Using Fire and Smoke and Associated Suggestions

[ruarz 739]

Okay so you can make a little campfire to cook food and keep warm but in a zombie survival situation fire has so many more uses that so far have been left out of DayZ. While I imagine its pretty fiddly to put in the mod, the dev team has already astounded us with their ability and I'm sure they could pull it off. Here are a few ways fire could enhanced in into DayZ. I'll start with the bread and butter survival stuff and then move on to harnessing fire as a lethal force.

You don't need a hatchet to make a campfire! And you can't light logs with matches! I think the campfire mechanic should be expanded a bit:

You can either gather sticks or cut wood.

Gathering sticks means you can make a small campfire that provides some warmth and you can cook a raw meat for every bundle of sticks you load the fire up with. In wind or rain you may need several attempts to get a fire going, using up more matches.

Cutting wood means you can build on this smaller campfire (i.e. use the sticks as kindling) to make a campfire which will cook lots of raw meat and provide lots of warmth.

You could have completely new mechanic, which is sorely missing, and that's a gas stove. Much more reliable, stealthy and efficient than a wood fire. Virtually no smoke. Stove fits on the tool-belt, gas canister (comes in small and large) is a magazine (and, incidentally, can explode if put in fire or can be used to make IEDs). Also would like to see some of the much bigger canisters/refill canisters would are used to make much bigger IEDs and refill smaller canisters. Matches/lighter still needed to light the stove.

Matches should be limited. I've noticed the lovely little green bar running down the side of magazines in the inventory, wondered if this could be applied to a box of matches on the tool-belt. Maybe 50 matches in a small box and 100 in a large one. Also add lighters. Cheapo crappy plastic lighters: found everywhere, 50 lights, not windproof. Zippo lighter: more rare, 100 lights, more windproof. Mil-grade jet lighter: rare, 150 lights, fully windproof.

Fire attracts zombies! So be careful if you're lighting a campfire. Big campfires have a bigger attraction range and create more smoke.

Fire creates smoke! And not just the piddly little plume that we currently see coming out of a camp fire. If the wind is up then it'll blow sideways but on a still day it will rise high into the air, giving away your position to bandits. However campfires should create relatively little smoke compared to burning cars or tires. Smoke could be lethal, and a symptom that your character is suffering from smoke inhalation would be violent coughing. Got a sniper holed up on the top floor of an apartment block? Just pile a few car tires at the bottom, douse them in petrol and smoke him out.

On that note wind is also missing. I've noticed the dev team are currently playing with weather and how it affects hearing and visual. Wind could obscure zombie hearing but quicken heat loss. The sound of the wind howling would greatly add to the ambiance.

The Jerry Can mechanic should be greatly enhanced. Firstly make it a magazine, holding 20 rounds (litres). Then it can be filled with water and taken back to base and 20 1 litre water bottles can be filled from it. Tada - another way to promote teamplay. Alternatively, you could top up a car with only 10 litres of fuel and save the rest. Or you could use it in the way I will describe next:

Petrol is flammable! Jerry cans should be a lot more useful than just for refueling vehicles and filling water bottles up. It would be great if you could douse the ground in petrol and then set it on fire, creating a barrier which would set fire to zombies, start forest fires, damage vehicles or even set buildings alight. The douse mechanic could work as follows: you can drop a maximum of 20 small 1 litre puddles from a full jerry can of petrol so you can make the fire barrier the shape and size you want it. You then light one puddle and puddles touching it will catch and the fire will spread.

Other objects should be flammable! Firstly let me start off by saying there's a difference between car wheels and spare tires. Spare tires should take up less weight and space than wheels and should fix flat tires while car wheels should repair completely shredded wheels but not tires. Okay so tires should be flammable. And they should create a hell of a lot of smoke. A car tire and petrol fire barrier would be far deadlier than just a petrol one, but a lot less subtle!

Buildings could be flammable. Maybe not all of them and maybe not non-enterable buildings. When I say this I can't help but think of the last episode of series 2 of the Walking Dead when Rick and Carl douse the barn in petrol and set it on fire to kill and distract some of the zombies. A few ways of setting barns on fire:

-Douse it in petrol

-Set hay on fire (hay-bales should be also flammable and a brilliant way to distract zombies from an area)

-Throw a molotov at it.

And that brings me onto Molotovs. And more importantly, a crafting mechanic, which I'm sure has been discussed elsewhere in the suggestions. A few fire-related crafting ideas:

-Bottle + Petrol (filled from Jerry Can ofc! :D) + Rag (filled from Jerry Can ofc! :D) = Molotov

-IEDs! A mixture of gas canisters, nails, grenades, dynamite, circuitry, car/motorbike batteries, petrol jerry cans, ammonium nitrate, rocket sparkers and remote devices could make a variety of IEDs.

FIRE SHOULD BE LETHAL! You should be able suffer from fire. If you're especially unlucky you might catch fire and have to roll to extinguish the flames. Zombies should also be susceptible to fire. They'll frenzy for a few seconds and then die.

***I once did a suggestion about zombie herds. The idea being there are maybe a dozen herds of varying sizes (10-100) that wander around the map and can be attracted to certain stimuli if they are in range such as gunshots, FIRE, SMOKE, vehicles etc. It would be important that the don't just suddenly aggro and run like crazy but rather wander towards the stimulus to investigate it and then if they discover a player then, well, all hell breaks loose.

This also brings me on to another suggestion which is a change in zombie aggro behaviour. It is unrealistic that zombies suddenly run like crazy on hearing a gunshot. At the same time the aggro range for zombies from gunshots is also unrealistically small. A sniper rifle shot would be heard by zombies for hundreds of metres. What I suggest is zombies at closer range will walk towards the sound of the shot and then on visual/hearing confirmation of the player himself would aggro. This would encourage players to fire from cover from zombies, or quickly move on after firing a shot as zombies will be inbound on their previous location. At longer range only a few zombies might investigate. And there is always the risk of drawing a herd, eek!

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Other thread about herds: http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3829

[carlgustav 63]

Some of these are definitely worth consideration!

[ruarz 739]

Just had another idea - a flare gun! Can be used to ignite stuff or light up the sky.

[Reaps 22]

Really like the different uses of the jerry can +1 to that idea.

Building fires... not so keen on. Say goodbye to all the barns/buildings/forests/fields. In an ideal world, anywhere other than the internets, i'd love to see all of the above implemented, if the engine allows it, or in a standalone version. But throw in a fire hungry griefer, and you can kiss all the loot spots goodbye.

We'll all be living in the forest, with no supermarket to raid for beans and animals becoming extinct

[RaviN (DayZ) 9]

some are worth consideration. not all.

[ruarz 739]

Haha on our server someone manage to completely blow up one of the elektro fire stations, no idea how, maybe he blew it up with hacked stachel charges. I'm not sure if its fixed now in our case but with regards to the suggestion maybe a burnt out buildings could reset in 24 hours?

[Bat (DayZ) 230]

You're taking it far, I like that :)

Craftable molotov cocktail, IED's, oh yeah (I'm afraid you look like you know in details how to craft that IRL, maybe don't give the recipe ingame or rocket will have problems with law ahah)

I have the feeling things like that will be in next updates, rocket stated new interactions/craftable things

[ruarz 739]

Haha I know a kid who had the police turn up at school because he was looking up how to make explosives from ammonium nitrate on their computers :)

[Beemlord 1]

Haha on our server someone manage to completely blow up one of the elektro fire stations' date=' no idea how, maybe he blew it up with hacked stachel charges. I'm not sure if its fixed now in our case but with regards to the suggestion maybe a burnt out buildings could reset in 24 hours?

[/quote']

If the buildings are actually destructible than me might have destroyed it with the M136 Rocket Launcher which is in the mod.

[ruarz 739]

I don't know, but we were exploring around the coast and noticed there was a pile of rubble where the fire station should be :)

[Gordon Axeman 191]

I found sats at NWA. That's not a cheat.

[ruarz 739]

Well its back so i guess damaged building reset on a server respawn :)

[Migfighter 2]

would be fine ,a molotov cocktail but also flambeau and maybe Incendiary projectiles(for a limited amount of guns like m249 and ,50 s )

[razzi 25]

For the molotov: full whiskey bottle + bandage.

[ozjace 35]

^ Plus matches unless your born a dragon?

[DAS1337 20]

Why Jerry Cans for Molotov's? Why not make a use for all of the whiskey bottles laying all over the map? Obviously Jerry cans would make a much larger mess, but also pretty damn hard to throw =P

[ruarz 739]

Use the jerry can to contain 20 litres of petrol. Use whiskey bottle, petrol and rag for a molotov.

[DMC14 46]

nice ideas everyone. i reckon being able to start fires like in Farcry 2 but on a larger scale could be usefull too.

[liquidcactus 719]

i want molotovs soOo hard......

[mibz0r 141]

good idea's but also Jerrycan's should explode if full when shot at.

[Riem 164]

Lead does not spark, it is a soft metal and will not provide the ignition necessary to set a jerry can on fire. If there are steel or other such ammunition, then I could see that happening.

[mibz0r 141]

Lead does not spark, it is a soft metal and will not provide the ignition necessary to set a jerry can on fire. If there are steel or other such ammunition, then I could see that happening.

Erm from what I remember most military grade and decent rifle ammo is copper jacketed and I'm quite sure that will strike a spark in the right conditions

[DMC14 46]

Erm from what I remember most military grade and decent rifle ammo is copper jacketed and I'm quite sure that will strike a spark in the right conditions

yeah it is. But did any one see the episode of Myth busters where they shot the car petrol tank to see if it would explode? i dont think it did.

[Riem 164]

Erm from what I remember most military grade and decent rifle ammo is copper jacketed and I'm quite sure that will strike a spark in the right conditions

The part of the round that would actually be sparking would be the steel core of the round, not a copper jacket. Copper and brass do not spark as well, and it's a common error you see in movies, likely just to enhance the effect of the bullet striking whatever surface it's hitting.

[slonlo 43]

Yeah, shooting a container of gasoline won't ignite it. Throwing a lit match into a bucket of gasoline won't even ignite it. So what minuscule spark you MIGHT get from the copper jacket on a projectile against the steel container won't be enough to cause an explosion.