[Solved] Questions about oil lamps

[uwotm8 0]

I really enjoy the new oil lamps. They're a nice substitute for torches, albeit olives are not very easy to find if you're not lucky. I play using WAILA, which as you know shows how much time is left in terms of fuel. I use to turn off lamps during the day not to waste precious fuel. As the dark comes I turn them on again, and I notice strange things happening with the oil. Before I right click on the lamp, WAILA says that a certain amount of time is left, but after I click, that time drastically decreases, kind of 15, 20 hours.

 

Is it an intended feature or a bug? If it is a feature, does this mean that oil boils off and as such it is useless to turn off lamps during the day, since that fuel would be wasted anyway? Also, does temperature influence evaporation?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

To reduce lag, oil lamps are not constantly ticking. They only update their timer whenever they are updated either by player interaction, or by a random world tick. They keep track of the timer from the last time they were updated, and then when they are updated again subtract the difference in the oil.

 

Temperature has no effect, because it is not evaporation, it is burning. Considering that it is a flame that is burning the oil away, unless your ambient temperature is the same temperature as the burning point for olive oil, it's not going to affect anything.

Edited 11 May 2015 by Kittychanley

[uwotm8 0]

Of course if it is burning a few degree doesen't change anything, but this happens even when I turn off the lamp by right clicking it. Or, at least, whenever I right click I toggle the flame. Now I don't know if this is merely aesthetic, but since oil is consumed all the same... In a nutshell: is it possible to turn off the lamps so that no oil is burnt when not needed?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Yes. Oil does not burn when you right-click them to turn them off. What you are seeing when you turn them back on is just the oil amount updating the amount it burned when it was burning.

 

Edit: There was a bug that would occasionally cause lamps to burn fuel even if they were turned off. This has been fixed for the next version.

Edited 11 May 2015 by Kittychanley

[uwotm8 0]

I've done some experiment. I placed four rose gold oil lamps (like those I use in my survival game), put them off, checked if they still had 2000 hours of time left and 250mL of oil, then I entered the debugmode and added time with commands. After one week I checked the lamps, they were off, WAILA said there were 2000 hours left, so I right clicked on one of them. As I clicked and the lamp turned on, the timer went from 2000 to 1831. 2000 - 1831 = 169, which is the amount of hours in one week. This is odd. If you want I may attach screenshots.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Please see my above edit.

[uwotm8 0]

Oh sorry, didn't refresh the page. Well, thanks for your attention, glad to have helped you guys to improve the mod even more.