Explosive Fire Extinguishers

[ShadowDragon8685]

So, lately I've taken to leaving frag grenades Forbidden around my fortress, just lying on the ground, so the cleaners won't sweep in and clean them out, and I won't accidentally sell them off. I'm leaving them around as if they were fire extinguishers, so that someone nearby can grab them and put out the fire. You can manually force someone to equip a forbidden item (though it wouldn't be hard to pause, unforbid, click, rightclick, equip, even if not,) so that's not even a problem.

I think it says something is very amiss about this game, largely in the firefighting AI and the inability to manually force someone to override a job that someone else is already doing, that I'd quite honestly rather use fragmentation grenades to manually put out a fire and blow up whatever is burning and rebuild it, than get my colonists lit on fire trying to fight it manually.

Does anyone else do this?

[Hypolite]

I never had that kind of trouble with fire I had to blow it away every single time. How big is your colony? At some point (arounds 30 colonists) I had to assign some colonists to do nothing but put out fires, and it worked well. I also took preventive measures like cutting vegetation around the base.

That is, if your problem is large fires caused by raiders attacks, it's normal for your colonists to struggle to extinguish them and for you to find creative ways to deal with the situation while there's no real fire extinguisher implemented nor fire extinguishing ability upgrade research. Remember the game is lacking a lot of content, so it's rather normal for players to resort to workarounds like you do.

And I must say it seems to be pretty effective if not a bit extreme!

[Makropony]

I never had that kind of trouble with fire I had to blow it away every single time. How big is your colony? At some point (arounds 30 colonists) I had to assign some colonists to do nothing but put out fires, and it worked well. I also took preventive measures like cutting vegetation around the base.

That is, if your problem is large fires caused by raiders attacks, it's normal for your colonists to struggle to extinguish them and for you to find creative ways to deal with the situation while there's no real fire extinguisher implemented nor fire extinguishing ability upgrade research. Remember the game is lacking a lot of content, so it's rather normal for players to resort to workarounds like you do.

And I must say it seems to be pretty effective if not a bit extreme!

The point is, if there is a fire, and some colonists ACROSS THE DAMN MAP already "took" the job to extinguish it, you can't manually order a colonist who is closer to deal with the fire. So while you're waiting for that retard to go thru the whole map to that fire, said fire lights up more and more stuff -_-

[ShadowDragon8685]

I never had that kind of trouble with fire I had to blow it away every single time. How big is your colony? At some point (arounds 30 colonists) I had to assign some colonists to do nothing but put out fires, and it worked well. I also took preventive measures like cutting vegetation around the base.

That is, if your problem is large fires caused by raiders attacks, it's normal for your colonists to struggle to extinguish them and for you to find creative ways to deal with the situation while there's no real fire extinguisher implemented nor fire extinguishing ability upgrade research. Remember the game is lacking a lot of content, so it's rather normal for players to resort to workarounds like you do.

And I must say it seems to be pretty effective if not a bit extreme!

The point is, if there is a fire, and some colonists ACROSS THE DAMN MAP already "took" the job to extinguish it, you can't manually order a colonist who is closer to deal with the fire. So while you're waiting for that retard to go thru the whole map to that fire, said fire lights up more and more stuff -_-

This is exactly my problem. Exactly. Unless you're gonna leave five colonists assigned to fight fires and NOTHING but fight fires.

It doesn't matter if it was a fire lit by raiders (though I do my level best to discourage those with terrain sculpting,) by lightning, or (the most damaging ones,) an "electrical fault" rocket-kick to the crotch discharging upwards of 54,000 watt-days of electricity through a wall and setting fire to everything within ten tiles.

So, ultimately, it's far safer to just draft everybody who approaches the fire to make them stay put, and give one of them a belt of frag grenades to blast down anything that's on fire, after having sold the things two tiles away from the existing fires so they can't get lit.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I'm really, really starting to resent the firefighting AI and everything that starts fire in this game. Fires are, hands-down, the most annoying, most destructive thing to my base. Half of the devastation isn't even caused by the initial fire itself, it's caused by the literally worse than useless firefighting AI.

This is why every boomrat becomes "blow down the walls" time, because it is, by far, faster, safer, and cheaper in the long run to use grenades to blow up anything that's on fire rather than let the mooks attempt to put it out. Even more egregious is what happens when a colonist gets themselves lit on fire, they run around like a headless chicken, setting everything else on fire and running full-tilt away from the colonist trying to put them out. And this is compounded by the lack of the ability to pause the game, select someone who's directly in their chicken-run path, and order that person to clothesline their dumb ass and extinguish them while they're on the ground.

So I just wind up drafting them, arresting them (which auto-extinguishes them,) and then simply re-recruiting my own colonists. Because it's the only effective way to micromanage who extinguishes who without drafting the entire damn fort.

[Calistyn]

I never had that kind of trouble with fire I had to blow it away every single time. How big is your colony? At some point (arounds 30 colonists) I had to assign some colonists to do nothing but put out fires, and it worked well. I also took preventive measures like cutting vegetation around the base.

That is, if your problem is large fires caused by raiders attacks, it's normal for your colonists to struggle to extinguish them and for you to find creative ways to deal with the situation while there's no real fire extinguisher implemented nor fire extinguishing ability upgrade research. Remember the game is lacking a lot of content, so it's rather normal for players to resort to workarounds like you do.

And I must say it seems to be pretty effective if not a bit extreme!

The point is, if there is a fire, and some colonists ACROSS THE DAMN MAP already "took" the job to extinguish it, you can't manually order a colonist who is closer to deal with the fire. So while you're waiting for that retard to go thru the whole map to that fire, said fire lights up more and more stuff -_-

This is -without question- the single most frustrating aspect of the game. At this point, as soon as there's fire, I draft the entire colony all at once, just so I can do the prioritizing for fire-fighting, instead of letting some nimrod across the map 'claim' a job just so the rest of the base can burn. It's a little crazy.