Right now we have matchbooks, lighters, and refillable lighters right now and they are every where, except refillable lighters I hardly find them.
So I see no reason why we could not add 32 count matchboxes to the list, they are the most common type of matches where I come from, you hardly ever see matchbooks here.
You could also think of adding the bigger 250 count boxes, they should be harder to get ahold of sense they have so many uses.
And I am sure there could be some crafting thing, that may use the empty box or you could just burn it.
Strike any where matches could be good to but probubly would be rare, you could dich the box and cary them lose or some thing or they could not be eny beter than the reuglar ones.
Water proof matches would be uncommon, would be good if matches geting wet matered, but right now it dosen’t.
I am shure I could have worded this better and spelled it better but it’s 7:50am here.
Does nobody else find it kind of hilarious how many matches/lighters there are in the game? No? Just me? Alright then.
The fact that lighters and matches don’t really weigh anything usually means my inventory is stacked with them after a while. It is almost impossible to use matches/lighters faster than you find them unless you’re playing a wilderness game.
I don’t really have a problem with more types of match drops so long as the overall spawn rate of these items is reduced. There’s kinda too many of them and starting fires has become a bit of a non-issue. Especially since hotplates kinda do the job of fires.
I might tack onto this a random chance to waste a match or lighter charge while trying to light something, a chance that is influenced by your survival skill. (Forgive me if this is already a thing, I have to admit I haven’t really paid much attention to fires since a) hotplates do just about everything a fire can do with only a few notable exceptions, and b) hotplates don’t generate toxic, harmful smoke)
While we’re at it, can we remove the hotplate from some of the crafting recipes that make more sense with fire? I know the hotplate is an optional crafting tool to replace fire in some recipes where it made me scratch me head a little, though at present I can’t recall a specific example.
It’s kinda ridiculous how I can start a whole 2x4 plank on fire with a single spark of my lighter, or light bushes with 100% chance of success in the middle of winter. I’d support lighting fires requiring multiple charges or having a failure rate that depends on both survival skill and what you’re trying to light (meaning paper, splintered wood etc would become important for starting fires before feeding them larger wood).
I thought about saying we should add a chance to fail at lighting a match/lighter, but forgot because I was really sleepy.
When it comes to lighting a fire with matches I almost always get some that ether brake or just don’t light no mater how you try to strike it. With lighters I burn my self with them periodically.
It not always 100% to start a fire even with paper, fire starters or dry dead ceder branches. Some times it just wont burn until you pore gas/lighter fluid on it.
Also there could be a rare chance that you really screw up and light your self on fire instead. I have herd of this happening to some to some guy who had a sweater on that had really long sleeves. He went to start a grill or some thing and the wind blew the flame from a lighter on to the sleeve and his sweater went up in flames setting him on fire, apparently he spilled lighter fluid on a already flammable sweater.
make the fire started by using a match or lighter a new type of fire that’s small and doesn’t spread, all it does is try to consume fuel and get bigger, if it consumes enough fuel it turns into a regular fire.
make the new smaller fire only reliably consume very flammable items.
Results:
Takes time to start a fire.
Use for kindling.
I think the way to tie it into survival is make a special “campfire” item that has a lot of potential as fuel, but burns easily, and is crafted from wood.
I definitely like the idea of wasting charges/difficulty in lighting fires as it’d add a lot of realism. Currently you can carry two lighters around and not really run out of charges (combined with hotplates and the like)
Two things:
I’d suggest hotplates get rarer - there seems to be a weird amount of an item which isn’t that common (I don’t think) and even if it is a common item in reality, they’re much too useful.
Also, making lighters/matches stack completely (as in, just having it as a number rather than matches (15), matches (10), matches (14) - it’s just matches (39)) would be great.
Matches & lighters being frequent isn’t too big an issue to me. Every person I know has both in their homes. Finding a home without matches or a lighter would be near impossible for me. So it comes down to … do you want “realism” or do you want “game”?
If realism: Matches/lighters are probably fine in frequency but why aren’t there candles all over the place in the game? I had matches and candles for power outages and/or “mood lighting”. Are there candles in the game? If so, are they part of the loot stream?
There comes a fine like between “realism” and “game” though for some of the other things:
I’ve never seen a battery powered hotplate before unless it was a camping store. Granted Cata is “the fuuUUUuutuuuUUUure”, but they do seem to pop up a lot in people’s kitchens. Food dehydrator / hot plate … these I’d assume would be rare.
If you’re going “the game should be super realistic” then:
Microwaves should spawn in damn near every house.
Small appliances like blenders, food processors, toasters, can openers should be all over the place.
Flashlights would be as frequent as matches/lighters.
You’d need to spawn a metric-crap-ton more “butter knife” and “steak knife” and “fork” and “spoon” and the like in every kitchen. Glass ware, plates bowls … and on and on.
Basically, a block of homes spawned would probable cripple the game with all the items spawned. lol
Dom, I think you kinda answered your own question.
The loot spawns need to be balanced, even if that balance is partially informed by real life. I mean you should be able to find a crap ton of preserved foods (canned soup, raw pasta, etc) in the average house, and yet you hardly do in Cata. Why? Because the game would be a joke if you could survive for a week or more on just the non-spoiling food you would find in the average house. And that’s before you even start talking about grocery stores.
You can kinda handwave the absence of things a bit with some combination of mass panic and environmental damage.
Yeah, the trouble is that the player is the only one eating all the food. IRL, if you were the only one left alive in even a medium size town, you would probably not starve for years. Maybe we can increase loot spawns to normal levels once we have npcs running around and looting stuff.
Its really disappointing that many promising mechanics go unused in cataclysm, therefore I would argue on the game side: make lighters/hotplates less common. Lighters could for instance often spawn near depleted or you know, less often. It would make them actually matter. As it stands there could be just as well be a ‘make fire’ button.
When you can make fire drills, I don’t particularly see the issue with that. String and wood are not particularly rare materials. Plus if lighters were super rare and also as important as they are now everyone would just pick the profession that starts you off with the refillable lighter. Also since turning down item spawns is an option I don’t know why it’s even being suggested as an option.
