Firepit changes

[williams_482]

In 1.22 the firepit was changed so that when cooking a stack of items, it would no longer reduce the temperature of the entire stack to zero and start over after each individual item cooked. That's a good change; the old way didn't make a lot of sense and could be gamed manually (remove the hot stack right before something cooks, feed hot items in one at a time). Personally I had installed a mod to "fix" it which had some accidentally beneficial side effects.

To balance that change, stack heating time is now proportional to stack size. That makes sense, but in practice it feels far, far too punishing. I have just spent an entire day heating 64 flint to it's calcination temperature, burning through roughly three stacks of peat and 16 brown coal in the process, and now I'm facing the prospect of this all being to waste if my limited supply of charcoal runs out while pieces are still cooking. Needless to say, this feels harsh.

To add insult to injury, things in the firepit seem to be cooling down substantially faster in 1.22-rc2 than they did in 1.21.6 and before. If stuff is going to take a literal day to heat up, it really shouldn't cool by a few hundred degrees in under a minute. 

My suggestion would be to make the heating cost of a stack non-linear in a way that makes heating larger stacks meaningfully quicker and more efficient than heating two half sized stacks. I don't have any physics based argument for this, only complaints that babying a fire for as long as I have is really not fun. 

[Shoom]

I know what you mean, I cooked 32 quicklime for mortar yesterday, it took something like 4 in-game days just to get the temperature up. 

What I resorted to doing was to burn full logs instead of firewood/peat, one oak log for instance burns for 98 seconds up to 800 degrees, firewood/peat only last 25 seconds a piece so just for the sake of getting temperature up I think it's more effective, a full stack of 16 oak logs gives you 1568 seconds of burn time vs ~800 seconds for firewood/peat.

For quicklime though it wasn't that big of a problem as it cooks at 825 degrees, I can see things requiring higher temperature and thus more valuable fuel being a bit harsh indeed.

 

[PoisonedPawn777]

Pretty sure it's a placeholder while a better alternative is developed. But agree, too resource intensive as it stands.

[LadyWYT]

I don't mind that large stacks take a long time to heat up, but I do think that they(in this case meaning the firepit and item stack) should take a proportionally longer time to cool down as well. In that fashion, it would be easy enough for a player to get a large stack of stuff up to temperature and then add a bit of fuel every now and then, rather than needing to drop a small stack of fuel just to keep the stuff cooking.

Currently, the change doesn't exactly feel horrible, but it does feel a bit overtuned so I do expect to see it adjusted a bit sometime in the future.

[Blaiyze]

I was excited to see the firepit change in the changelog, as I too have been using a firepit mod. Alas, burn rate is a bit too fast IMO so I usually manually edit how long firewood for ex burns. It's very likely that this will change further, especially once the status effect system is up and running.

Personally, I'm intrigued if the status effect system will impact actually heating indoors via firepit/other heat sources. If that's the case, burn length will likely have to be adjusted to prevent players from having to clearcut an entire forest for fuel for winter.

[MKMoose]

22 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

To add insult to injury, things in the firepit seem to be cooling down substantially faster in 1.22-rc2 than they did in 1.21.6 and before. If stuff is going to take a literal day to heat up, it really shouldn't cool by a few hundred degrees in under a minute. 

This has apparently been changed to make the tempering process less tedious. A fix to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, if you ask me, but anyways. I think the best way to improve it, possibly alongside the change mentioned above by @LadyWYT, would be to make the cooling rate vary in different containers as well - it's only natural that a firepit should retain its temperature much longer than a flat piece of metal exposed to air.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't mind that large stacks take a long time to heat up, but I do think that they(in this case meaning the firepit and item stack) should take a proportionally longer time to cool down as well. In that fashion, it would be easy enough for a player to get a large stack of stuff up to temperature and then add a bit of fuel every now and then, rather than needing to drop a small stack of fuel just to keep the stuff cooking.

Currently, the change doesn't exactly feel horrible, but it does feel a bit overtuned so I do expect to see it adjusted a bit sometime in the future.

Came here to echo this, essentially. I'm halfway tempted to dive into the code and see where they determined how long it takes to heat up a stack and apply the same algorithm in reverse to the cooling down. More mass = more storage of heat... It's just basic thermodynamics. I appreciate what the dev team was going for here, but I think they missed on this one.

Edited 10 hours ago by Teh Pizza Lady
spelling; because i'm tired

[williams_482]

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

This has apparently been changed to make the tempering process less tedious. A fix to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, if you ask me, but anyways. I think the best way to improve it, possibly alongside the change mentioned above by @LadyWYT, would be to make the cooling rate vary in different containers as well - it's only natural that a firepit should retain its temperature much longer than a flat piece of metal exposed to air.

I definitely don't object to "slow" cooling of metal workpieces happening faster, and tempering/case hardening/etc are all contexts where we should be leaving stuff to cool even in a maximally realistic metalworking setup. Quite like the idea of cooling rates varying by container, if they don't already. It seemed to me in earlier versions that crucibles held in heat better than cooked food, for example. But perhaps I was wrong about that? Crucibles seem to be every bit as rapid-cooling as anything else in this update.