Flare Guns - Actually Useful

[dm19732787]

I've seen many examples on youtube where the player or youtuber just treats the flare gun as useless.

So let's examine. The flare gun is NOT a weapon. It should be. A flare gun at point blank range should kill a snake or severely injure a boar, but it does not. At best, in these regards, it only acts to deter the predator from attacking you for a very short while. If anyone has an instance where the flare gun actually damaged something, ANYTHING, I would like to know about it myself.

So what does it do? It gives off red light. Is this useful? YES!

Journey to a new island, keep a flare gun with you. It could be dark by the time you land and you need to craft your save point and a campfire and a still. Fire that flare into the air. While it does not illuminate the whole island, it still does enough of an area where you don't need to carry a stack of lanterns to see what you do. You can now work at night, have your camp done by morning to do the exploration you wanted to do to begin with.

Alternate use? Fire a flare upward over a wreck. You can now explore that wreck at night, and the red illumination will let you know which way is up in case you sense of direction gets fouled on account of a shark attack. This gives your torches and lanterns a bit extra illumination as well, making things much easier, and the red ambiance gives a whole new feel to the gameplay. Some of you will love this feature.

With all that said, do not use for deep water diving. The light just doesn't penetrate deep enough to be useful on a deeper dive. And the flare itself will sink into the water and be useless.

Hope this gives a new idea on ways to play the game. It sure does make it more exciting for me,

[V11CU96]

Fair observation, they do give off quite alot of light.

I wish there was a way to hold a torch at the same time as another tool or weapon, e.g craft a torch helmet or something, (since they bothered to make a silly propeller beanie for creative mode)

Really useful for hunting at night, in co-op mode you can have one player with a torch and another with spears/ Bow etc, to hunt down a shark or snake at night. but there is no option for this in single player.
Especially bad trying to get eyes on a shark around dawn or dusk - its near impossible as the water is too reflective at those times.