RimWorld

RimWorld

[JPT] Burn It for Fuel
TDuffin 5 Aug, 2020 @ 6:42am
A few notes about the mod
I've used it for some time, but in the end I decided that it wasn't for me. I use a handful of other mods, the only ones I imagine impact my experience with this mod are Haul Urgently, Haul On-the-job.

One thing I found, firstly, is that while it was nice to have "Wood-burning" items use other burnable materials as fuel, it was also quite annoying to manage:

If I needed a certain textile for a quest, I would need to make sure that *every* building using the mod had this item disabled. I only realised my mistake when my stock of human leather (don't ask) was randomly depleting itself on buildings I didn't expect it to.

Secondly, partially related, was that as the settings, by default, are the same for all buildings, my chemfuel generator was often getting fueled with wood, among other things. This seems to break the balance of having a chemfuel vs wood generator in the first place. I also found it odd that passive coolers were accepting other fuels, such as leather.

My personal suggestion to fix both of these issues is to, by default, make it so that newly-built fuelled buildings only use their "default fuel"; that is chemfuel for chemfuel gens, wood for fuelled smithies etc. and allow the player to change the settings after-the-fact. I would also personally remove the fuel tab for "specialised-fuel" (chemfuel gens for example, which IRL wouldn't allow wood or textiles as fuel!) buildings, but I guess some people like the customisability.

My only other gripe, which may be due to other hauling mods, is that pawns will mix fuels, but *not bring enough mixed items to the generator in one trip* (even when prioritised!), which would lead to situations where:

Pawn A brings 70 fuel X, but needs 75 to refuel a generator.

Pawn A decides to go back to base to get 5 more fuel of type Y and drops X on the floor.

Pawn B sees 70 items of type X on the ground half-way across the map, and decides to haul them back to base.

Pawn A brings the 5 fuel of type Y to the generator, but needs 75 to refuel the generator.

Pawn A decides to go back to base to get 70 more fuel of type X and drops Y on the floor.

Rinse and repeat until one pawn gets tired or dies unexpectedly (dont ask).

the "easy" fix here (I havent ever modded RW so I cant tell if this can be fixed easily) would be to ensure that any pawn refuelling a building has enough fuel to do the job in one trip, OR enable buildings to be fuelled "part-way".

TL:DR its a useful mod! but it doesn't fix my game right now. Hopefully others will enjoy these proposed changes too :)