Details of fireplaces and smoking meat with new fire mechanics

[irontide]

I've been trying to get my head around how smoking food has changed in 3.63. The question I have is how large a fire is required in order to keep the process ticking along.

At first I thought that we would need to have a continuous fire for a few hours in order to fully heat up the fireplace, and I erred on the side of overdoing it. I tried various combinations of firewood and branches to get the fire to the level of either 'burning for a few hours' or 'burning for several hours'. The smallest combination in my haphazard trials was 5 firewood and 20 branches or thereabouts. I had no meat spoilage doing this, even if I missed a day (I would then make a larger fire, e.g. 80 branches, to make up for that).

Since I had no spoilage, I thought I was overdoing things, and this is a significant amount of firewood to go through in midsummer. Also, as far as I can tell the fireplace heats up even with the minimum fire (16 branches, or 5 firewood and 1 branch). So now I'm trying to see what happens with the minimum firewood. Now I'm getting spoilage. At first I thought it was that I had misjudged the boundaries between days and inadvertently missed one, but I get more spoilage the more that a batch of meat has been smoked during my 16-branch fire regime. The bits that were mostly with my large-fire regime and only a few days of 16-branch fires only had a little spoilage; my last batch that was entirely done during the 16-branch fire regime had ~40% spoilage. So, something is going wrong.

Is it that the 16-branch fires are too small? Or is it something with the timing of the checks, and my pretty haphazard schedule of lighting fires (while trapping, active hunting, building a cabin, long trips, etc.) means that the small fires doesn't have the margin of error for smoking that a larger one does? I've frequently lit a fire in the morning, left my settlement, and come back and lit a fire at night the next day. Perhaps this is now a no-no without lighting large fires. I presumed that the game would do a check at 8am each morning whether the fireplace was heated since the last 8am check. But that is just a presumption.

Another issue is that I don't understand the details of how heating a fireplace now works. It may be that 16-branch fires are too small to properly heat the fireplace. Maybe there is now a continuum of how hot a fireplace gets, and my ~40% spoilage is because a 16-branch fire only gets to ~60% of the necessary heat. In this case, the question is 'how large a fire is needed to fully heat a fireplace?'. A wrinkle here is that the game describes as a 'heated room' a room with even a minimum-sized fire that has just been lit, which is what emboldened me to try 16-branch fires.

I would need to do more systematic testing to come to any kind of conclusion. In the meantime, I thought I'd ask the other players, you, what your experiences and meat-smoking regimes have been.

[skyleaf]

Since sami said an hour or so would be enough (https://steamcommunity.com/app/351700/discussions/2/2570942392201636470/), I basically use 200 branches or 20 firewood everyday at noon, not being excessive nor being less. No spoilage so far, and I agree the consumption on woods increase tremulously, every 7 days I have to spend a whole day as firewood making day. But I kind of like how it is now, it makes the smoking meat process more challenging and makes me not only focus on 'how to kill' but 'how much are needed to kill'.   

[irontide]

Thanks, I hadn't seen that Steam discussion, that is very helpful.

I can tell you 200 branches is much more than needed. I used 80 and got zero spoilage.