As a thought - given the number of people who are raging now that wood doesn't fuel starships any more, how about putting in an item like a charcoal burner that allows you to convert unrefined wood > charcoal (at a rate of say, 3:1). Allow players to fuel starships with either coal at 1:2 or charcoal at 1:1.
I think this is a good idea - except you should be able to do this in the furnace I think, instead of having a separate piece of equipment. On that note, you should have to smelt Coal into Coke before you can make steel out of it - just saying!
I was bummed when you couldn't use wood anymore for fuel, but I understand that it makes more sense for coal to be used instead of wood to power a spaceship. Coal is becoming too essential of an item, and I run out of it very quickly. I like this idea a lot!
The argument for it is that it's realistic, the argument against it is that it's just crafting bloat that serves no real purpose.
I think certain liberties have to be taken given that this isn't a game about blacksmithing. But mechanically, converting wood into coal and have that be fractioned out so that coal becomes a more desirable commodity, but wood works in a pinch, would seem to be a good tweak to make.
Wood to charcoal makes perfect sense, and it can just be less efficient fuel than coal, like in Minecraft. Approved.
I think matching the coal rate makes sense, but balance that out by requiring more wood to create one block of charcoal. Example: 1 block of coal > 2 fuel points x blocks wood > 1 block charcoal > 2 fuel points Where x is a value determined by play testing to give best balance of utility vs ease of use vs value of coal as resource
The only problem with this is that you can already use wood as fuel where 1 unrefined wood = 1 fuel point, so charcoal would have to provide a better benefit than 2 fuel points if more than one wood is required to craft one charcoal, otherwise it'd be redundant.
Ah was that in the last patch? I didn't bother checking since 1 wood for 1 fuel was kind of a waste, heh.
Which then fuelled a barrage of posts complaining about not being able to use wood as fuel any more - which was the prompt for my initial post.
Maybe add dirt to the recipie to make a coal coke pile. Adding 2 Dirt and 4 Wood creates a placeable Coak Coal Pile that can be lit with a torch. After 2 minutes (or less) you gain like 4 Coal from it. (Just reuse the chest interface with 2 slots and place coal into it after it's done). It changes texture to some ash pile. The ash can be used for black coloring or something (like petals). This way we can get rid of our Dirt (because i end up having 3x1000 stacks in my inventory all the time) and we can make coal production via wood not so unbalanced.
I've added a wood to coal conversion in my mod here: http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?resources/spacefuel-tamefoxx.8/ It also adds some other recipes for space fuel. (Including a particle condenser that is used to turn dirt to fuel)
