Fire is in kinda a bad place atm

[bleak quest]

Currently I feel like having a fire on your ship is a pretty not-fun mechanic and I almost always reload if my ship catches fire rather than try to fight it. There's two key reasons why it's way too hard to recover from a fire.

• The crew keep doing their regular jobs if they don't have an extinguisher available/aren't set to put out fires. This generally means they just suicide sitting in a burning turret or walking through the fire to deliver batteries.
• The capacity of each fire extinguisher feels quite low and on a large ship, the crew getting there and back can be quite long, and this leads to the player trying to spam extinguishers everywhere.

Compared to, say, FTL, where you can put out fires by venting, or send your crew to the medbay and make sure they don't sit in fires, it's a pretty feelsbad experience. Therefore I'd suggest the following:

• Default crew behaviour should be to leave on-fire areas even if their job is normally there. Only crew who are actually carrying an extinguisher should stand in areas that are on fire.
• Add a medbay part that can heal crewmembers when they get burned.
• Consider some kind of venting mechanic
• Consider buffing fire extinguishers. I might even suggest flat out replacing them with sprinklers which can cover an area, similar to heat exchangers, rather than a crew-operated thing. At least that way you know which parts have coverage and which don't.

[steep raven]

having non-extinguisher crew try avoid fire would probably be the best solution imo

[half furnace]

alternatively having fire suppression (slows spread of fire, doesn't extinguish it) would be helpful

[steep timber]

i wouldnt mind seeing more ways to manage fire

• forcing rooms shut using a button, essentially frying the component but saving the rest of your ship (also killing any crew inside from fire!)
• the ability to slow down fire with a heat-exchanger-like system would be nice
• alternate fire extinguishers (nitrogen bombs coating an area in fixfoam)

[tribal timber]

This could be a priority thing.
A simple do/don’t avoid setting as you mentioned, but also a checkbox next to each parts priority number list that determines if they should avoid fires or not.
The complexity would be very useful imo

[tepid marsh]

forcing rooms shut using a button, essentially frying the component but saving the rest of your ship (also killing any crew inside from fire!)
This is an interesting idea that I'd like to think more about. Thanks!

[half furnace]

alternatively it could be a dedicated part which would be interesting to play with from a building perspective

forcing us to plan what parts of a ship can be segmented off incase of a fire

[tepid marsh]

It could, but the thing I like about being able to quarantine individual rooms is that it gives new players options for fighting fires.

[strong sable]

While I do think fires do need some nerf/better methods of fighting them, I'm gonna play devil's avocado here

Fires are a very important part of a thermal heavy build, imo almost as important as the resistance debuff from heat. I wouldn't like seeing fires get a heavy nerf.

Like yes fires distract and kill crew, but that is the point of them, they are rarely going to destroy parts outright

I do like the sealing rooms idea though, as its a method of fighting fires that lets the player screw themselves over if used wrong

[safe hornet]

Tldr: new fire / heat status system is a great and good working addition, but
Crew ai is poop

[strong sable]

not an inaccurate assesment

[austere holly]

More expensive type of door mabye?

[halcyon wasp]

How about just opening the hatches on the room? Forcing all the air out and starving the fire but also forcing all the crew EVA

Another idea ive seen in a mod is a bulhead room

Basically a little 1x1 room that lets crew through but not fire

Could also be done as a more expensive door though

But seeing as crew just become EVA when the part is destroyed oftentimes, i dont see why not do the same with fires

Itll also make a good non combat option too in case your factory ship has a sudden heating problem

[austere holly]

I feel better for them to just die since I don’t think they wear space suits at all times

[halcyon wasp]

crew can get ejected to space if the part theyre on gets blown up i think

its kinda rare

but i swear ive seen it happen

[warped arch]

yee

[bleak quest]

happens all the time to enemy ships you destroy, and can happen to your guys too

[fierce glen]

I think this runs into the issue that it trivializes fire. You could just ignore fire extinguishers, replace them with air locks, and permanently staff a manipulator beam emitter to scoop the crew back every time something even thought about catching fire. Having it kill the crew fits better when it comes to making interesting decisions when in combat and still encourages you to engage with the heat/fire mechanics.

[torpid prism]

Medbay could be nice to heal burned people and in the future also to heal crew for boarding combat

[fierce glen]

Medbay would be awesome and I really hope it's a part of the crew boarding system.

For a fire suppression system, what about a foam solution that shares transportation with the heat pipes but requires separate tiles to store and deploy it?
For example, you have a foam tank that refills over time either just naturally like the fire extinguishers or requires a factory. The foam is transported anywhere you have heat pipes connected to that building but you have to put a separate foam deployment tile next to your deck gun for the foam to be used in that room. It would only deploy if a certain % of the tiles in the deck gun were on fire but the room would need to be repaired from the inside before it can resume use. Useful for buildings that require ammo because you have a tool for preventing ammo detonations but still have to design around it and weigh the cost/benefit of the materials and space impact.
It's basically a backup if fire extinguishers fail but still has its use cases for decreasing the risk of the ole ammo chain detonation funni.

[bleak quest]

Forcing the crew EVA is a pretty serious problem during combat, since they are super vulnerable and also not doing their combat tasks

[serene path]

comes down to how you build your ship and how you build your crew

best solution, airlocks, segmented ships and dedicated fire crew assigned to specific ones or have crew extinguish fire as one of the highest priority

generally you now require much more crew than usual to combat fire but all it really takes is segmented ships

if fire takes place in like an inner core part of a shelled warship then you might be out of luck, it's really ass I know but if you want a way to really save most of your money, abandon ship, get a highspeed crew recovery rescue ship to recover crew with manipulator beams and come back to your junked ship later

if the fire spread enough you've lost the fight anyway

[bleak quest]

I'm definitely gonna just reload instead of doing that

[serene path]

I play on hardcore, really never loading saves and just restarting

fire is really common for me with the new io faction

most of my ship just has oc extinguishers now and airlocks dotted on every single corner of my warships with hundreds of cut off segments for each weapon type

[half furnace]

a way you can reduce fire against thermal weapons/overheating is heat exangers

[serene path]

yeah oh hi rift

[fierce glen]

Does it also slow the spread of fires?

[half furnace]

i believe so

maybe go into dev mode and test it to make sure

[serene path]

no

well in a way yes technically it cools melting parts but it does not take out internal fire

[fierce glen]

I'm going to test it when I can. If it does, it's basically my idea about the foam with fewer steps. lol

[halcyon wasp]

honestly even with manipulator beams a lot of ships would need to substantially slow down in order to let the crew get back in, something which may not be ideal during combat, especially when your guns and/or shields are being set on fire and one of them just had itself shut down because you vacuumed out all the crew

[stray gale]

What about letting the heat exchanger extinguish fires at the cost of sending heat into the system?

Essentially becomes a sprinkler

[serene path]

I'm not the one to call the shots on what gets added to the game or not