I’d very much suggest, from first hand experience, that disallowing NPCs from using flamethrowers would be a very good idea. From what I can assume, they use them very similarly to guns, which means they’ll fire it at every enemy with reckless abandon. This makes them very dangerous to themselves, the world, and the player (which I guess makes sense). One time I witnessed a survivor with a flamethrower shoot it right into a zombie at a gas station that was 2 titles away from him, blowing him to pieces as he deserved. Also on another occasion, I befriended a survivor with a flamethrower, and we both got into a car to drive to our safehouse. We would have made it if she hadn’t tried to shoot across me out the driver side window to kill a zombie near the car, which just ended up lighting me on fire. Before I could crawl away from the burning car, I was killed in the explosion. I know that situation could be avoided if I had told her not to use it, but if NPCs are so reckless with flamethrowers, they shouldn’t be allowed to spawn with them as weapons until they’re under control 
I watched a lets play about 6+ months ago on Cataclysm: DDA.
The creator had to restart, because he did the last firefighter scenario, and started with an NPC in the firehouse (doors closed). He thought it was great, until the room also had 5 zombies. Within 10 turns the building collapsed.
It was funny, and from watching that re-start I did begin to play the game.
I’m of the opinion that their reckless behavior regarding flamethrowers is !!FUN!!.
It also seems proper to me; I’d expect similar results in real life if you gave flamethrowers to a bunch of untrained and highly anxious people.
NPC AI is totally unfinished, I think it would be OK to forbid them anything with NAPALM and related tags. At the moment, they don’t even see fire and will blunder into it.
[quote=“Rivet, post:3, topic:9137”]I’m of the opinion that their reckless behavior regarding flamethrowers is !!FUN!!.
It also seems proper to me; I’d expect similar results in real life if you gave flamethrowers to a bunch of untrained and highly anxious people.[/quote]
I suppose it makes sense that I was wrong to trust someone I’d just met wielding a flamethrower to get in a car with me. I’m not going to hide the fact that I found the event hilarious!
I picked 0.B up having heard NPCs had improved a lot since I last played (long ago), and had Random NPCs turned on.
They quite frequently spawn with simple flamethrowers, and in my base-building playstyle I saw a lot of them spawning. Wandering into a flame-throwing pyromaniac every now and then is cool and fun in the Dwarf Fortress sense; walking through a flaming hellscape on a regular basis is just irksome.
I’m intending to keep random NPCs off 'til I upgrade to an experimental that has the variable NPC spawn rate, which was apparently a relatively minor fix that makes having random NPCs more tenable until development gets around to giving NPCs AI other than ‘bump into a corner and stay there forever’ and ‘massacre ALL the woodland creatures’. Coolthulu’s idea of disallowing napalm weapons seems to be in the same vein.
Howdy, if you would like a quick fix I can tell you how to prevent future random npcs from spawning with flame throwers in your current world.
You’ll want to back up your folder before doing this…
In you cat folder go to data>json>npcs
Here you’ll see two documents of interest, NC_ARSONIST.json and items_generic.json.
- Delete NC_ARSONIST.json, when the program can’t find unique item groups for an NPC class is will then give them generic ones.
- Open items_generic.json with wordpad
- ctrl+f ‘flamethrower’ and you should find
},{
"type" : "item_group",
"id" : "npc_launcher",
"items":[
["flamethrower_simple",50]
]
},{
4) Change “flamethrower_simple” to any other weapon you see listed there… like “crossbow” or “usp_9mm”
That should get rid of at least 90% of the flame throwers… I don’t remember adding them to any other classes.