Campfire extensions: types of fuel, cooking

[Packbat]

Earlier today I realized that I had a bunch of PZ ideas, and after throwing out the ones that are redundant with everyone else's suggestions I realized there was still a big one left: more sophisticated campfire mechanics, especially for cooking.

 

 

 

As natural as it is to run appliances via on-off switch, I would love to have a separate "Fuel" window for charcoal grills, wood stoves, and campfires for one simple reason: different materials burn differently. Drawing from my old BSA experience, I'd suggest having a simple binary split between tinder and fuel. Tinder would include books, magazines, newspapers, tissues, sturdy sticks, and twigs (the last of these you can forage from the woods), be ignited by anything - matches, lighter, or bow-drill fire starter - burn for not-very-long, and leave only ashes. Fuel would include logs and planks, be ignited by the tinder, burn for a long time, and produce coals ... which is key, because (a) you can bank the fire, which will let you start it many hours later with nothing but tinder and fuel, and (b) coals are what you use to cook on.

 

On which note: it always felt weird to me that there was no difference between stovetop, oven, and campfire for cooking purposes. A microwave egg is as different from a fried egg as a fried egg is from a boiled egg. My "make everyone carry around potholders" idea is probably ridiculous, but a simple split between frying and baking seems natural: ovens and microwaves do baking, and stoves, grills, and campfires do frying ... with one exception.

 

The exception - and I love it, it just feels so Project Zomboid - is the cooking implement that Americans call a "Dutch Oven", other Anglophones call a "Casserole Dish", and French call a "Cocotte": a nine-kilogram (twenty-pound) cast-iron pot that has legs so it can sit above coals and a lid with a lip so you can pile coals on top. It is exactly the kind of absurd thing that I'd love to see more of: terrible in the early game (all it is good for is baking or carrying water, and it's way heavier than a baking pan and a cooking pot combined), awesome in the late game (oh, the power went out three years ago? That's a shame. Here, have some berry cobbler).

 

And, of course, dev's choice whether to let people use the lid separate from the pot as a frying pan.

 

So, yeah, that's the best suggestion I've got. Hope it's amusing.

[syfy]

Dutch Oven cooking is great stuff, once you learn how to do it right.

 

a Dutch Oven would be a great addition to the game, i can guarantee there would be a number of them in Kentucky IRL, either at houses and garages or at Giga Mart, the hunting lodge,and sporting good stores.

 

great idea. for those unfamiliar with them, click this link to see some of the different styles

[Impetiso]

I like the idea, but if you separate fuel and tinder, you should consider separating the cooking place as well, so you can cook the things you want to cook and burn the things you don't want to (cooking a stir fry and burning a rotten raddish, for example). That way you can cook and get rid of unwanted things (like broken a broken rolling pin or a suspicious corpse)

[Packbat]

@Impetiso: If I'm understanding your suggestion correctly, in terms of game mechanics, campfires et al. would operate as double-containers: a Fuel container and a Food container. As long as the Fuel container had a fire in it, whatever you put in the Food container would cook. That's roughly what I was imagining as well.

That said, weirdly, I feel as if it might be better to do the opposite. Think about it: when you cook a Raw Steak, first the temperature rises, then a Cooking meter appears, then - when it's done - a Burning meter appears. What if you handled fire the same way?

 

...I have to think this through. I'll be back.

[Viceroy]

Ah nice, we call it a Potjie instead of a Dutch oven. But then again we are Dutch settlers so it'd be weird otherwise. We have the flat ones as the one pictured in the video above. But more fequently we have these little pots that look like old-school witch cauldrons lol.

 

 

On a more serious note, the suggestions you made here seems reasonable and could add a little depth to making fire. Also they should allow you to split fires with a shovel.

[Packbat]

Thanks, Viceroy! The basic concept - a cast-iron pot designed to be put over coals with more coals placed on top - is probably widespread, but it's a bit much to ask humanity to agree on a name for ... well, anything.
 

On a more serious note, the suggestions you made here seems reasonable and could add a little depth to making fire. Also they should allow you to split fires with a shovel.

 
You know what? I think my present thinking accomodates that. I would make a campfire a container which has its own temperature. Here's how I imagine it would go.
 

You just finished reading the "Firemaking for Beginners" skill book. It's time to make the book do double-duty by using it for kindling. You get some logs, drag one over to where you want the fire to be, and use the Build menu to combine the skill book, the log, and a pack of matches to make a Campfire.
 
When you click on the fire to check it in the Inventory window, you see the Campfire symbol in the container list with a black background, the Skill Book rapidly heating to bright red as the "Combusting" bar slowly fills, and the Log still with a black background. Soon, however, you see the background of the Campfire symbol turning red, and after that you see the background of the Log start changing color. After a few in-game minutes, the Log gets warm enough for the "Igniting" bar to appear and start filling, but you notice the "Combusting" bar on the Skill Book is almost full. To make sure that it burns long enough to light, you put one of your three surplus "Advanced Fishing" skill books in the Campfire; after a few seconds, the new book has heated to red, ignites, and shows its own "Combusting" bar. Not long after that, the "Igniting" bar fills on the Log and is replaced by a "Burning" bar; the temperature of the Campfire rises visibly and an "Unpleasantly Hot" moodle appears. You quickly doff your sweater, open a Can of Soup to make a Pot of Soup, and put it in the Campfire.
 
As you wait for the Pot of Soup to finish cooking, the "Burning" bar of the Log fills, and the Log item disappears and is replaced with a Bed of Coals item with a "Combusting" bar. The Campfire temperature drops back down, and you find yourself putting the sweater back on before the Pot of Soup finishes cooking. After you take the Pot of Soup off the fire, you add two more Logs to the fire, step back to a more comfortable distance, make yourself a Bowl of Soup, and start eating.

 
What I see happening internally is the following.

• Each item (and the fire) has a thermal inertia coefficient based on real-world weight and specific heat capacity that says how quickly the item changes temperature. For the STEM people in the audience: I think the most convenient units on this would actually be time^-1 - the highest inertia objects (Logs, Pots of Water, Planks) would have the smallest number, the lowest inertia objects (anything weighing 0.1 or less, Empty Mugs) the highest number.
• At every point in time, each item (and the fire) has a target temperature and an actual temperature. The target temperature will be either be based on its environment (if it is not on fire) or be its burning temperature (if it is). Each tick, all the objects in the container (starting with the highest thermal inertia) would check its target temperature and actual temperature, and move the actual a fraction of the remaining distance towards the target based on its thermal inertia coefficient. (This is why I suggested time^-1 - so that this fraction is just the number stored in the program.)
• Each item on fire also has a radiation temperature. This represents how much extra heat they give to their surroundings (e.g. players standing next to the fire) from their glow. If fires give off light, you can adjust the radiation heat felt by players based on distance using the lighting engine in the graphics card.
• For the campfire, the target temperature is based on a weighted average of the ambient temperature the average item temperature, plus a fraction of the total radiation temperature - that is, the sum of the radiation temperatures of everything in the fire. (Two ways that the Firemaking skill might make things easier for you: reduce the effect of ambient temperature, increase the effect of radiation temperature. This represents building your fire in a more efficient way that focuses the heat where you want it.)
• For items not on fire, the target temperature is the campfire temperature plus a fraction of the total radiation temperature. Note: this is the temperature shown in the Inventory window, not the true campfire temperature - hence the sudden drop when the Burning Log turned into Burning Coals.
• Each item affected by heat would have a temperature threshold at which the bar for being hot ("Cooking", "Burning", "Combusting", and "Igniting" are the ones I've mentioned) would start filling. When that bar fills, the item either turns into a fired version of the item with a new bar (e.g. a Wet Towel would turn into a Dry Towel and start charring) or vanishes into ashes. Ignitable items - which would include, say, Burned Bacon - would have a special Igniting bar that resets if it cools down below the igniting temperature; other bars would remain at whatever point they reached. Tinder materials would have extremely short Igniting bars, but for everything else it would vary - longer for Logs than for Planks or Twigs. Stable materials - e.g. empty cookware, golf clubs, and skeletons - would have no bar.
• As I implied above, a Burning Corpse would turn into Bones, not simply ashes. You can't burn bones on a campfire (although they might have agricultural value when smashed). Also, the Dessicating bar for a corpse would take a really log time to fill.

I have a bunch of other ideas, but that's already enough for a post. Let me know if it is confusing how confusing it is.

 

Edit: I would also like to apologize for not hiding the game mechanics under some kind of tag - I don't know which one to use.