Fire protection?

[Tolkien Book Fan]

Assuming I continue to almost never get gears, what alternate methods can I protect things from fire? If I build a stone wall around my chests, will that protect the chests from fires outside the wall?

[RequiemsRose]

Fire breaks and lightning rods are my main strategies. Clear a decent sized area around things you don't want burnt so fire cant spread to them as easily, and use lightning rods to prevent the lightning strike fires around your base.

If you also happen to play Willow like I do, mind your sanity well and later game you can use scaled chests for your most precious things (much later game most likely. Requires reign of giants and a boss fight)

[Tolkien Book Fan]

A thankfully mild fire in a recent game convinced me to set up a Lightning Rod as soon as possible (and then I got hit outside the base just gathering berries. Dramatic!). I could use some advice about how to deal with things like Red Hound fires at night and such.

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

To avoid red hound fires in the base, don't fight hounds in the base. You can put fire pits outside the base or make portable (even hands-free!) light sources in order to venture away from your base at night.

Oh, also worth mention, don't let friendly treeguards hang around in your base either. This one time I had the sense to run away to fight the hounds out of my base, but the hounds chose to fight the treeguards instead and I had to replace like a dozen burnt drying racks.

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

Stone walls will only protect your chests from fires under one particular set of circumstances I'm aware of:

1. the walls are far enough from your base to serve as a fire break
   
2. the walls have at most 1 space gaps between them
   
3. sources of fire remain safely on the other side of the walls
   
4. your base is in the desert
   
5. tumbleweeds roll through the fire source in the direction of your base

[Tolkien Book Fan]

I thought that it was Blue Hounds in Autumn, for some reason. So two days out from Winter I ended up in a fight with two Red Hounds and all my chests burned. I was hoping for some advice about how to block fire in the event of mistakes like this.

In my current game I have discovered that Wigfrid can tank Treeguards if she has enough helmets. However, before I discovered this, my first (and so far only) 100 day run ended when two Treeguards spawned, and then a Spider Queen, with winter falling at night. I set the Treeguards on fire twice then ran toward my base to get warm and give them time to burn. I died in the resultant fire.

[Big Bobby Sue]

I also use lightening rods and spacing things far enough apart so that if one group is burning, the other group won't catch. I'll have two groups of grass, two groups of twigs, far enough that if one burns the other will be ok. Trees. Chests. Everything. Then instead of having a chest full of logs or something flammable, lay those things on the ground far apart from each other.

For your base, you can always have a secondary, smaller base set up to run to in emergencies. Or even just a firepit with fuel by it and a firefly to show where it is.

For fire hounds, have a plan when you see them coming. A plan that includes running from your base.

Fireflies will light things at night to make them easier to find. So I like to have one by my firepit, and some by my tooth traps (which are outside of my base, but not far). Other firepits, whatever else you may want to find at night, especially while being pursued.

Beehives will kill things like hounds and treeguards. So will beefalo. So will pigs, but only if they're not in their houses, and they will eat the meat.

To control spider queens, destroy the nest when it gets to three tier, before they can spawn. Also, I've used lure plants to kill them. You might get a spider hat if you kill one, if you're interested in that. Easier to prevent them from spawning.

Always always carry stuff to make a fire and a torch so you don't run to your base to get warm.

Also, if deerclops shows up, run away from your base immediately. If he's not following you, hit him, then run. Beehives and beefalo and pigs will also kill deerclops, if there's enough of them. Tentacles probably would too. Don't let deerclops kill all your beefalo, pigs, or beehives because then you won't have any more (unless you have enough pig skins to build a pig house).

Everything getting destroyed sucks. :(

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

...why didn't i think of this sooner luxury fan!

Hunt those moosegooses, make a fan.

I believe lureplants have higher burn priority than just about everything else, so if you floor your base so the eyes can't grow, you can place a lureplant somewhere safe but within the same screen as your base and summer wildfires will burn it first. There's various guides that show how to use this to extend the reach of a flingomatic, you'd just be doing it without the flingomatic. Still lets you know what to pay attention to in case of wildfires, less likely to happen without noticing it and maybe you can put it out with an ice staff or luxury fan.

Another option is to use telelocators wastefully to force the weather to rain (you can just zap frogs or butterflies). Won't be any summer wildfires while it's raining. You'd need quite a few telelocator staves to get through the whole summer like this, so it's more an emergency option if your lureplants all burn.

Alternatively, you can search the tumbleweeds for gears. For every 25 searched you have a 50% chance to find at least one gear, if I remember the math correctly.

Or you can just hide in the caves all summer?

[RequiemsRose]

I hate gear hunting, so I also end up turning the clockworks to "more", pro: gears are no longer a problem, con: somehow going from default where they are somewhat rare, to one tick higher on more, means they are now basically everywhere. This does mean you make your start a bit more confrontational, but you'll get your gears quickly. It also happens to mean that you can usually find a rhino to kite through forests.
They can clear pretty good fire breaks rather quickly, and you can kite them into nearby mobs like pigs or beefalo until they eventually get killed. All sorts of new goodies to pick up, and a new fire break (as long as you do clean up all the logs and stumps left behind). Another con though, pretty decent chance of angering a tree guard, so you may also want to stock up on those pinecones to make it happy again instead of taking it on really early.

[Tolkien Book Fan]

Thanks for all the advice! I think I have finally played this game enough to understand and be able to do a lot of what you are suggesting. Farming bosses is still probably beyond me. I haven't even tried catching bugs or exploring the caves, but Autumn is four days away and I have plenty of jerky saved up to do things like that.

[Kirote]

In my opinion, the best way to fight against wild fire is to set up a temporarily camp in rocky bio. Not many things can be burn there. alternative strategy is to enter the cave and explore.

[Tolkien Book Fan]

Is the Dragonfly supposed to only appear for a day, once it spawns? I had built an Endothermic Fire and tooth trap area for the summer one screen south of my base. It appeared directly east of my base and went west through it. I ran off to get the Blueprint for the Old Bell. After the first night came the Dragonfly headed for the coast and then vanished. I checked north and across the water to the west and it wasn't there. I haven't braved the two Spider Queens that appeared northwest to see if it fought them, died and (hopefully) left Scales (I assume those are inedible).

The conclusion I draw from this is that I should build my storage area and crafting stations in a reasonably close Cave, with just food production on the surface. Although that does assume that the Cave doesn't reset, which according to the wiki may be a possibility. If it works, that would shift the Giants from 'fun-destroying game elements I can't get rid of' to 'annoying things to run away from'. But it also disrupts the base building, which I rather like.

In this current game, the Dragonfly incinerated all my chests without, apparently, setting fire to the contents that were ejected. I haven't checked yet because I was looking for the Dragonfly. I did see that it somehow left my Birdcage and an icebox, so I have both food and my main further source of it left. I guess I have to continue this save until I find the final Thing and build the Wooden Thing for the first time, or die.

[Justice]

Ice staff can put down fires. If you need a tool against already burning item.

[RequiemsRose]

I usually play as Willow, so while I don't really need to worry about dying to a forest fire, I'm also especially prone to accidentally lighting things on fire when my sanity drops. That's part of why I need to use clockworks to make fire breaks real early on for me. Eventually I will lose my mind (or farm nightmare fuel), and I will ignite whatever is near me. It's good to make sure that isn't a massive section of the map, or my own base.

If I don't base in the rocky areas, I snag the turf (and I personally like making cobblestone floors). Use that as my flooring to both help with my fire issue, and the eyeball plants later on. With the rhinos earlier forest clearing for me, it's not hard to mass produce floors early on. I do base near a cave, though not close enough for the bats to invade at night. I usually rely on caves a lot to get my Willow through the winter, and occasionally summer if things are getting too firey.

Sidenote related to the spiders, bring all the traps! Scatter some animal traps around an edge of the web, annoy them and lead them into the traps until they stop popping out. Move the traps closer to the nest, smack said nest, run through the traps. When spideys stop trying to defend their nest, you can wreck it. Although if it isn't yet, may want to wait til it gets to a 3 tier so you can also get eggs from it for future farming.

[tyrranor]

Fan to extinguish
Dragonfly scales to make floor immune to fire
Find gears in tumbleweed or ruins to make the ice flingo