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Hydra26

Alcohol Heating

9 posts in this topic

So, eventually all of us in TFC run into a problem; too much grain.  Eventually, we end up with hundreds and hudreds of pounds of the stuff.  Alongside this, we also will soon have another issue: body temperature.  We will, at some point, need to start to heat our houses, and none of us want to sit there feeding twenty logs per day all winter long.  I propose a solution:

 

Use alcohol for heating.

 

I think that a good use for all that grain is heat.  I say that, if we make alcohol, we will have the option of distilling it.  How you ask?  Quite simple: take a large vessel filled with any form of an alcohol, then place it over a forge or firepit.  After that, a new distillery multi-block structure, with one overhanging block on one side (think large chests), that sits on top will be somehow made with copper tuyeres and filled with water, and it will fill the barrel placed under it with ethanol.  The ratio of ethanol to original alcohol is determined by the original concentration of the alcohol, as it is already planned (From the wiki: "Adding an excess of food will simply consume the entire food in making the alcohol, although it is planned that in a future version this excess will increase the potency of the alcohol."); thus, 5000mB of 20% ABV whiskey will distill to 1000mB of ethanol. And what do we do with this ethanol?  We burn it for heat.  A new heating block will be added and placed in a room.  After the player fills it with ethanol, it is lit and burns through one bucket of ethanol in 24 hours, or any other time set in config.  The heating block will heat a 10x10x5 area, and only need to be refilled every week or so.  Anyway, that's just my thoughts, feel free to add to this below!

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Unless you can find documentation stating otherwise, ethanol fireplaces are a modern invention wayyyy outside the timeframe of TFC. It also looks like the heat produced from ethanol fireplaces are less than half of what you would get with a wood-burning fireplace, and it burns through the fuel much faster.

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Have you ever heard of the corn burning stove? Anywhere where you have an excess of inexpensive grain people (in modern times) burn it. I personally would rather drink, I mean brew the alcohol...

 

Perhaps one should plant less grain?

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"So, eventually all of us in TFC run into a problem; too much grain."

 

Art imitating life. IRL we have so much excess of grains we feed it to cattle and try to pour it in our cars' tank.

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Isn't a simple solution to this problem to make grain harder to achieve? For example, grain could be more susceptible to death?

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Reading this article.

Here is some information and average numbers from a friend of mine who grows wheat to sell to folks who make their own flour.

Soft White Wheat is used in flat breads, cakes, biscuits, pastries, crackers, Asian-style noodles and snack foods.

Hard Red Winter is used in pan breads, Asian noodles, hard rolls, flat breads and general-purpose flour

Hard Red Spring is used in pan breads, hearth breads, rolls, croissants, bagels, hamburger buns, pizza crust and used for blending

The average yield per acre of winter wheat is 82.0 (2.46 tons, 4920 lbs) bushels, while spring wheat is 78 (2.34 tons, 4680 lbs) bushels per acre.

45 lbs of wheat will yield roughly 158 cups of ground flour; white will yield a bit more than red.

1 lb of wheat = roughly 3 cups = roughly 4 cups of flour

1 acre = 43, 560 square feet

1 square foot will yield roughly .112 lbs of winter wheat or .107 lbs of spring wheat.

For 4 cups of flour you would need to plant roughly 9 square feet.

So we would be totally in the believable if we had 1 Square Meter, same as 1 square yard to produce 1 pond of flour.

The wiki says roughly 14 ounces of wheat per plant, so we are in the realistic realm here.

One of the issues is that some people will always want the game to be harder, specially when playing on a server one player can easily take care of farms and animal husbandry.

But for others is like they already did all the work about farming, collecting the seeds prepping the soil and planting. Now they want to build something awesome.

Even in real life a few people working as farms were able to feed whole Nations. It's the reason civilization exists.

It frees people to be soldiers and builders and priests and nobles.

I never lived in the country, but when I was a kid I had a big backyard and one year we planted a few seeds of corn just for the fun of it. We ate so much corn and with hardly any work.

My point is that the game is actually realistic as how much food is produced.

One idea would be to have animal hunger, that would give more uses for grain.

As far as using alcohol for heating is not believable or in the time frame of the mod. Wood is what was used for thousands of years.

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There's already a perfectly good alternative to wood when it comes to heat: http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Land#Peat

 

 

peat can be used as fuel. It has industrial importance as a fuel in some countries, such as Ireland and Finland, where it is harvested on an industrial scale. In many countries, including Ireland and Scotland, where trees are often scarce, peat is traditionally used for cooking and domestic heating. Stacks of drying peat dug from the bogs can still be seen in some rural areas.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat

 

 

That's not to say that alcohol as a fuel wouldn't be useful. It works for lamps anyway. But for heat, wood and peat are sufficient and fitting.

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In modern days, alcohol stoves are great for backpacking and generally way less dangerous than pressurized stoves. Open-top burners are less fuel efficient but they work even in extremely cold environments when gas stoves wouldn't have enough pressure to start.

 

However, it doesn't really fit the TFC feel. You'd need some kind of metal cup at least, and I'd probably feel a little silly with a chunky hand-forged metal cup that I try to use as a stove, when I could simply make a campfire.

 

I do however share you feelings that alcohol needs more purpose. I feel like we have a ton of freedom in Terrafirmacraft but when you follow that mindset it makes the limitations seem so much more obvious. Clearly we won't be able to simulate reality perfectly, but I feel that players should be encouraged to be resourceful by making items have multiple functions. I haven't played TFC in a very long time and just got back in (I stopped playing right when placing ingots on the ground was implemented, whenever that was), and I really like where it's gone since I've been away. Barrels seem to be a pretty new feature in the scope of the whole mod, so it will probably just take some time to find the right balance for the features added. Nobody would want the entire economy to devolve into alcohol production being the main source of trade, although it'd probably be worth a chuckle or two.

 

TL:DR, alcohol shouldn't be used as fuel, but purposes for it will likely be added as time goes on.

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Not everything that we add to TFC has a purpose, or will ever get one. Sometimes we just add things for fun. For example, alcohol was actually only added as an easter egg. We didn't tell players which foods you needed to create the different alcohols, and the only use for it was to drink it and get random potion effects, and then eventually die of alcohol poisoning if you drank too much. The only reason it became part of the food preservation system was because enough players kept complaining about not being able to find rock salt.

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