Bonfires with four cooking slots

[Willy Pete]

What do you guys think about the ability to make bonfires that have four cooking slots as opposed to the two granted by a normal campfire?

As it currently stands, I think you can only put X number of fuel items into a fire before you can no longer feed it (correct me if I'm wrong). Thus, I think that the easiest way to implement a bonfire would be to "upgrade" a regular fire to a bonfire once you exceed that limit. You would then be required to maintain that number of fuel items or risk having the fire die down to a regular fire once more. The change would be obvious, with an additional two cooking slots and a larger pile of fuel being burned inside the fire. If a bonfire died down while cooking, the additional two items would simply pop off like how arrows pop off of a carcass and go into a paused state or simply skip the paused state and require re-cooking.

Additional possibilities would be that bonfires aren't effected by wind, touching a bonfire would cause two burns instead of just the one, and they might be able to scare off or otherwise deter bears.

[Guest kristaok]

I think Fires should have more slots anyway, it's weird there is only two big Rocks to Cook on  

[Mroz4k]

Its really not, per the size of the campfire, I think two cooking spots are more then sufficient. I especially disagree with the idea of making a bonfire that is immune to the effect of the wind. Gathering a big pile of fuel is never really a hard thing - and the whole idea of campfire vs ovens is that ovens are rare in specific locations, and shielded from fire and offer a benefit to cooking. If it became possible to build fires that are almost as good for cooking, and immune to wind, in the outside, they would be vastly superior to these rare ovens. 

You could cook fairly fast on such bonfire, it would be placed outside so no cabin fever, it could never go out by a wind so no fear of just sleeping by it whole night in one long, sound sleep... Deep forest kind of fire would become seriously easy. Not to mention you could build such a fire right next to a carcass as you process it to keep it thawed, and cooking sizeable portions of the meat to make them less smelly to predators. With 5lvl cooking, cooked meat could even go bad and would still provide great benefits for you, so no point not to cook as you cut off more pieces of meat, or process the hide and guts.

I mean, what would be the point of, for example, having the pot belly stoves in fishing huts? With just 1 slot for cooking there, its benefit clearly is that it is a contained fire that is immune to wind. If you had a bonfire option like this, you could just build a bonfire next to the hut as you are fishing.

Absolutely no, sorry to say but the campfires have just enough cooking slots for them to make sense.

Besides, there is no type of cooking spot that would offer 3, or 4 cooking spots right now (which is frankly a bit strange. I would have hoped the "quite rare" smaller stoves like the one in Trapper´s cabin would offer 4 cooking spots. After all, most real-live stoves have 4 spots, its kinda strange that one only has 2.) Bringing this up because if there are no 4 cooking spot options yet, they would have to be specifically designed.

Fires that can be built by players everywhere should have some significant demerits, because of what they offer otherwise - protection from wildlife, protection and heat when sleeping outside, etc. They serve as traveling fires, and frankly, two cooking places are more than enough for what they are designed for.

After all, if you simply want to "heat" up something, you don't need to place it on the cooking spot, you can cook 2 steaks on a campfire and in the meantime be heating up a cup of coffee by placing it near the fire. This option is much better because even though it takes longer, you can never actually "burn" the coffee that way, it will simply always stay hot until the fire runs out.

[Doc Feral]

Building huge fires to cook more stuff can be simulated by building two or more camp fires, with some extra fuel you can cook quite fast. Littering the landscape with massed camp fires looks ugly after a while, but it's not often needed. Lumps of abandoned fires can usually be found near my first temporary shelter, as I start runs making mincemeat of every animal I get to practice cooking and fire building. Light a fire, add fuel, place meat, pull torch, light more fires, let them die and keep cooking, add more fuel, pull another torch, re-light fires... the "practice" fires may actually last enough to cook the smallest bits of meat.

Anyway, unless you're in the middle of flat nothingness like the central areas of Pleasant Valley, shelters for a good fire are easily found. Don't underestimate the wooden wonder  of hollow trees, you can use them to light a permafire and sleep buck naked in the open during a blizzard. A few feet on the inside of caves you can light fires with a lens and they'll be shielded from wind.

And if you need to thoroughly harvest everything from a carcass, locate a sheltered or fire-friendly location in the vicinity and consider quartering. It allows you to relocate the whole carcass, it saves you a lot of time if you want to skin&gut a large animal, it can be stopped and resumed and it takes not so much time that you'll die if the weather goes bad halfway. Just don't quarter wolves.