Burning Things Should Be Easier

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Currently fires are weird. Wood is flammable. Two-by-fours are wood. They burn, and are consumed pretty fast, like you’d expect. Logs are also wood. You make two-by-fours out of them. However, they do not burn. Like, they get scorched, but don’t burn. I’ve never been able to successfully burn a log in a woodstove of any variety. This seems odd, considering I am able to do this very thing daily during the cold months in my house’s wood furnace.

Corpses are known historically to be mass-disposed of by burning, but in game this isn’t feasible nor practical. It requires constantly maintaining a blazing inferno over the course of 24+ hours in order for any number of corpses to be destroyed, whereas all the clothing will be consumed in a matter of seconds and then promptly extinguish. That at least seems right, but I don’t know the exact process of body burning by heart, but I feel like it should at the very least be a legitimate option to stack up a mound of zombie bodies and burn them semi-reliably. Maybe acceleratant is needed, but either way, it should be more possible than it is right now. At the VERY least, I should be readily able to burn logs in a regular fire. I mean, come on now. It’s a log.

What are some areas that the fire modeling can be tweaked in order to reflect reality more in this way?

2

I’ll respond to the corpse destroying portion, that caught my interest for some reason. Malkeus kicks a stray hand back under the bed

Faq on Cremation:http://nfda.org/planning-a-funeral/cremation/160.html#hot
Cremation involves 1400-1800 degrees fahrenheit flames for 2-3 hours.

How hot is a bonfire?:http://classroom.synonym.com/hot-bonfire-8770.html
Green wood burns at roughly 1000 degrees fahrenheit, charcoal and seasoned wood can reach temperatures of over 2000 degrees fahrenheit.

NSFW Forensic Pathology of burns: NSFW http://www.forensicpathologyonline.com/E-Book/injuries/thermal-injuries

The above is all fascinating and describes what necessary to completely destroy a body along with the temperatures of various fuels. Completely destroying a body with green wood would be nearly impossible, using charcoal or seasoned wood, it could be done in a few hours, provided the heat was maintained.

Then I thought…we don’t need to completely destroy a body to deny it to the blob, we simply need to make the muscles unusable and/or kill the blob. I don’t know what temperature the blob can handle, but muscle…that we can find out easily. And it turns out muscle begins to lose it’s ability to contract at a fairly low temperture of 120 degrees fahrenheit. At 150 degrees fahrenheit, connective tissues begin melting and another protein needed to contract breaks down. Between 160 and 200 degrees fahrenheit, connective tissues and muscles begin falling away from the bone.

After reading all that, and after my stomach settled (seriously NSFW), I came to the conclusion that the current corpse destroying mechanic is fairly accurate for bodies caught in a house fire, but the bodies SHOULD be rendered inert by the flames, similar to pulping.

3

Fire mechanics are current OP for small fires and damage.

Corpses burning under low fires (such as those started by a thread or splintered wood do too much damage for their size.

Larger fires should destroy corpses though.

4

They do destroy corpses. It just takes a very long time to do so, and a lot of effort. Having a stone fireplace is ideal so the fire will keep burning for a while, and even then you need to fuel the fire with quite a bit of wood to keep it going.

5

Also keep in mind that the heat is going to need to penetrate into the bodies’ tissues to do the damage, raising the core temperature of a corpse to say 120F is going to take a lot more than applying a 120F (or even 240F) heat source for a short amount of time.

That having been said, there are some serious problems with the way fire is handled and I do intend to look into it.

6

I agree, it does take time, that’s why I tracked down the data on cooking meat. Depending on the thickness of the meat it can take a few minutes to several hours to raise the temperature to 160 degrees, which I feel would be the minimum necessary to render the body incapable of being used by the blob, whether the blob can survive those temperatures or not. A body sitting in a burning house would most likely attain those temperatures though, given how long the fires tend to last. The body would most likely still be there, but it would be very badly burned. I’ve worn my survivor out many times pulping corpses that remain viable after the house fire has burned out. Perhaps instead of giving a corpse ‘burnt’ status instantly, corpses could be given a counter that is increased by exposure to heat and they would achieve a ‘cooked’ status after the counter has reached it’s limit, after it’s cooked it would no longer revive (and maybe yield cooked meat when butchered)? Further exposure to heat would lead to burnt and sufficient heat after that would destroy the corpse. I’m not sure how the heat system is working WRT the various sources of heat (lava, fire in all it’s flavors) but perhaps it could affect more than just the player.

Destroying corpses entirely is a more involved process that would almost need a dedicated oven or a specially built fire to work. The greek method involved large pyres constructed in a fashion to keep air flowing and used slaughtered food animals (for the fat) to increase the heat. And it took a LOT of wood. You’d have to use the logs from a couple trees to get the same amount of wood, and that’s discounting the problem of green wood lowering the burn temperature.

7

We could make blob a bit more flammable, just for the ease of incapacitating zed bodies.

8

DEEEEERAIIIILL: OOOO, I want to sweat the blob out of corpses, for use in superglue recipe’s and making parts for my blobmobile…

9

Or you know, just recieve an organ-sized piece of blob when you butcher it with enough skill.

10

I did voice awhile ago that it’d be better IMO if butchering were a two-step process, first taking out the meat and then completely breaking the corpse down with results varying depending on your skill. I think it’d be pretty neat if you got a single blob glob out of the process. Human corpses should probably give one too, given the lore. I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be many un-infected humans left, be it corpses or actual people. Animals too.

Slightly back on topic, I have trouble believing the omnipotent blob ocean would allow themselves the single exploitable weakness of being easily combustible, or even combustible at all. They’re all about that adaptation stuff, and being prone to fire is a pretty obvious concern in an environment rich with oxygen like our world is. It was probably one of the first things they did when they decided to move in.

That said, if a corpse is un-revivable (be it by fire or being hit with a stick repeatedly) then it probably gives no further benefits that its living version did and the blob would either die outright or slowly now that its containment unit is completely inoperable.

I don’t know what substance the slime in the slime pits are made out of, but it does make some degree of sense that it might be flammable. They’re sort of a hodge-podge thing the blob slapped together on short notice to survive en masse without hosts, right?

11

Thermite would be easy enough to make recipe wise. Maybe just have that obliterate objects lying in a tile…

12

Isn’t thermite already in? I get confused sometimes, I use a lot of mods… I don’t think it’s anything special heat wise though.

jNsMXZD.png1611×333

Yeah, there it is, right in the core files:

{
"type" : "recipe",
"result": "chem_thermite",
"category": "CC_CHEM",
"subcategory": "CSC_CHEM_CHEMICALS",
"skill_used": "cooking",
"difficulty": 4,
"time": 2000,
"reversible": false,
"autolearn": true,
"qualities":[
{"id":"BOIL","level":2,"amount":1}
],
"components": [
[
[ "chem_aluminium_powder", 50 ]
],
[
[ "chem_chromium_oxide", 50 ]
]
]
},
13

A thermite reaction can reach 4,000 degrees F and destroy your eyes with UV. It should certainly annihilate a pile of corpse.

On the topic of corpse burning though…what if pyres were a construction? Long, hot burning beds of improvised materials and suitable accelerant.

14

For getting campfires and fireplaces going, you should need to at least use some tinder. I already try to always use some tinder, splintered wood and two or three 2x4’s to start fires, just for my own immersion factor. Fires should also be a lot harder to start in the rain without decent survival skill, tinder or accelerant.

For starting tactical shrub fires, you should have to use a spray can or some gas. Tinder should also work for lighting up shrubs, but it should take a little while before the fire becomes hot enough to actually do any real damage.

Gasoline is also a great answer to this question of using fire to neutralize corpses. Just spray a bit on each corpse and light’em up, no need to carry them all into a big pile.

15

I’d agree that fires should go through stages. Starting one without an accelerant should take time, and be very prone to failure in the wind and rain, then it would be a small fire as it begins to consume the available fuel and gradually swell to a level moderated by the amount of fuel available and what kind was available. This would definitely help with the ‘Instant tactical shrub fire’ scenario, requiring a bit of preparation to execute or the proper starting materials.

On the subject of destroying bodies with fire, I found a neat discussion about a forensic research group that burns bodies for science: http://www.sott.net/article/185067-Body-burners-The-forensics-of-fire :

"So what happens after they light the fire? “A human limb burns a little like a tree branch,” says John DeHaan, a fire investigator at Fire-Ex Forensics in Vallejo, California, who works with Pope. First, he says, the thin outer layers of skin fry and begin to peel off as the flames dance across their surface. Then, after around 5 minutes, the thicker dermal layer of skin shrinks and begins to split, allowing the underlying yellow fat to leak out.

“That’s when the fire gets most interesting,” says DeHaan. Body fat can make a good fuel source, but it needs material such as clothing or charred wood to act as a wick. Like that in a wax candle, a wick absorbs the fat and pulls it into the flame, where it is vapourised, so enabling it to burn.

Assuming there is sufficient wick material, the body can sustain its own fire for around 7 hours. During this time, the heat causes muscles to dry out and contract, making the limbs move and sometimes adopt characteristic postures. Bone takes longer to burn, so by the end the skeleton is usually laid bare like a charred anatomical model, coated in the greasy residue of burned flesh. "

So given the right conditions, it seems a body can provide it’s own fuel, read the last few paragraphs for some expansion on the topic. However, the article has this to say about using gasoline:
“A related misconception is that flammable liquids alone are sufficient to destroy a body. “If you dump gasoline on someone, it will burn for about a minute,” says Pope’s colleague John DeHaan of Fire-Ex Forensics in Vallejo, California. “That’s enough to cause localised burns, but not enough that the skin will split and the body fat gets involved.” The body needs to be exposed to fire for about 5 minutes for that to happen.”

It’s an interesting read and gives a lot of food for thought.

16

So all we have to do is break the skin? Most zombies already have broken skin, given they had to die of something first. Plus they’re somewhat rotten and the blob is pretty flammable. So shouldn’t zombies burn pretty well?

17

Just had this idea; if you fail to sufficiently burn a zombie corpse, it will reanimate as a different special type, named something along the lines of a “burnt” or “charred zombie.” I picture it having traits similar to that of a skeleton, with added fire resistance.

…Which actually just gave me another interesting idea, totally unrelated to this topic but here it is; zombies which reanimate after enough time that they have begun to rot could become a “rotting” or “carrion” zombie. Basically just like a normal or perhaps decayed Z but attacks have a much higher chance of causing infection.

18

New decayed zeds already cause infection very easily.