Auto-rain?

[Vastin]

I'll occasionally send out one of my guys with a moltov to burn back the grass on the map by setting several fires around my perimeter - but it seems like every time I do this, it inevitably starts raining in a minute or two and puts them all out.

I mean, it already rains pretty frequently for what looks like a scrub desert environment, but the coincidence seems like a bit much nevertheless. Is the game automatically triggering rain if a certain number of squares are on fire or something? It feels that way.

[Galileus]

Yup.

[Vastin]

Which reminds me, we need a drought event. No rain combined with dramatically reduced crop growth rates and possibly animal die off.

It'd wouldn't be that interesting an event unless water became a resource of some sort, but it's thematically appropriate to the environment.

[Thunder Rahja]

This happens in the real world too. Rising smoke causes moisture in the air to condense and fall as rain.

[Coenmcj]

While that is true, somewhat wasteland looking areas tend not to get that much rain annually let alone on rimworld's level. Rain is more OP than Blasting charges in my opinion, it'll rain every time when you don't want it, but the moment YOUR base is on fire, it'll be as dry as antartica...

[SimpletonSnowman]

This happens in the real world too. Rising smoke causes moisture in the air to condense and fall as rain.

yeah but not in the span on a few minutes

[Bodog999]

I think its random I've had once a huge fire spreading on the map for days they often destroyed my outdoor power conduits wich wasnt so bad its only 1 power supply cut off I have more but its random otherwise I didnt had to rebuild my power conduits constantly

[Untrustedlife]

There is actual code in the game for this.
So, rain is sometimes random, but once you get t a certain amount of fire it does make it rain to put it out.

[Nasikabatrachus]

It's a necessary measure for now, as the game will really slow down if there's a great deal of fire on the map. I do look forward to desperately fighting off prairie fires in future versions when that's less of an issue, however. I'm playing a 2-person colony right now, and almost had a situation where a fire threatened the crops and the house, but the rain came and solved that problem. Changes in ecology, like not letting grass grow on sand and preventing grass from growing quite so much overall, would let fire have a free-er hand, leaving aside whatever optimization can do to deal with the many fires problem.

Also, Literary term of the day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy

The auto-rain code could probably be tweaked to allow the environment to subtly reflect game events, like triggering a thunderstorm when a colonist or two die. (If it doesn't do that already.)