Tinder / Use after level 4 fire starting


Ahatch

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After one gets the level 4 fire starting and you no longer need tinder it would be nice to be able to throw the tinder into the fire and get a few extra minutes of burning time on a fire. So you pick 40 cat tail heads and have a way to use them up even if you only get a short fire. 

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Guest kristaok

I end up having to stash all of my Tinders away in Trash Bins, and Drawers. So I agree it would be nice to permanently get rid of them. 

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Pretty sure its level 3 firestarting that makes the tinder irrelevant. Unless they changed it, but I dont think so.

I think it should still matter. Certain tinders can help with firestarting tremendously. For example the almost useless birch bark which already is in the game is an amazing tinder for fire starting, its so soaked in natural oils that it burns bright and easily even if its wet. Using a tinder like that to start a fire should improve the chance, even if just by +5 to +10%.

That being said, what you propose makes no sense and would actually be quite immersion breaking. Tinder does not burn at all, it would not prolong the fire as it would burn up basically instantly on an already active campfire. I get the idea - yall are tired of having tons of tinder plugs lying around. Id reccomend you put them to a different use, then. Some people use them to mark paths towards shelter in case of a blizzard. Which is not a particularly bad idea. You can use these tinder plugs to create patterns on the ground that points to various places, so in case of a heavy fog or blizzard, you can use these to orientate yourself towards a shelter, for example. Or a cache with supplies.

But you cant expect to use them to increase the duration of your fire, the whole point of tinder is that its is separated into particles so small you can bring even embers into flames. If you put it on active flames, they will evaporate. Wont even increase the temperature at all.

Another use could be that the tinder plugs would be used in some sort of crafting recipe in the future. 

Edited by Mroz4k
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Tinder tends to go up in a flash, so if you did have it extend the duration of a fire, it should require something like 10 tinder to extend by 1 minute, and at that point who's going to bother.  A way to keep it useful would be to allow tinder to raise the temperature by half a degree or something.  So one stick and 10 tinder, you get a +6C fire for 7 minutes.  Not terribly useful by itself, but a way to make tinder actually useful and something you'd possibly consider creating deliberately, to quickly raise a forge temp before adding coal.

Edit: I might need to explain my thinking more.  Using tinder as a way to raise temp without extending time can be a tactical decision.  If you try to get a fire up to 80C with sticks alone, before adding coal, you have to add like 10 hours worth of burn time.  Then add 2 coal, and you're at 140C....and have to wait an hour until adding that 3rd coal to bring it over the 150C mark.  That's a 13 hour delay between starting the fire, and actually getting to work.  Or instead, get an hour of fuel in there, toss in a boatload of tinder to spike that fire to 80C while still only having 1 hour of burn time, then toss in your coal after a half hour and get to work that afternoon.

Edited by ajb1978
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Or, they could decrease the base fire starting skill by 10%, and have the tinder increase the fire starting chance by 5%, and some better types of tinder would increase the fire starting chance by 10%. 

I think that would be more realistic, and would make the early low skills more difficult (but not that much, since you can always use books and that puts you rather high regardless of the skill), but most importantly, they would actually make tinder "optional" - which is something you dont have to use, but if you chose to use it, it gives you some benefits.

 
 
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1 hour ago, ajb1978 said:

Edit: I might need to explain my thinking more.  Using tinder as a way to raise temp without extending time can be a tactical decision.  If you try to get a fire up to 80C with sticks alone, before adding coal, you have to add like 10 hours worth of burn time.  Then add 2 coal, and you're at 140C....and have to wait an hour until adding that 3rd coal to bring it over the 150C mark.  That's a 13 hour delay between starting the fire, and actually getting to work.  Or instead, get an hour of fuel in there, toss in a boatload of tinder to spike that fire to 80C while still only having 1 hour of burn time, then toss in your coal after a half hour and get to work that afternoon.

I get the theory behind it, and for that reason I would not like for it to work that, because it would be somewhat immersion breaking. I think its awesome that if you use mostly wood to bring furnace to life, you need to wait some time to let it burn out before you can add coal... since a furnace needs some time to be brought to life, to a high enough temperature that allows you to shape metal... 

Besides, it is not really that difficult - since as far as I know, you can still take a torch out of the furnace, which brings the temp down by 1°C, but also lowers the time of the fire burning by 10 minutes, meaning you can easily make some space in a furnace to put coal in, at a loss of some temperature.

(but why, anyway? Coal is probably the easiest to collect, lightest-to-burn time kind of fuel within the game... and it is pretty plentiful in caves around Great Bear. I never found a need to conserve it, then again I regularly make trips to coal mines to collect it)

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13 minutes ago, Mroz4k said:

(but why, anyway? Coal is probably the easiest to collect, lightest-to-burn time kind of fuel within the game... and it is pretty plentiful in caves around Great Bear. I never found a need to conserve it, then again I regularly make trips to coal mines to collect it)

I concur with this. I don't understand the fetish to save coal by using a ton of sticks to heat up a furnace. I've seen countless streamers do it and I still think it's a waste of time. By the time I go back to FM for another forge run, the coal have respawned and there is easily at minimum 15 pieces of coal already respawned between the caves in FM alone.

The trade off of 80 sticks for 4 pieces of coal as a means of optimizing or "min-maxing" fuel is just absurd. It makes no difference in the short or in the long run. It's even more absurd in Desolation Point, where coal is plentiful and sticks relatively scarce. With firestarting level 5 it is impossible given that 80 sticks will give you 15 hours of fire(10 hours at lvl 1 firestarting), unless you're sleeping on that fire you pretty much just wasted fuel. / rant

I'm in full agreement with the OP in regards to tinder's patent uselessness. All options presented in this thread are good and viable. I personally like the idea of providing a modest temperature increase like the suggested 0.5ºC. Other than that, we could use them  to craft tinder bundles ( mixing up bark, cat tail heads and plugs for instance ) that speed up the firestarting process, etc. Plenty of good possibilities to overhaul the firemaking mechanic.

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Lol! I just use tinder plugs to mark paths across ice, or open stretches of snow, where there are few landmarks, so i can more easily navigate home in fog or a blizzard. And sometimes I just have fun arranging them into "drawings" in the snow.  Lots of good screenshots of people making huge word signs on the snow and ice. Don't make so many tinder plugs, maybe? Only make 5 or 6 at a time, rather than having a stockpile of 300 or more? And don't pick up every last piece of newsprint or stack of paper laying around, You can leave them sit there.  :)

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It'd be great to have tinder as another way to raise a fire's temperature, if only slightly. I'm sure we've all been in the situation when you just want to get an extra degree of heat, to stop your condition loss. I think this would be a nice little addition.

It does seem unrealistic to me to not need tinder when you level up your fire skill though. I can't imagine starting a fire with only some reclaimed wood and a single match lol. So personally, I'd rather tinder stay as a necessity in fire starting no matter what your skill level is. 

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On ‎11‎/‎2‎/‎2018 at 8:23 PM, ManicManiac said:

- Items usable as tinder should provide at least some kind of bonus for starting fires (even if only a small one), it only makes sense...  Otherwise it's a completely wasted resource after your get your fire starting skill to level 3.  In a game like this, nothing should be useless.  Right now, after level 3 tinder is only good for filling the pockets of corpses. :P


Here are my thoughts on the matter.  I agree that tinder should not be irrelevant after one achieves level 3 fire starting... more that the various types of tinder should grant a small boost to the chances of starting a fire or shortening the amount of time it takes to get the fire going...  This way it stays useful for much longer. 

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I support the idea of different tinder types give different fire starting chances. After level 3 make tinder optional but allow us to use it for better fire starting chances.

 

Technically the idea of tinder raising temperature has sense to increase it's usefulness as an item, but it is not very realistic as others said. I would love to see another type of wood -- the birch wood that is lightweight, has reasonably high temperatures but is a fast-burner (i.e. time addition is not very significant).

Edited by Wormer
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