Putting Out Fires

[Shayloh]

Using water to extinguish fire simply does not seem to work. I tried extinguishing a fire over and over again with water, but it doesn't seem to go out until it's time for the fire to die naturally.

Smothering fires, on the other hand, works in only a single try, though it only gives an echo for starting to dig. It never returns an echo upon completion.

[Raona]

This confused me at first, too. Pouring water on a fire does put it out, but at the next "clock tick" (when you stamina and health go up, if not at 100%). Without pouring water on a fire, it will burn for a much longer time (but still eventually go out).

When you bury a fire, code-wise, you actually literally bury the "fire" object: it is still there, and burning, but underground. As with the water treatment, it will go out at the next clock tick. (You can actually dig it up again, still burning, if you hurry.)

So, this is how the code works, and it may be a bit odd, but it's not really broken!

[Shayloh]

That is very odd, but that explains a lot. I might have to try digging up a fire once, just to see that craziness for myself. Thank you for making that clear for me.

There's one bit still bothering me, though. Burying a fire takes a little bit of time, like burying anything else. If you are impatient and try to do something else, you could interrupt the digging process. However, there is no echo upon completion. The fire will be out, but your HUD will not reflect this until something occurs (hear footsteps, input a command, start combat, almost anything), causing the screen to update. You could sit there for quite a while with "You begin digging..." on your screen and a fire showing up in the HUD without any visible changes. It makes it difficult to know when you can move on.

[Gwain]

On an interesting note, cooking a container of liquid, snuffs out a fire immediately, burying a fire barehanded produces a damage echo.

[Raona]

There's one bit still bothering me, though. Burying a fire takes a little bit of time, like burying anything else. If you are impatient and try to do something else, you could interrupt the digging process. However, there is no echo upon completion. The fire will be out, but your HUD will not reflect this until something occurs (hear footsteps, input a command, start combat, almost anything), causing the screen to update. You could sit there for quite a while with "You begin digging..." on your screen and a fire showing up in the HUD without any visible changes. It makes it difficult to know when you can move on.

Hmm, quite right! That is odd, and I'll put it in as a minor bug, #1019

It looks like burying a fire is pretty quick, but you can't LOOK to see if it is done without risk of stopping the process. It's a bit extreme, but you could use REFRESH to monitor your progress in burying the fire until we get this fixed. Thanks for reporting it!

[Shayloh]

As a slightly-less-anal version of Smokey, I appreciate this getting fixed.