Stoking

Stoking is the act of keeping a fire burning. In ATITD, the term can refer to either of two (different and unrelated) activities:

• Poking a Firepit with a Sharpened Stick or Iron Poker to increase the yield.
• Adding wood to a Kettle to keep it boiling.

Firepit

Once a fire has been lit, you have the option of stoking it if you have a Sharpened Stick or an Iron Poker. If you have both, it will let you choose which to use. Both seem to act identically other than that the poker does not seem to burn up. Stoking a fire correctly keeps it burning longer, which increases its charcoal, ash, and lime yields. Stoking does not affect grilled food yields.

A firepit runs through the following stages:

• A very dim warmup stage, immediately after lighting. Stoking the fire at this stage will put the fire out immediately and you will recover all materials except Tinder unburned.
• Burning merrily: a normal stage where the fire is orange. Stoking the fire at this stage will put it out, but not immediately - it will go to the "smouldering out" stage first. This phase can last for anywhere from 10 to 45+ seconds.
• Periodically, the fire will brighten then dim (orange -> yellow -> white -> yellow -> orange) over a period of 14-15 seconds. You must stoke the fire exactly once during each of these phases. If you correctly stoke the fire, it will continue burning and return to the previous "normal" stage at the end of this stage. If you do not stoke the fire in time, it will become "smouldering out".

If you look at the center of the fire with a color picking program it is trivial to know when a stoke phase occurs. The Hue of a fire will be 60 during the no-stoke phase, and then the Hue will drop to 0 for the stoke phase.

• Smouldering out: The fire has gone out and the firepit is cooling. This stage takes approximately 5 minutes. You will get a message in Main ("Your firepit has smouldered out") when the fire finishes cooling. At this point, the final products are produced and can be taken from the firepit.

It is possible to leave the byproducts of firepit usage (charcoal, lime, ash) inside the firepit and still use it.

Other Tips

• When you first start, it is important not to panic-- the flames are going to seem to fluctuate between the stages. What you are looking for are the times when it holds the color-- long stretches of orange-- a solid few seconds of yellow-- the blinding white and so on.

• Wait for the Orange. You do your thing after orange-- and after staring at orange for so long-- the change to yellow/white is an obvious one and you can stoke.

• For record purposes, it helps to type the stoke number into Main-- so you can keep track of how many stokes you've done-- and the approximate time spent.

Yield

The yield of a firepit depends on:

• The number of ingredients originally added.
• For lime, ash, and charcoal: the time (not number of stokes!) the firepit burned for.

Optimal load

The yield formula appears to involve some integer truncation. This means that you do not have to fully load the firepit to get maximum yield! The optimal loads for each resource are:

• n*16 Limestone (16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96)
• n*40 Leeks (40, 80)
• n*20 Dried Flax (20, 40, 60, 80, 100)
• n*20 Dried Papyrus (20, 40, 60, 80, 100)

For example, if you have 20 limestone, add 16 to the firepit and keep the other 4. Adding 20 limestone will yield the same as adding 16. If you put less than 16 limestone in, you won't produce any lime.

This also means that you shouldn't fully load a firepit with maximum amounts of everything. Only load 96 limestone and 80 leeks, not 100 of each, and you will still get the same yield.

Sample yields

This table shows yields for a full firepit and stoking times up to 60 minutes. Note that the actual burn time will be approximately 6 minutes longer due to warmup/cooldown periods.

Stoking time (Teppy-minutes)	Charcoal	lime from 96 limestone	Ash from 100 dried flax	Ash from 80 leeks	Ash from 100 dried papyrus
0	25	13	11	4	17
5	30	16	14	5	23
10	34	19	15	6	28
15	38	20	17	6	32
20	41	22	18	7	36
25	43	23	19	7	39
30	45	24	20	8	42
45	51	28	23	9	50
60	56	30	25	10	57

Vegetables and fish always yield 1 grilled food for every 1 ingredient, regardless of stoking time.

Yield Formula

These formulas match the test data (see the discussion page) very well, and were used to generate the above table.

 t = int( (burning duration in teppyseconds) / 30 )
 charcoal = int( t^(1/3) * 11 )
 lime from limestone = int( t^(1/3) * int(limestone/16) )
 ash from flax = int( t^(1/3) * int(flax/20) )
 ash from leeks = int( t^(1/3) * int(leeks/40) )
 ash from papy = int( t^(1/2) * int(papy/20) )

(Discussion about yield moved here.)

Kettle

Some Kettle recipes, such as that for potash, require continuous boiling. During this process, more wood is needed overall than the kettle can hold at one time. Thus, the kettle must be regularly stoked by adding more wood to keep it going.

In general terms, stoking a kettle works as follows:

• Once the kettle is ignited, it runs in a series of 30-teppysecond ticks. At the beginning of each tick, it consumes one deben of wood. At the end of the tick, it evaporates one deben of water. (Meaning that most of the time, except for the very beginning and end of the batch, it will consume one wood and one water simultaneously every 30 tsec.)
• The first three ticks after igniting are "warm-up" ticks... wood is consumed, but no water is evaporated.
• If at the beginning of a tick there is no wood left under the kettle, the fire goes out. The batch isn't ruined, but the fire will have to be reignited, and will go through the warm-up process again, wasting time and wood.
• You can stoke the kettle at any time to add wood, but it will only hold up to 5 at once.

Stoking Run

1. Load requirements
2. Ignite (cost 5 wood)
   • Burns off 1 wood in lighting
   • Fire burns till 0 (4 wood)
3. At 0 wood stoke 5; water is at 24 now
4. At 0 wood stoke 5; water is at 19 now
5. At 0 wood stoke 5; water is at 14 now
6. At 0 wood stoke 5; water is at 9 now
7. At 2 wood stoke 3; water is at 6 now
8. Let burn out
9. Take the product (don't discard!)