New Lightning and Fire Mechanics, Old build

[Fret]

So, I haven't been playing for the last few months and I saw that in the meanwhile a few new updates came out. Very cool! But, since my base mostly exists of wooden structures, I am a bit worried about the new lightning and new fire mechanics. So what are some good ways to make my base lightning proof? As I understand it, as longs as the highest block in a certain area is a non flamable block, there is no problem. So how much area does a block-made lightning rod (I don't have SFS atm) roughly cover? Kind of a gamey question, I know, but my walls also are made out of wood, so I need to cover a lot of area to prevent a chain reaction.

[Mesh]

I hate getting gamey myself so my recommendation would be to build a few stone pillars around your town/base

[FlowerChild]

Ok, I'm going to get full out spoilery here and describe the mechanic in fairly technical terms, as I don't want to fuck up your builds:

Spoiler

Show

When lightning is going to strike any given spot, it searches horizontally 8 blocks in each direction, forming a square pattern 17 blocks on each side, in which the highest point is instead struck. There's some additional wiggle that occurs if leaves are hit so that the lightning travels towards the trunk of trees, but unless you're decorating your roofs with leaves and logs, that shouldn't affect you.

Material (rock, wood, lightning rod, etc.) doesn't currently matter for determining which block is struck at present. So having stone chimneys or what have you poking up out of your wood structure should be enough to keep them safe. I plan to do something more with lightning rods in the future so that they provide additional benefits.

So, in short, if any given point has a higher one up to 8 blocks away, it's safe.

Now, to complicate matters a bit, I just noticed an off-by-one error in the code while referring to it for this explanation, that makes that 7 blocks along some axis, but that'll be fixed for next release.

[Fret]

Thanks a lot for the explanation, it should be an easy fix for most buildings. I do really like the recent changes, I got away with just building out of wood blocks for too long. Now I actually have to think about the material qualities of the blocks.

[FlowerChild]

Thanks a lot for the explanation, it should be an easy fix for most buildings. I do really like the recent changes, I got away with just building out of wood blocks for too long. Now I actually have to think about the material qualities of the blocks.

Awesome! Yeah, that's really one of the larger points I've been trying to achieve with some of my recent changes: to give block types a real identity of their own rather than just being a different texture.

[Egger3rd]

to give block types a real identity of their own rather than just being a different texture.

I appreciate your efforts in that regard. All the recent block changes seem like they should have been that way in vanilla. The dirt mechanics have been particularly rewarding to suss out.

[FlowerChild]

Ok, I want to clarify a couple of things here as lightning seems to be freaking people out a bit more than it probably should:

The big thing to keep in mind is that lightning has not actually changed that much, other than for trees and logs.

Planks, for example, are no more susceptible than they used to be. If lightning hits them, they might catch fire, but will almost inevitably go out in the rain.

The big things that have changed are logs now convert to smouldering blocks when hit by lightning, which can cause them to continue to burn after the rain has stopped, then starting additional fires. This can go several blocks deep if logs are stacked on top of each other (like with trees), or are just covered with leaves.

So, if you don't want to have nasty fires start from lightning, it essentially just comes down to not building roofs out of logs or leaves. That's about it. Otherwise, you're dealing largely with the regular vanilla mechanics.

The other change is that lightning now migrates towards high points, in the way I described in previous posts, but again, unless you were using the old SFS lightning rods, this comes down to the same blocks potentially getting randomly hit by lightning with vanilla mechanics. I implemented this migration mainly so that trees would be struck in a more natural fashion.

I hope this clears some stuff up. Unless you're building specifically with logs, very little should change for you.