Rebalanced Fuel

Rebalanced Fuel

 

If you've ever been camping before, it's possible that you might have noticed that the way fuel works in Vintage Story is a bit... weird. Most fuels burn way hotter than they're supposed to (except Coke which burns at about half its normal temperature for some reason), and they also burn insanely fast. A vanilla Vintage Story day is 1/30th that of a real day, so the 24s burn time of a stick of Firewood translates to 12 minutes in real world time. Firewood in real life burns for about 10x that long, while firepits can stay hot for hours compared to the equivalent minutes of Vintage Story.

 

In order to alleviate these issues, this mod makes changes to a number of item statistics and temperature-related functions to make fuel more varied. These changes are inspired by realism, but not necessarily restricted by them. The reason for this is that you can collect fuel in this game significantly faster in this game than you can in real life, so making all fuels burn as long as they should would completely break the balance of the game.

Changes:

Firepit:

 

Firepits now lose heat slower when below certain temperatures.

 

< 500°C = 50% heat loss rate.

< 200°C = 25% heat loss rate.

< 100°C = 5% heat loss rate.

 

This helps to simulate how firepits actually behave, with hot coals sitting under ash remaining hot for hours upon hours.

Firewood Drying:

 

Firewood in this game appears to defy physics, burning cooler than raw Logs despite having more than double the surface area. Since there's no drying process modeled, I'm going to assume this is due to the Firewood having too much moisture and needing drying.

 

To dry Firewood, all you need to do is leave it in a dry place. Your inventory and under a roof are decent options, and will take 7 in-game days to fully dry, at which point they will turn into Aged Firewood.

Aged Firewood:

 

This item already exists in Vanilla, and is found within ruins. All I've done is adjust the stats of Aged Firewood to more closely resemble what properly dried firewood would behave like.

 

Burn Temperature: 900°C

Burn Duration: 45s

 

It's worth noting that this is still a fraction of the burn time of real world firewood, but I think it's fine since Firewood burns at like double the temperature it's supposed to and is quite plentiful.

Peat:

 

Speaking of burning at double the temperature it's supposed to: Peat. It's essentially waterlogged dirt filled with decayed plant matter. Dirt doesn't burn, and water inhibits burning, so Peat usually doesn't burn very hot unless it's been heavily dried.

 

Rather than just outright nerfing Peat, I've moved it into it's own niche. Peat now burns significantly colder, but also lasts much longer than even Aged Firewood, making it good for keeping a Firepit lit and cooking, but not much else.

 

Burn Temperature: 450°C

Burn Duration: 60s

Charcoal Pit:

 

Aged Firewood isn't just a better fuel, it's a better source of Charcoal. Each log of Aged Firewood within a Charcoal Pit counts as 1.25 logs of Firewood, thus causing a Charcoal Pit completely filled with Aged Firewood to produce 1.25x more Charcoal than normal.

 

Note: Due to rounding, the number is always going to be lower than 1.25x. From testing with normal-sized Charcoal Pits, the real number seems to be about 1.2x. The larger the pit, the closer this number will be to 1.25x.

2x2x5 Charcoal Pit: 125 Charcoal vs 150 Charcoal.

Pit Kiln:

 

Aged Firewood can now be used in Pit Kilns, resulting in the Pit Kiln finishing in 15 hours instead of the 20 of regular Firewood. Thanks to Enigmayster for the suggestion!

Other Fuels:

 

I wasn't quite sure what to do with Brown Coal, Black Coal, and Anthracite, so all I did was round their burn durations up so that Peat isn't too powerful. Black Coal and Anthracite are still powerful general-purpose fuels, and Brown Coal retains it's use as being an ingredient for Coke.

 

Coke and Charcoal are unchanged.