Vaka

Vaka

Vaka does two things to fires. It caps what a fireplace loses while nobody is there, so a single absence costs at most one fuel however long it lasted. And lights that burn resin or coal hold each unit twice as long. Cooking fires burn wood, and while you stand at one it burns exactly what vanilla says.

Features

• A fire is charged at most one fuel for any one absence. The amount is configurable.
• A fire that burns resin or coal lasts twice as long per unit, whether you are there or not.

Which fuels count and how much longer are both configurable.

• Wood fires burn exactly as vanilla, to the decimal, while you are at them. Sleeping and

skiptime are charged in full at the fire's own rate, because the fire was loaded and ticking the whole time.

• Covers every piece that uses the vanilla Fireplace component, including fires added by

other mods.

• No new pieces, no keybinds, no UI, no new saved data. One Harmony postfix on one method.
• A log line each time you enter a world, naming the fires the light rule applies to.
• Optional logging that reports what each catch-up was worth and what it was actually charged.

How it works

A fireplace does not burn in the background. While its zone is loaded, Fireplace.UpdateFireplace runs every two seconds, asks how long it has been since the last run, and subtracts that many seconds of fuel. When the zone is unloaded nothing runs and nothing re-stamps the timestamp on the fire's network object, so the gap keeps growing. The first update after your base loads back in pays for the whole gap at once. Whether anyone was present is never part of the sum, so a base of thirty torches is thirty of those bills landing in the second you walk in.

The clock is world time, not wall time. A dedicated server only advances it while at least one player is connected, and the value is saved into the world file. An empty server is frozen and a single player world resumes exactly where it stopped. What actually drains your base is the hours other people spent online elsewhere on the map, or in single player, the hours you spent across it yourself.

Vaka caps that first bill rather than making all fuel last longer. A longer fuse on every fire would make cooking cheaper while you are stood at the campfire, which was never the problem, and a longer trip next time would still arrive at a cold base.

An absence is recognised by the fireplace object not having been running, not by the size of the gap. The game creates a fireplace when its zone loads and destroys it when the zone goes, so the first update for a new object is the one paying off however long it was away. Every later update is a live tick and is charged in full whatever its size. That is why sleeping through the night and the skiptime console command still cost full price.

Light fuels

The second rule is a longer fuse, and only for light. A fire whose fuel is on the LightFuels list burns each unit LightFuelMultiplier times as long. The defaults are resin and coal, twice as long. It applies all the time, at the fire and away from it.

It stays off cooking fires for the reason the cap is a cap. A longer fuse on a campfire makes cooking cheaper, and nobody asked for that. On a torch it only means fewer rounds of the base with a stack of resin.

A cooking station or cauldron does not ask for a campfire. It looks for the burning area a campfire carries, and the standing brazier carries one under the same name. If the rule reaches a fire with that area and a cooking station fits over it, that spot cooks on the longer fuse. Nobody has tried it. The log line below names any fire the rule reaches that carries the area.

The rule reads what a fire burns rather than which piece it is, so a torch from another mod that burns resin is covered without anything to update. Which pieces burn resin or coal is the game's own data, so each time you enter a world Vaka writes one line to the log naming the fires the rule applies to, grouped by fuel. A fuel on the list that nothing burns is named too, with "no fireplace in this world burns it".

The two rules stack. The cap is counted in fuel, so an absence still costs a torch at most one resin. The torch just has to be left alone twice as long before the bill gets there.

What it covers

Anything carrying the vanilla Fireplace component: every player-buildable fire, and any modded fire built on the same component. Numbers ripped from the running game, at vanilla rates:

| Piece | Prefab | Holds | One fuel | Full tank | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Campfire, iron campfire | fire_pit, fire_pit_iron | 10 | 1h 23m | 13.9h | | Bonfire | bonfire | 10 | 1h 23m | 13.9h | | Hearth | hearth | 20 | 1h 23m | 27.8h | | Wood ground torch | piece_groundtorch_wood | 4 | 2h 47m | 11.1h | | Standing brazier | piece_brazierfloor01 | 5 | 5h 33m | 27.8h | | Ground torch | piece_groundtorch | 6 | 5h 33m | 33.3h | | Blue and green ground torches | piece_groundtorch_blue, _green | 6 | 5h 33m | 33.3h | | Wall torch | piece_walltorch | 6 | 5h 33m | 33.3h |

Every column is populated world time, not wall clock. Cooking fires burn wood. The wood ground torch, the ground torch and the wall torch burn resin, and the standing brazier burns coal, so the light rule reaches all four at its default. The blue and green torches burn neither.

With the light rule at its default, a fire it reaches doubles both of its last two columns. A wall torch holds a resin for 11h 7m and a full one lasts about 67 hours. A fire burning anything not on the list keeps the numbers above. The log line when you enter a world says which fires the rule reaches in your game.

In vanilla, cooking fires burn four times faster per fuel than torches do, which is why a base goes dark unevenly. A campfire is empty after about fourteen hours of other people playing, a