How to make them put out fires?

[Smokey]

My colonists just drove me insane. Lightning struck right on my solar panels and I wanted to prioritize putting that fire out but the game wouldn't let me. Thus, I decided to put everyone on firefight 1. Still, they were ignoring the, now, massive fire on all of my panels. Then I turned everything else off and only had firefight on, then they finally ran over to put the fire out but then they all died because of heatstroke and explosions from the batteries near the panels. Why cant I prioritize putting out a fire?

[SlimeCrusher]

Colonists will only put out fires if it's on the home zone. If it's not, it's simply ignored. So make sure you have a big-enough home zone that covers the whole fire and they'll put it out, but remember to remove it later if you need to.

[Smokey]

Colonists will only put out fires if it's on the home zone. If it's not, it's simply ignored. So make sure you have a big-enough home zone that covers the whole fire and they'll put it out, but remember to remove it later if you need to.

Oh man. This must be why that happened. I restructured the home zone when the toxic fallout came and never reset the zone itself when the fallout was gone, Ill remember to adjust the zones now, thank you.

[GOForce3]

Instead of modifying home zone during toxic fallout, create a new area that's indoors and tell your colonists to stay in that area.  You can create a new zone by going into the zone menu and choose expand allowed areas and choose manage areas.  Create new one and name it.  Then go to restrictions tab (you can also manage areas from this menu) and you can tell your colonists what areas they are restricted to.  Or you can go to each colonist and the right-most status box is their current area (defaults to unrestricted).  You can click on it and choose any area you want him/her to stay in.  You'll have to go back into the expand allowed area to actually select the area for the new area you made.  When you create a new area, it won't automatically expand the area.

I've also noticed that if the colonists are sleepy and go to bed, they won't always go out to beat out the fires.  They'll lay comfortably in their beds.  I've had to micromanage them to extinguish an inferno several times.  Very annoying.

[milon]

Note that drafted colonists will fire fight any adjacent fires, whether it not they're in the home zone.