Skip to main content

Fire

Fire warms you, cooks food, and boils water clean. It is never free, and keeping one alive costs less than starting a new one.

Making fire from friction​

There is no flint-and-steel. The first fire comes from friction:

  • First lay an unlit campfire Campfire (crafted from 3 sticks and plant fiber — the fiber is its built-in tinder).
  • Then hold right-click on the unlit campfire to drill it alight. Two friction tools work: a bare stick Stick (a hand drill — slow, exhausting, and a long gamble) or a bow drill Bow drill (crafted from sticks and cordage — it catches sooner, for less stamina, and wears out with use).
  • Drilling costs stamina and only makes smoke until enough strokes finally catch.
  • Rain and being wet make friction fire fail. Drilling needs dry conditions.

The unlit campfire — 3 sticks and plant fiber:

Stick
Stick
Stick
Plant fiber
→
Campfire

The bow drill — 2 sticks and string:

Stick
Stick
String
→
Bow drill

The ferro rod — the reliable fire​

Above friction there is one dependable fire-starter: a ferro rod (fire steel). Held like the drills, you hold right-click on the unlit campfire to strike it — and it behaves nothing like friction:

  • It catches almost at once (about two strikes, a high chance each) and costs next to no stamina — it's struck, not worked.
  • It lights in the rain. The sparks run hot enough to take wet tinder, where a bow drill would only smoke. (Fully submerged still fails — everything's soaked.)
  • It wears with use — a rod is good for about 200 fires before it grinds away.

The ferro rod is endgame gear: forged from 2 steel ingots and a flint (steel is the deep metallurgy tier), so it's something you build toward — or bring as one of your starting loadout picks, exactly as contestants prize it on the show.

Flint and pyrite — the strike-a-light​

Long before steel, people struck fire with iron pyrite (marcasite) — a brassy nodule of "fool's gold." Sift enough gravel and, alongside the flint, you'll turn up the odd lump of pyrite Pyrite. Craft it with a flint shard into a flint-and-pyrite striker Flint and Pyrite and you have the primitive rung between the bow drill and the forged ferro rod:

  • Like the ferro rod, it's struck, not drilled — it catches quickly (about three strikes, good odds) for almost no stamina, even when you're spent.
  • But its spark runs cooler, so — like friction — it still needs dry tinder and fails in the rain. That all-weather edge stays the ferro rod's alone.
  • The soft pyrite crumbles with use (about 40 fires), but you don't build toward it — you find it in the gravel, so it's the fire upgrade you can stumble into on day two.

The campfire​

The campfire is the hearth. It is crafted from 3 sticks and plant fiber — no coal or logs needed — and laid down unlit until you drill it alight.

Once lit, it runs on fuel and needs feeding:

  • Right-click it with sticks, logs, planks, plant fiber, or leaf litter to add fuel and make it burn longer. Fuel is worth what it physically is — a log is a couple of hours of steady fire, a plank a quarter of that (a log saws into four), a stick minutes of kindling, fibre and leaf litter mere seconds of tinder. Keeping a fire lit through a night is a real, several-log wood cost.
  • It burns down over time and goes out when the fuel runs dry.
  • When it dies it leaves charcoal — in proportion to the wood it burned: a small fire a single lump, a big well-fed blaze a handful. But an open fire is a poor charcoal-maker (most wood burns clean to ash), so it yields only about one charcoal per two logs — for charcoal in quantity you want a purpose-built burn.
  • It gives off warmth that dwindles as the fuel runs low — a dying fire warms less.
  • It cooks food and boils water (set a fire-safe vessel over it — see Water).

Heat structures — there is no craftable furnace​

You don't assemble a furnace from loose cobblestone (nor could you carry eight blocks of it — that's ~140 kg). As in life, a furnace is a fired-clay or brick structure built in place, and Alone's heat-tech is exactly that:

  • The campfire is the low, open heat — cooking, boiling, rendering tallow, and firing your first bricks (right-click a clay ball onto a lit fire) and clay pots.
  • The kiln (laid from 8 bricks) is the contained high heat — it fires pottery and melts sand to glass, which an open campfire can't reach.
  • The bloomery (laid from refractory clay) is the iron furnace — see Tools & crafting.

The vanilla cobblestone furnace can't be crafted; the clay ladder above replaces it, and (unlike 140 kg of cobble) a whole kiln or bloomery's worth of clay is light enough to carry to your camp.

Fire is a hazard — keep it clear of wood​

An open campfire is dangerous, the way a real one is. A flammable block touching a lit campfire — a log wall, a plank ceiling, dry thatch — can catch alight (within a few seconds), and from there the fire spreads and burns like any fire until it's put out or runs out of fuel.

  • One block of clearance is safe. Keep the fire a block away from wood, or ring it with stone/dirt.
  • The block the campfire rests on is spared, so a fire on a wooden floor won't torch its own support — but the walls and ceiling around it are fair game.
  • Torches don't spread fire Torch — only open campfires do. A torch in a bracket is a contained flame, so you can still light your home safely.
  • A fire in the rain doesn't spread (it's busy going out).

Carrying an ember​

Fire can be carried between camps instead of drilling a fresh one:

  • Sneak and right-click a lit campfire empty-handed to scoop out a glowing ember Ember. This costs the fire a little fuel.
  • The ember cools as it is carried. Its durability-style bar shows the remaining glow — it lasts about 3.3 minutes before dying to cold charcoal.
  • Right-click an unlit campfire with a live ember to light it instantly — no drilling, no gamble.
  • If the ember runs out before it is used, it dies.