🔥 Suggestion: Bonfires 🔥

[David Stark]

Bonfires are large fires constructed by placing 16 sticks followed by 32 logs. When lit, they produce a large flame and smoke plume and burn for two days. They cannot be used for cooking. Like pit kilns, they set nearby things on fire, including any flammable items several blocks up, due to the tall flames. Once they have burned out, any immediately adjacent rock blocks become "brittle", allowing them to be broken by hand, yielding the usual stone and ore pieces.

Why?

1. They look really cool in your village center, wintry mead hall, great festival, or doom fortress.
2. They provide a very slow and expensive way to mine ores without having unlocked the tools for them. This is how ores were actually mined in the copper age, by setting up large fires against ore faces. (If being able to mine any ores is OP, restrict this to working with softer ores that would be mineable with copper tools.)

[l33tmaan]

Wait, they were literally cooking rock to make it easier to mine? 
Why am I not surprised by this?

[David Stark]

Yep, thermal stress from the fire will cause the rock to crack. Checking Wikipedia, it's apparently called fire-setting.

[AdrianNumbers]

Actually it could be a way to extend stone age in game . Surface stones could act as "marks" with only traces of copper/lead and so on , they would only provide information that the vein is there but to get to it you would need to remove the soil and then make the bonfire , depending on how deep (how many stone layers you need to get through) it is you might need to lit more than one bonfire to get to the ore.

[Maelstrom]

It would make those low copper starts a little easier.

[David Stark]

Yeah. Of course you can also grind your way to enough copper using panning, but giant fires is cooler, right?

[Vinter Nacht]

I was already interested when you started... I became VERY interested when you mentioned the 'brittle rock' aspect.  It would probably encourage me to change the tier to mine even copper to Tier 2. I would imagine the best way to do this would be to lower the mining tier of the effected wall.  This should (?) resolve the issue of "Any Ore", especially if modifications are made to how copper tools interact with the rock face.

My suggestion?  Put in a configurable option that either 'lowers the mining tier of the rock by 1' or 'makes mineable by any tier of tool'.

 

 

Edited December 8, 2021 by Vinter Nacht

[Hal13]

Such a bonfire would do fine for using it on top of a light house too and it gave us a way to heat/illuminate our homes independently from the burnduration of fuels (which is measured in realtime whereas those 2 days would be measured using the ingame time).

maybe one could actually use it for cooking too, i mean just put a pot near it and the contents will get hot or at least won't get cold.

 

6 hours ago, Vinter Nacht said:

'lowers the mining tier of the rock by 1'

Problem with that is we don't have tools for breaking rocks you need tier1 tools for, but i wouldn't mind a stone hammer (tier 1 mining tool), that only can break rocks of tier 1 and lower and change any stone type that is too soft to knapp to tier 1. i mean theoretically that hammer would be able to break anything of equal or lower hardness, the old egyptians did use granite rocks and wedges to quarry granite and get the blocks in shape for example.

Or reduce it by 2 that way the rocks of the copper tier could be broken by hand and anything higher (atm there is no rock/ore that is higher than tier 3) would still need at least copper.

i can say for sure even a campfire can become hot enough to crack stones, just needs some time (about a summer night will do, okay we used 3 small trees over that night and the grass about 1 meter around the fire didn't recover for months as we boiled the earth when we tried to put it out in the morning), a real pyre can do that faster (but we are speaking about a cubic meter, that could take a while)...

[Vinter Nacht]

13 minutes ago, Hal13 said:

Problem with that is we don't have tools for breaking rocks you need tier1 tools for, but i wouldn't mind a stone hammer (tier 1 mining tool), that only can break rocks of tier 1 and lower and change any stone type that is too soft to knapp to tier 1. i mean theoretically that hammer would be able to break anything of equal or lower hardness, the old egyptians did use granite rocks and wedges to quarry granite and get the blocks in shape for example/

Or reduce it by 2 that way the rocks of the copper tier could be broken by hand and anything higher (atm there is no rock/ore that is higher than tier 3) would still need at least copper.

i can say for sure even a campfire can become hot enough to crack stones, just needs some time (about a summer night will do, okay we used 3 small trees over that night and the grass about 1 meter around the fire didn't recover for months as we boiled the earth when we tried to put it out in the morning), a real pyre can do that faster (but we are speaking about a cubic meter, that could take a while)...

I need to get in game to confirm this, but Tier 1 *is* copper. And since you can make a copper pick from copper nuggets found on the ground, you have your entry to tier 1 mining.  It's also the first valid argument for adding a stone hammer I've heard.

Crazy thought -> Have the stones react to the watering can, crumbling into pieces when you sprinkle it.  There's your early game "pick."

[Hal13]

On 12/8/2021 at 11:01 PM, Vinter Nacht said:

I need to get in game to confirm this, but Tier 1 *is* copper.

nope copper is tier 2 stone is tier 1.

But I mixed up the posts, and I thought you were the one suggesting surface ores should only give information on the ores that can be found and not give nuggets anymore.

[Vinter Nacht]

18 hours ago, Hal13 said:

nope copper is tier 2 stone is tier 1.

But I mixed up the posts, and I thought you were the one suggesting surface ores should only give information on the ores that can be found and not give nuggets anymore.

Yeah, that would be decidedly problematic.  It would also largely be historically inaccurate. There's a strong suspicion that tin was first discovered as it was accidentally smelted in campfires.

[David Stark]

I have now made this into a mod.

[ArZog Magescales]

On 8/6/2021 at 10:45 AM, David Stark said:

Yep, thermal stress from the fire will cause the rock to crack. Checking Wikipedia, it's apparently called fire-setting.

This is the coolest fact I've learned in while.

[Maelstrom]

On 12/11/2021 at 2:18 PM, David Stark said:

I have now made this into a mod.

AWESOME!  Does it work on non-ore bearing rock as well?  Sometimes that surface copper is a few blocks below the soil. 

[David Stark]

Yes!

[Omega Haxors]

On 12/11/2021 at 1:18 PM, David Stark said:

I have now made this into a mod.

I playtested it awhile back and it's great, but there's two bits of feedback I'd like to contribute

First there needs to be a small increase to the range that bonfires crack. Right now it only cracks two blocks, the one directly adjacent and the one behind it. I would like to see this increased so that it cracks all blocks directly next to the initial block rather than just the one behind it. The next point's kinda minor but I'd love to see the light color shifted more red to really sell the heat that thing puts off. Default fires put off a surprisingly white light which is fine for the smaller fires, but for something that big?

EDIT: I patched the 2nd point myself, the line to change is

	lightHsvByType: {
		"bonfire-extinct": [3, 7, 2],
		"bonfire-lit": [3, 14, 40],
	},

I mean just look at that beautiful orange glow.

Edited December 16, 2021 by Omega Haxors

[Omega Haxors]

On 12/14/2021 at 9:49 AM, Maelstrom said:

AWESOME!  Does it work on non-ore bearing rock as well?  Sometimes that surface copper is a few blocks below the soil. 

It doesn't work on blocks below the fire, only directly next to it. In those cases you'll just have to come back at it later with a pickaxe.

[David Stark]

On 12/16/2021 at 2:11 PM, Omega Haxors said:

It doesn't work on blocks below the fire, only directly next to it. In those cases you'll just have to come back at it later with a pickaxe.

Ah yes, that is a mistake, I think caused by the enumeration of adjacent blocks being labelled differently than I expect. I can probably fix this tomorrow.

[David Stark]

@Omega Haxors I can't actually reproduce this problem, and I think we're talking about slightly different things? The fire cracks all six directly adjacent blocks. It doesn't crack, and isn't intended to crack, blocks that are below it and to the side.

[Hal13]

On 12/24/2021 at 5:35 PM, David Stark said:

The fire cracks all six directly adjacent blocks. It doesn't crack, and isn't intended to crack, blocks that are below it and to the side.

But doesn't all six adjacent blocks include the block beneath the fire and the blocks on its sides? left, right, front, back, up and down are the only directly adjacent blocks, right? Though I'd say it wouldn't be overpowered to add the horizontal diagonals too (meaning after cracking the one block below you could use another fire to widen it to a 3x3). it still would be only good for ores that are exposed already as each fire takes much time to do the cracking.

[David Stark]

It *does* crack the block beneath the fire. I checked repeatedly.

Edited December 26, 2021 by David Stark

[David Stark]

Using bonfires to mine for Borax.

[Smile]

Me in winter if there was bonfires:

[setne550]

Speaking of bonfires, I do think of Braziers. Except we just dump it with stuff as fuel.