Secrets of Fire


SEAplane

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The fire mechanics are a work in progress and it's as of v.304, but I think there is value in hearing how we share fire knowledge.

Fuel burn times* :

stick: 10min

cedar: 1hr

fir: 1.5 hr

coal: tbd (never just wasted a lump to know)

(* subject to stocking the fire)

 

Temperature: driven by type and amount of fuel.  I think 133F may have been my max.

 

Behavior: I've now noticed that a fire loaded up to burn more than 8ish hrs followed by rest seems to burn longer than forecasted.  It does not seem to be very predictable but bug or not it is a welcomed bonus in cold areas, but I feel as if I've wasted firewood.  Seen this over by 1-4 hours in the morning.

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 I'd like to know more about stick only and its heat and effectiveness?  (Gathering is very efficient)

Has someone tested a breakeven point on just keeping it going with the extended run time?

Does a rock wall seem to really reflect heat besides just block the wind?

Use of the forge?

Uses perhaps not considered... You get the idea.  Please weigh in!

 

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  • Coal burns for 1 hour, however its heat output is a lot more than any of the other burning material. This makes it useful at the forge.
  • When melting snow, if your fire is at an "outdoor location," (the Forestry Lookout and Mountaineer's Hut count,) it will take a lot less time to melt than when indoors. 
  • It takes 20 minutes to cook meat.

As for the other things, I am not sure. I think that sticks only burn for 10 minutes and have very little heat output, but I only use them to start fires considering that it's fairly easy to collect firewood. I've heard that some people keep fires going forever, but I am not one of those people.

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Sticks give you 7.5 minutes of burn time and 1°C fire temperature boost.

http://thelongdark.wikia.com/wiki/Fire#Fuel has a complete discussion of fuels and many other aspects of fires such as the wind blowing out your fire and wasting all your fuel!

 

8 minutes ago, SEAplane said:

Has someone tested a breakeven point on just keeping it going with the extended run time?

I don't know what you are asking.

11 minutes ago, SEAplane said:

Does a rock wall seem to really reflect heat besides just block the wind?

We can't currently build fire reflectors nor does building a fire against a wall seem to give any thermal boost although in real life it certainly would. A wind shelter is an idea that has been suggested before if you search wishlist and "temporary wind shelter"

14 minutes ago, SEAplane said:

Use of the forge?

Yes! you can only raise the forge temperature to a certain limit and then you must add coal. You can't add more coal than 12 hours without wasting the valuable duration it gives so during this time, it's useful to either nap, boil water, or cook food esp coffee.

"Coal is an important component for forging as it is the only material capable of raising fire temperature above 80°C. When coal is added to the furnace, it is not restricted by the 12 hour fire life cap and can be added repeatedly. Even though the 12 hour cap stands and any life in excess of 12 hours would be lost, temperature will rise for each coal added up to the furnace temperature cap of 200°C. " - wikia

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I love using coal.  Coal is an incredibly efficient fuel source for travelling.  You can't use it for 30 minutes, but it's very portable and lightweight.  With a magnifying glass and a handful of sticks, the 30 minute wait is trivial (I boil a liter of water).  It requires no tools, so using coal saves wear and tear on hatchets.  In certain mines, the respawn rate has been decent if I'm willing to make the trip (on Voyager, don't know how it is on Stalker).  The downside is that the caves can be remote from locations where I might want to live.

I live almost exclusively on stick gathering.  I chop a couple of cedars only for starters, but the bulk of my fuel are sticks.  They are easy to collect and bring back to my base camp.

I noticed that cooking/boiling seems to be faster on stoves than in a non cooking element like fireplaces, but I haven't confirmed that conclusively yet.

My longest burning fire according to game stats was 122 hours (5 days).  I did that with firewood mostly, however, the wear and tear on my hatchets were excessive.

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  • Yeah wiki + game changes can be challenging.
  • Breakeven point being - can one measure the 'fire overrun time' and find out if there is an advantage to be gained or even a minimal loss by just keeping the fire going?
  • Wind seems to effect thermal radius more than reflector.  Count me in on wanting reflection to work.
  • Thank you for the info on coal!

 

Who's a stick fire player out there?!

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2 hours ago, rune said:

. I've heard that some people keep fires going forever, but I am not one of those people.

I'm not sure you could collect enough fuel with the current wood harvesting techniques, to keep a fire burning all the time. It takes time to find sticks, it takes time to break down limbs. It takes time to carry loads of wood back to the fire. You also have to forage food and explore so at this time, I don't think it's mathematically possible. Some old game mechanics let you get a lot of wood easily so people playing continuation of very old games can accumulate vast stock piles of loot and firewood. If they bring back multi-day blizzards, it would be in response to new wood harvesting technology. Three sticks gives you a fire of 21.5 minutes if you use accelerant. Without accelerant, you need 4 sticks to get a torch. The wikia doesn't seem to document the fire start up time and I don't recall off the top of my head. I thought I read it somewhere there but can't find it now.

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2 hours ago, SteveP said:

I'm not sure you could collect enough fuel with the current wood harvesting techniques, to keep a fire burning all the time. It takes time to find sticks, it takes time to break down limbs. It takes time to carry loads of wood back to the fire. You also have to forage food and explore so at this time, I don't think it's mathematically possible.

I had a 122 hour (5 day) fire burning.  I did this on Voyager on Mystery Lake, not sure how it would be on Stalker, but I didn't find it that bad.  I started with a large stockpile of wood, enough for 3-4 days, before I started the fire.  I actually had it running for more than 122 hours, but it went out a couple of times because I overextended some of my outdoor trips.

There is a lot of firewood in close proximity to ML Trapper's Cabin, so I didn't have any trouble maintaining my firewood stock without traveling far.  Before going out to chop wood, I threw in 3 fir logs (3x1.5hr) and 2 cedar (2x1hr) for about 6.5 hour burn.  All I had to do was find 1 fir and 1 cedar in order to replenish what I used, but I would often get more than that.  I also collected all available sticks for free fire.

Food wasn't an issue because the wolf outside Trappers would kill a deer every few days.  I would kill or scare the wolf, and take the free meat.

In the end, I had to abandon it not because I ran out of firewood, but because my hatchets were getting too worn down.  I made a plan to go to Desolation Point to make a large hatchet supply to see if I could keep the fire going longer, but I died en route before I could continue my experiment.

This worked very well at ML Trappers, but this did not work at all for PV Farmhouse when I tried it.  The available firewood is too far from the Farmhouse in order to be efficient about collection.  It was a waste of fuel.

longestfire.jpg

Someday I will try to break my record, but I'm working on other objectives.

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It's not impossible to keep a fire going 24/7, but it is impractical. If you know where bundles of sticks are, that can get you several hours of burn time for an hour of gathering. Chopping limbs is net positive burn time for cedar, and especially fir. If there are coal-bearing mines nearby that;s another decent source of fuel and it is net positive even if you assume you need to take a torch or two from the fire you have in order to explore the cave/mine. 

All of this fuel will begin to run dry, of course. After several days you will be wanting to see a blizzard to bring limbs back. But even if you're travelling several hundred metres to gather wood, the walking time isn't incredibly significant. The main drain on your ability to keep the fire going is the time you need to devote to sleeping, cooking food, boiling water, or doing anything time consuming that isn't wood harvesting, such as mending clothes, sharpening the hatchet, hunting/harvesting meat.

The only real advantage of maintaining a permanent fire is the temperature bonus. Once it has maxed out at 80 degrees, you'll thaw out in minutes. If you're struggling to stay above zero in the environment without a fire, this is valuable because a new fire might require 2-3 hours of fuel just to get it warm enough to start heating you up, and if it's only just getting above zero, it'll take about that long before you're fully warmed. 

But then, you'll be burning a LOT more fuel trying to hold on to that heat bonus than you ever would building a new fire when you need it.

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3 hours ago, LucidFugue said:

After several days you will be wanting to see a blizzard to bring limbs back.

Had not considered limb respawn was weather related, always seemed about 10days for me.  (Hard to say for me as stats total time is 150 days with 20 blizzards total.)

On the constant fire, IF the 12hr load with rest was picking up 1-4 hrs extra burn time, I just wondered if a 2-4hr 'nap' could stretch out the run time if you kept stoking the fire, resting, working, stoking, rest etc.

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On rest times not being exact, I'm usually catching 1-2 hour naps to fill up my temperature bar between journeys outside when I have a fire going and no need to boil water or cook food. I'll always try to sleep for less than the fire has left time wise, and usually have a bonus 15-30 minutes.

I always assumed that the fire time was accurate, and I wasn't sleeping for exactly x hours, not the other way around as you are implying. 

Since the precise time was removed from the game clock, I guess you'd need to take estimates from calorie burn rates to determine if you really are sleeping for that amount of time and the fire does burn longer than indicated. 

Nevertheless, I don't think how you sleep matters in terms of maintaining  a permafire beyond maximising your opportunity to gather wood.  I'll save limbs that are close to the house for collection during  night/fog/blizzard, and take advantage of the warmest part of the day to gather as much as I can further afield. If it is freezing out, I'll harvest 1 limb, add it all to the fire, nap for 1 hour, then head out again.

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10 hours ago, SEAplane said:

Had not considered limb respawn was weather related, always seemed about 10days for me.  (Hard to say for me as stats total time is 150 days with 20 blizzards total.)

I don't know about limbs (haven't really paid much attention to them as I mainly burn sticks), but the spawning of sticks and branches is not weather related. Sticks simply spawn about every 2 days, branches seem to take a little longer but not sure how much.

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When someone noted on the forums that sticks were respawning after a blizzard, I thought that was pretty cool. But when I started paying attention to it, I noticed there were plenty of times that no new sticks had spawned after a blizzard or new sticks had spawned when the weather had been fine. I also noticed that, taking the same route every day, when I picked up all sticks the next day there would be no new sticks, but the day after there would be. No matter the weather I had in the mean time.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The "8 min left" fire duration means that your fire is currently being blown out by strong winds. You can (theoretically) keep it at 8min left for extended periods of time by adding a stick every 7 min, but that doesn't make much sense ofc. Better abandon the old campfire and build a new one somewhere where it's protected from the wind. :winky:

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