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Campfire proficiency / wet wood


Strider

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Two parts to this suggestion:
 

1. Wet wood (stop that giggling at the back!)

2. Campfire proficiency

 

1. Wet wood.

 

So as I'm sure you all know. It's a bad idea to set wood on fire when it's wet. It makes a huge ploom of grey smoke that can be seen for miles and would invariably attract the Z's.

 

I'd like to see this reflected in the game. Keep wood stored in a dry place. If you don't it would be extremely difficult to light with a notched plank and stick and would be awkward to light otherwise unless you had some sort of primer like lighter fluid. Even if you did light it the consequences as I touched on above could be disastrous.

 

Which leads me to number two.

 

2. Campfire proficiency

 

With the aforementioned in mind you could create a basic tiered system or perhaps tag it to the carpentry skill or hiking/scout perk (to simplify matters)

 

You could have a couple of levels of fire. You could have the basic fire but you could also have a 'steath fire' (not my nomenclature) something like this:

 

 

I can image this being touched on before. I'm sorry, I have scoured the forum so I apologise if I've trampled on anyone's toes. I've not done it on purpose and I'm glad to give you the credit you might deserve. As ever, I'm just spitting ideas, if you don't like them, don't hurt me, I'm only little.

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Actually.

 

Wood that is wet would be extremely difficult to chop too. Now that wouldn't apply to cutting down trees (as far as I can tell) but it might effect the players ability to saw them into planks.

 

Perhaps someone with actual experience of woodwork might have a better idea.

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Fire building might deserve it's own skill, with higher skill levels enabling more specialized fires. A low level fire builder wouldn't know about wet wood (among other things) and end up making only fires that smoke a lot and are only good for heat and basic cooking. Higher levels could allow more discreet, smokeless fires, or brighter ones for the nights, or warmer ones for winter, or meat smoking fires, etc. I could imagine the top level fire building abilities to allow for the smelting of basic metal tools by melting other stuff; Melt a kettle, make a proper axe head or spade.

 

Instead of having the player know to keep his wood dry (for instance), lets offload that unto the character by having such knowledge represented by a skill. It's probably also easier to implement than, say, adding a new property to every container in the game and mechanics to assign/change it's value based on whether or not there's a roof above it and if anyone set said roof on fire :/

 

I used to be a scout, it was a long time ago but I do recall there's WAY more to fire building than stacking sticks and striking a match. +1 to Strider's idea.

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Fire management is definitely a skill we're gonna need moving forward. Once the power goes out and fire is all we have left to heat our homes and cook our food we're gonna need to be able to learn how to manage it properly. From campfires to fireplaces to metal wood burners for heating and metal/stone ovens used for cooking there's a lot that can potentially go wrong.

 

Might be a good idea to tie it into other skills, though. Campfires would be good to tie into a survival skill of some sort. Maybe foraging and trapping? Someone who lives off the land could manage that easily. A cook would know exactly what they need as far as a wood stove for cooking is concerned. An engineer, likewise, would be good at designing any sort of equipment that burns wood for various purposes. Whether it be building a burner for making coal, heating a house, smoking meat, or cooking food, the engineering skill would help with all of that.

 

I might suggest having two different skill recipes for making some of these things, though. One for someone who specializes as an engineer and one for someone with a small amount of engineering skill but a higher level in some other skill such as cooking or survival. A cook would be able to build a wood stove for cooking with only a little engineering skill and a survivalist would be able to build a smoker with only a little engineering skill, but someone who specializes in just engineering could build both these things without having the skill that utilizes them. This would make it so that someone by themselves wouldn't be penalized for being by themselves but someone who specializes in engineering would be able to build anything as needed for a larger group without them having to put points into engineering first.

 

Sorry, kinda got off on a tangent there. If OP thinks this isn't adding anything to the topic we could split this off.

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