Fire destroyed my base

Started by DrOnline, May 25, 2017, 06:41:31 PM

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DrOnline



My first run that went kinda well... until my arsonist colonist finally did it right and got my main stores on fire. It spread insanely quickly, impossible to put out.. hopeless situation!

But man this game is kinda fun :D

Any general advice for me based on this picture? Anything entirely out of whack?

O Negative

#1
Firefoam poppers are your friend :D


Also, the fact that wooden floors can catch fire now is great. I love to use wooden floors for their aesthetic, and it's good to know they're not OP for setting up fire barriers anymore.

Edit: Oh, a trick I like to use is keeping doors open to help ventilate the heat. It helps make sure my firefighters don't die of heatstroke while they beat the fires. Most notably, your base has a door to the south of your stockpile which leads to the outside. That door being kept open could've helped you a lot. Doors are also your friend :D

NinjaDiscoJew

Don't dig into overhead mountians, unless you want infestations.

Hans Lemurson

Quote from: O Negative on May 25, 2017, 07:06:28 PM
Firefoam poppers are your friend :D


Also, the fact that wooden floors can catch fire now is great. I love to use wooden floors for their aesthetic, and it's good to know they're not OP for setting up fire barriers anymore.

Edit: Oh, a trick I like to use is keeping doors open to help ventilate the heat. It helps make sure my firefighters don't die of heatstroke while they beat the fires. Most notably, your base has a door to the south of your stockpile which leads to the outside. That door being kept open could've helped you a lot. Doors are also your friend :D
Since oxygen doesn't exist, opening doors helps FIGHT fires!  If you can bust a hole in a wall to the outside, that also helps cool the burn.  Fires in internal rooms (especially under mountains) are extremely hard to put out because of their insulating factor.  It can easily get to hundreds of degrees inside a burning room.

If you can open (or better yet, deconstruct) the south door, then you stand a much better chance of saving a life or two before your whole base burns down.
Mental break: playing RimWorld
Hans Lemurson is hiding in his room playing computer games.
Final straw was: Overdue projects.

grrizo

#4
It reminds me of my first colony, wich was also burned down entirely. Yikes!

Some advices:
-Beauty is important in the game. Use constructed walls instead of just rocky mountain walls and hide your power cables into them.
-Use your freezer just for food, meat, vegetables and animal (or hooman ;) ) corpses. You don't need it for plant matter like hops and green.
-Separate your kitchen from your butchery and from everything that can get it dirty, this way you'll prevent food poisoning. Also, you can use sterile tiles on both of them for easy cleaning.
-Mortars! They're quite handy.
-And if you have lover colonists, build for them double beds. They will be happier  ;D
Lavish meal, now with extra Yorkshire terrier meat.

makkenhoff

Personally - I've gotten away from using the whole one room complex. I try to build an outer wall around my 'town' but using separate buildings spaced correctly will limit the damage a fire will do. I try and leave 4-6 spaces between buildings and spend a lot of time cutting up chunks to get the required bricks for the pathways between. All said, it takes me years before I usually have everything the way I want it - usually my colony dies before it gets that far along.

jamaicancastle

In mountain bases, you can use the raw stone floor (either rough or smoothed) as a firebreak. Some people build corridors 3 wide for better traffic flow, but they also help contain fires. Ordinary dirt is also fireproof as long as nothing is growing on it; if you put a roof over a patch of dirt, plants won't re-grow there when you cut them.

If your base is in danger of a serious fire that's indoors, fighting it may not be an option. If you can establish a firebreak and pull all of your people to safety, you can always rebuild. Material losses are easier to replace than dead colonists. You can protect yourself from that eventuality by building certain critical buildings (such as freezers and hospitals) out of stone so that you aren't left totally empty-handed afterward.

Some side notes: when you chain vents like that, they're less effective; rooms further from the heat/cold source take longer to reach the target temperature and are more effected by temperature swings. I usually find it best to arrange bedrooms around a central dining/rec room and vent them all from that room.

Certain rooms, like non-freezer storage, don't need vents at all, and you're better off just letting them float at the background temperature in temperate biomes. Workshops are somewhat more efficient if climate controlled, but not enough for it to be worthwhile initially; that's more for a boost when you become established.

Be very careful when mining out large areas that you don't have any tiles more than 6 tiles from a wall; in this picture, if your colonists ever get to mining out the designation below your stockpile, a 1-tile strip in the middle of that room will be too far away from the wall to support a roof and will collapse. Constructed or thin rock roof collapses are dangerous, and overhead mountain collapses are instantly fatal, for pawns (or items) that happen to be caught in them.

Nutrient paste meals are generally not considered worth it except in extreme biomes; in a temperate zone, you should have no problem sourcing enough food to make simple meals and avoid the mood penalty for eating goop.

Raids will eventually contain sappers that will try to tunnel through perimeter walls and/or mountains and come at you from odd directions; in the image, the "wall" of your production room would be an especially good target.

mumblemumble

Are firefoam poppers an item which can be purchased?

I figure such things would be in somewhat high demand..
Why to people worry about following their heart? Its lodged in your chest, you won't accidentally leave it behind.

-----

Its bad because reasons, and if you don't know the reasons, you are horrible. You cannot ask what the reasons are or else you doubt it. But the reasons are irrefutable. Logic.

Shurp

Firefoam poppers can be manufactured.

But I prefer the technique of simply deconstructing a few walls to let all the heat out, then run in and start beating the fire out.

Building a base out of stone walls is preferable.  Then you only have to put out the burning furniture and power lines.
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

cultist

The only way to stop an indoors fire that's so out of control, is to break down a wall to the outside in one of the rooms on fire. The temperature will equalize instantly and your pawns will be able to out it out without dying from the heat.
Very high quality wool clothing (go figure) gives a high temperature resistance, it can be used as firefighting gear.

Snownova

Oh my, batteries in a wooden enclosed space, that is just asking for a ZZZT of Doom.

DrOnline

Thanks for the advice guys. Yeah I'm starting a new game now. Tons of new information for me to build a better base on. This time I will try to make it more of a town than a complex, and replace the floor sooner.

And I did notice that once the wooden walls collapsed the temperature went from 1600C to 20C. I should have knocked it down. But I don't want to reload and cheese. That's part of the game to die off I think :)

ReZpawner

That's just beautiful! And to top it off, it's inside and won't be put out by the rain.

Which reminds me, I should probably make a firepopper or two...

tarator

#13
Quote from: makkenhoff on May 26, 2017, 12:41:07 AM
Personally - I've gotten away from using the whole one room complex. I try to build an outer wall around my 'town' but using separate buildings spaced correctly will limit the damage a fire will do. I try and leave 4-6 spaces between buildings and spend a lot of time cutting up chunks to get the required bricks for the pathways between. All said, it takes me years before I usually have everything the way I want it - usually my colony dies before it gets that far along.
If it is true that fire can jump 3 tiles, then two stone walls and a paved road between them is enough to prevent fire from spreading from one building to another.

Place some walls between the sandbags. Walls provide better cover, pawns behind them will lean to shoot.

edit: I just had a massive wildfire that stopped right next to my outer limestone wall. So it doesn't go through walls and roof in any way.

mumblemumble

To be honest, fire poppers should be on sale with merchants...tribals I could see buying them.
Why to people worry about following their heart? Its lodged in your chest, you won't accidentally leave it behind.

-----

Its bad because reasons, and if you don't know the reasons, you are horrible. You cannot ask what the reasons are or else you doubt it. But the reasons are irrefutable. Logic.