Mighty winter, boilers, and all that donated wood at the annex?

[Adresin]

So, it's possible I'm missing something here, but let me explain a couple of things that got me thinking.

A few months back, the annex started accepting certain things for firewood to be donated. A number of us chopped and hauled for hours, and now everything, except coal of course because where is anyone going to get enough coal, is down to a low need.

Fast forward, and now we're in the middle of the mighty winter, complete with boilers constantly hungry for fuel. I love it, by the way. The chance for player characters to make a difference in a tangible way is awesome.

a couple weeks ago, Alia ran across a tree, not even debranched, that someone chopped down and left. This left her with a quandry. During this hardship, no one wants to waste fuel. But you can't drag logs into town, and chopping up 15 logs would leave nowhere to put all of the resulting split logs. That's not even considering all of the branches involved. with help, she chopped some, filled the boilers, stuffed what she could in the inn's party room, donated what she could to the annex, sold the branches they wouldn't take, and hauled the remaining/majority of the logs to an out of the way location to be used as needed. But with bandits and whoever else on the prowl, that's far from an ideal solution.

Honestly, from a purely in character perspective, the smart thing would be for her and her helpers to chop up all of the logs and donate them all to the annex. Sadly I didn't have time then, but even if I had, mechanically those logs would then just be, gone. But, what if they weren't?

What if people could either put fuel directly in the boilers, or donate it to the annex? Perhaps the annex could show how much wood/peat etc is currently stocked rather than just need high or low or whatever. Then, I could see a few ways wood could get from the annex stock to the boilers.

1. If boilers are close to going out, an automatic process moves supply, say town workers or some such.
2. To keep players responsible for the boilers, there could be a command at the annex, either to transfer something to one of the boilers, or to retrieve a piece of whatever so they could physically carry it there.

Regardless of the method, I think this would serve a few purposes. For one, it would keep this very good thing going but in a bit more of a streamlined fashion. For another, it would eliminate the need for people to stuff wood into any possible container so as not to waste it, thereby lessening item bloat. It could also encourage group efforts, since people wouldn't have to balance how much they get at a time so carefully, again because of storage issues. It was a lot of fun back in the first instance I mentioned, the group chopping and hauling we all did. It's also just kind of weird, boilers going out when there's a whole building sitting there, presumably piled high with wood.

I'd also suggest the annex accept any branches. I think it's large straight ones they won't take which makes me go, why? They burn just like any other.

[Frisbee]

Just wanted to jump on and say seconded, hope something along these lines gets implemented as it's a good and sensible idea.

[Rias]

The issue I see with this is that it can take away the feeling of ongoing effort, which was the intent of the boilers system as they are currently. If it's possible to build up a massive stockpile of excess fuel, it becomes a thing people organize a large group effort for once, and then forget about, which loses the feel of the ongoing active effort to keep the town and its citizens warm during extreme circumstances.

As for where all that donated fuel goes, you can assume it's being distributed to townsfolk as needed in the background. There's a lot of Shadgard that isn't hooked up to the steam network and still needs fuel for fireplaces and wood stoves and such.

[Rias]

P.S. I did add the additional branch types to the donatables list, and bumped the needs of everything back to high!

[artus]

Does the system drain donated resources over time when you leave it there or do you have to bump it up every single time it goes down? Just curious.