I really like the snow biome (winter is my favorite season), so I planned to find one and build my home/castle there. Well, I soon regretted my decision, because I found out that it is near impossible to build a great structure without flooding the places with fireplaces/furnaces. Sure, there are decorative things that give off a lot of heat, such as Glitch Fireplaces, but putting one in every single room doesn't seem to look quite... right. I was thinking that if the temperature could would towards a 'room' instead of a 'AoE' style. For example, A normal fireplace would give off a lot of heat in its gernal vacinity, but once you leave it, it almost immediately does to freezing you to death. But with a room system, the heat would contribute to the temperature of the overall room. This would look something like this: [room name]'s Temperature (Empty) : 0/45 [room name]'s Temperature (With Fireplace) : 27/45 The total amount of heat needed to keep the room suitable without you freezing yourself ( 45, in this case ) would probably be determined by the amount of blocks in the room - the room being a closed in space. This would solve the problem of having to add several space-taking objects to heat your room, and the awkward-system in which the more objects around something that gives off heat, the less heat it gives off. Keep in mind, the only way to have this work is if the space/room is closed in ( doors closed/opened count ), and has walls covering the background. It wouldn't affect a snow/moon planets outside, too, because the general room of everything outside would be really, REALLY huge, even if you were to cover the entire outside with walls. Please share ideas that could improve the idea, or just comment on what you think! Jivix said: Perhaps air can be roughly simulated inside of rooms, so if a room is closed off with a fireplace in it, it will eventually heat up. However, if you enclose a fireplace in a room with no background panels or no door, only the area right near the fireplace will be warm (as it currently works outside). If a room gets hot from the heat, perhaps you could use the heat from that room to heat up an adjacent room as well. This would enable people to build furnace rooms that can heat their whole house. If furnace ducting is turned into a pipe system that uses the background tiles, it wouldn't even obstruct your movement! This could make living on a snow planet much more interesting and enjoyable, and encourage building as well.
It would still need to work roughly the way it does now when you're outside, or else exploration on snow and moon biomes would basically be impossible. But I do think that structures need to give more protection from cold. I've come across a few NPC cities that were basically uninhabitable because they were freezing cold and only every other building had anything that counted as giving off enough heat.
Perhaps air can be roughly simulated inside of rooms, so if a room is closed off with a fireplace in it, it will eventually heat up. However, if you enclose a fireplace in a room with no background panels or no door, only the area right near the fireplace will be warm (as it currently works outside). If a room gets hot from the heat, perhaps you could use the heat from that room to heat up an adjacent room as well. This would enable people to build furnace rooms that can heat their whole house. If furnace ducting is turned into a pipe system that uses the background tiles, it wouldn't even obstruct your movement! This could make living on a snow planet much more interesting and enjoyable, and encourage building as well.
I really like the idea of better heat simulation. I could see wanting to build a moon base. If rooms are already identifiable in the game this could be a simple change.
While I think a more realistic heat simulation would be great, a simpler way to allow players to heat bases while still using the current system would be just to include an item with a very large heat radius that could reasonable cover a whole building. A base could still be kept warm with a single "furnace room" dedicated to the larger heater, eliminating the need to create litter the place with smaller heaters like Dave Combine proposed, without creating the extra overhead that comes with including an invisible fluid simulation. While an imperfect solution, if such an item came in a few different flavours, such as a industrial boiler, a jumbo roaring fireplace and a sci-fi energy reactor, it would be more than satisfactory for my own cold weather building if creating an entirely new heat system would be too difficult or too demanding on computer resources. Also, the devs might have something else in the pipeline, given that we are eventually supposed to be able to edit the traits of planets like temperature and weather, so it might eventually be possible to use terraforming equipment to eliminate the temperature drain of a snow world while still keeping it icy, who knows?
