Is Building -> Tree Fire Spread Time Going to be Adjusted?

[BDDark]

Below is a picture of my city.

Notice the line of trees running along the railroad track to the left, or the groves of trees in the empty areas of the industrial zone in the bottom right, or the lovely landscaped forest of trees among the housing area in the middle right?

In order to continue playing my city, I have delete all of them.

Currently, once a fire starts in a building, any trees nearby will catch on fire within two seconds. That's not an exaggeration, that's actual time. Two seconds.

I watched this firestorm develop from the first initial building that caught fire. Every other building on that block was on fire in under TEN SECONDS.

Before anyone asks, my Fire Coverage is excellent. Even so, no amount of coverage will stop a fire in two seconds.

This isn't a Natural Disaster. This is just common, everyday one-building fires that have always been in the game, but now any fire results in declaring a State of Emergency, and I get three of these infernos every other day on average.

It's not unreasonable for me to build my city this way. There are many real-world cities with huge groves of trees built into the city planning and beautification. But I haven't played Cities Skylines in three day, and won't again until I know my city won't be burned to the ground. It's disheartening. I don't want to delete my trees, and I don't want to build cities of only concrete and steel.

The delay from Building To Tree fire spread has to be lengthened. Give the firetrucks a chance. And I would like to know it's being worked on so that I'll know one day I can start playing my city again.

Thanks

 

[peteij]

I agree. I've lost one of my industrial estates 3 times now, despite having a fire station right next to it. It's just way too quick - every fire takes out the entire block and there's nothing that can be done to stop it. The whole lot is on fire by the time the first fire engine arrives.

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

I was wondering/worrying about this. (Gaming computer is down, so I have not had the chance to try it yet.)
I have a LOT of trees in my cities. I plop them in all over the place to make it look nice.
I know some YouTubers (Flux, for example) put in a lot of trees and bushes, and wondered how they will fare.

 

[talisman56]

I started a new Vanilla city when the free patch came out - haven't bought the DLC - and I haven't noticed the block fires described above - do they only happen if you have the DLC?

 

[jcitron]

I think it's a bug with the code since Natural Disasters.

I have a workaround using the Extra Landscaping tools. I click on the add water, set the volume to .02 or something like that, and then add water. As soon as the water is added, I delete it. This causes a flood which douses the fire out nearly immediately, thus, reducing the damage.

I have a bunch of those water-sucker trucks around which come out and mop up the mess.

 

[Avanya]

It seems to be working as intended, though I too would love an option to turn it off. To anyone who really doesn't want to have this happen I can recommend the mod No Fires on the workshop. A very simple mod, which means it doesn't affect performance much (if at all) and won't break our saves. Downside is it removed the whole fire mechanic, but as a temporary solution it works.

 

[JimmiG]

With Natural Disasters, you need helicopters to put out forest fires, regular firefighters will ignore them. The problem in this case is that the game considers *any* tree on fire to be a forest fire, even if the tree is part of an urban park or in someone's backyard.

IMO, this should be changed so that regular firefighters can put out any tree on fire within a certain distance from a road. You don't need a helicopter to put out a fire in your backyard apple tree.

 

[ristosal]

Yeah, this is not good. I saw a video where it was about 20 seconds and an entire neighborhood was on fire (started from a 1x1 building). The simulation was double speed, but still. The forest wasn't as dense as in OP's case, which was probably a factor.

 

[Sanny]

All the Trees on the map got fried for me (all at once).

 

[BDDark]

I started a new Vanilla city when the free patch came out - haven't bought the DLC - and I haven't noticed the block fires described above - do they only happen if you have the DLC?

Yes. Fire spreading building to building is in the base game now after the update, but trees catching on fire requires the DLC.

All the Trees on the map got fried for me (all at once).

I've seen several people say they've had this happen, that every tree just spontaneously combusted at the same time. It's an entirely different issue/bug, yet no less frustrating. Either that, or you just witness the super-secret Biblical Apocalypse disaster scenario.

 

[ristosal]

@BDDark could be a good idea to test out what would be a sort of "safe zone" between buildings and a dense forest, until there will be a possible adjustment. Forestry industry will still be hell, regardless

 

[jcitron]

@BDDark could be a good idea to test out what would be a sort of "safe zone" between buildings and a dense forest, until there will be a possible adjustment. Forestry industry will still be hell, regardless

Excellent idea. Here we use what are called fire breaks which run through large forested areas to keep forest fires from spreading wildly.

https://binged.it/2gv6zrA

The line going to the right is a fire break. The other line that intersects up and down vertically is some power lines.

 

[BDDark]

@BDDark could be a good idea to test out what would be a sort of "safe zone" between buildings and a dense forest, until there will be a possible adjustment. Forestry industry will still be hell, regardless

Yeah, I was planning to, but with my city design it's basically removing all the trees to have open fields with maybe one or two trees in it. For example, the picture below:

All those trees must go. You can see in the bottom left where a fire broke out recently. The blocks aren't really big enough for a buffer. I can remove all the trees and have a few spaced in the exact middle of each block, but...that fundamentally changes the look and feel of my city.

I've put over 600 hours in this city, and don't want to abandon it, but I'll start a new one and do some testing there.

Also, yes, this city does have a Forestry Industry, hahaha! Although, I have to say in the case of a Forestry Building lighting a whole block of other Forestry Buildings on fire, I was kind of okay with that (was the first fire that happened after getting the DLC). It kinda made sense. But then I saw that fire did the same thing all over, and realized it's a screwy mechanic.

 

[jcitron]

I like your city layout, BDDark. That would definitely be a shame if you had to remove the trees. I agree the trees become an integral part of a city just as the buildings and transportation systems do.

It was the landscape architect Frederick Olmsted who designed many great parks around the world including Boston's Public Gardens, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA, NY City's Central Park, and others including one in Liverpool, England. These parks made use of open space, trees, and lots of them, and natural areas to break up the great expanses of pavement which take over cities to give the residents a respite from the noise and commotion that besiege urban places. This is even true of the city that I live in, though there are great stretches of woodlands, structured parks, and even farmland. When you visit these areas, you tend to forget that there's a big bustling downtown with lots of traffic, trams, subways, metro, and highways.

 

[ristosal]

All the Trees on the map got fried for me (all at once).

I thought about a theory for this which may give you an illusion of virtually all trees catching fire at once. If you go into an info view and pause the game in the process, smoke and fire animations go off. Then when you close an info view and unpause it's *whoosh*. I still don't close out the possibility of this being an actual bug though.

The thunderstorm seems to be the most frequent disaster in the game, even though they should be random. Even when they're not that strong (mostly 1.0 to 3.0), they set plenty of forest on fire across the map and this dynamic should be toned down. The current rate of forest fires can put a quite tremendous strain on performance and hinder the gameplay experience.