater just a few days ago. I was legit shocked when I found it.

Just so long as I don't do anything dumb, I'm getting this guy to 500, I can feel it.

I suspect that under current conditions this run could go into thousands of days before I'd start to really get pinched; I expect mostly for cloth to repair my gotch and scrap metal and trips to FM or DP to make tools. I haven't even been to FM and BR yet. This plus my bearskin bedroll means I can handle extremely severe weather conditions, so long as I've found shelter.

[Pillock]

2 hours ago, stratvox said:

I don't think I want it to be changed. The Northern Lights don't cause lights to flicker, burnt out radios to start working, or drive predators into a frenzy either. It helps with the experience... it's very nice to sit in the entrance of the cave with some venison on the fire and watch the sun set while it cooks up. It's also really nice to have a fire going at the entrance when you're stumbling your way back because a blizzard blew up while you were out gathering wood, lighting your way back to warmth and life.

With the bonus, it's very easy to end up with fires running at full temperature (+80C) after keeping one going for a day or so. 

I'm on the other side of the argument, I think. I'd like to see a total overhaul of fire-mechanics, if I'm honest: there's just too much about them that doesn't make sense to me.

Quite apart from the fact that sleeping outside with a fire is best done in the coldest place you can find so that the fire will last loner with less fuel - which totally goes against intuitive sense - I'd like to see the fire's temperature have a much more meaningful impact on the fire itself and on the other systems that interact with it. For example: hotter fires burning fuel more quickly; cooler fires going out if you overload them; hotter fires cooking and boiling things more quickly; bigger flames having a better predator-scare chance (including bears) while smaller ones having little-to-no effect. Stuff like that. Give the different fuel options a more meaningful impact on the state of the fire, so that you can build different types for different purposes (eg. a short, hot fire to warm you up quickly; a long, slow burner to keep going over night; a different type for cooking.) It would be more complex and require some learning, but because the mechanics would actually bear some relation to reality (unlike now),  it would feel more satisfying to figure out and use.

[Deerber]

13 minutes ago, Pillock said:

I'm on the other side of the argument, I think. I'd like to see a total overhaul of fire-mechanics, if I'm honest: there's just too much about them that doesn't make sense to me.

Quite apart from the fact that sleeping outside with a fire is best done in the coldest place you can find so that the fire will last loner with less fuel - which totally goes against intuitive sense - I'd like to see the fire's temperature have a much more meaningful impact on the fire itself and on the other systems that interact with it. For example: hotter fires burning fuel more quickly; cooler fires going out if you overload them; hotter fires cooking and boiling things more quickly; bigger flames having a better predator-scare chance (including bears) while smaller ones having little-to-no effect. Stuff like that. Give the different fuel options a more meaningful impact on the state of the fire, so that you can build different types for different purposes (eg. a short, hot fire to warm you up quickly; a long, slow burner to keep going over night; a different type for cooking.) It would be more complex and require some learning, but because the mechanics would actually bare some relation to reality (unlike now),  it would feel more satisfying to figure out and use.

+1, I love these ideas!

[Drifter Man]

I am on @Pillock's side of things here - some of the fire rules are far from intuitive. But for now they work, somehow. I hope the fire mechanics will receive an overhaul at some point.

[slvrsrfr]

This is a great conversation, I think. The dynamics of fire, and it's importance are hard to overstate. I have waxed nostalgic for the timber tepee fire of old. The new, 'rock formation/ring', a'la cooking spot(s) is nice. And are more aesthetic visually. I would like to see different types of fire-circles(maybe an entire skilltree). Ones similar to the old three stick pile, to the new double cooking spot fire-circle. Depending on locale, and maybe things in hand. An intricate rock ring may not be correct for the setting. A wishlist item. And especially if the graphic package is not gone.

And not even getting into the types of fire to build , etc..