My current character has advanced sufficiently to go beyond cooking by a fire on the ground, and has encountered a few gotchas:
- Setting fire to a line of fuel (for farm plots) no longer automatically succeeds in lighting the fire when the adjacent tile is lit, but the character isn't adjacent to the lit tile
fffffF
...c..
f=fuel, F=fire, .=open ground, c= character. Having the character within reach of the lit tile allows the automatic bringing over the fire, though.
- A single tile of fire at the end of a line of fire has managed to both set a pile of trunks on fire, as well as more or less the complete wealth of the character (clothing and weapons/tools), in two different incidents. Previously you needed two adjacent tiles on fire for the fire to spread automatically. I certainly hope it doesn't mean a single fire set adjacent to a shelter has some chance of setting everything on fire!
- Trying to smoke meat using the new sauna stove resulted in a "cold room" failure fore each one of the four 50 cut batches (well, I didn't try the first one, as I know it was cold before a fire was lit), and my character got cold while preparing the meat for smoking, rather than hot (it was snowing outside). I think I used 20 branches for the first fire and 16 for each of the following ones. I've yet to see how the whole smoking process turns out, though.
- I haven't seen any embers remaining in the sauna stove at any time I've started a new fire (each day), nor when I've tried to use the stove for cooking, so I've reverted back to cooking by an open fire outside...