Fires Go Out, Calls Come In

It’s been a while since the last devlog, and a lot has happened. The short version: you can now start a shift, wait for a call, roll out, put the fire out, get paid, and keep your progress when you quit. Here’s the long version.

The Shift Loop

Calls come to you

Alarms no longer have to be triggered by hand. Every session starts with the crew off duty, and once you clock in, dispatch starts counting down to the next call. Step off duty and the countdown pauses instead of resetting, so you can’t dodge a call by toggling.

When a call comes in, a popup appears on every player’s screen with the type of area it’s in (forest, city, mountains or depot), so you know roughly where to head before you can see the fire itself. When the emergency ends, a second popup tells you how it went, including what you earned.

Know what’s left to do

New today: while an emergency is running, a checklist on your HUD shows what the call is and what still needs doing, with a progress row for each task. For a forest fire, that means a live count of how many spots are still burning.

Under the hood, we rebuilt how emergencies are put together. Calls are now made of separate tasks played out in a scenario at a specific location, instead of being hard-wired to “a fire”. Right now the forest fire is still the only scenario, and it plays the same as before, but this is the groundwork for calls that aren’t just fires.

Your crew can abort a call, and every call has a safety timeout so a run can’t hang forever. Saving or loading the game ends a running emergency.

Putting Fires Out

For a long time, fire could spread but nothing could stop it. That’s fixed.

We reworked the hose system: the small fire engine now has functional hose couplings, hoses end in a proper nozzle, and you can disconnect a line when you’re done. Point the nozzle at something burning and the fire actually goes out. Fire got a voice too, crackling and roaring depending on how big it’s gotten.

The truck itself picked up some long-overdue basics: seats so a crew can actually ride along, hazard lights, a fixed blinker, and a siren that finally sounds right. Empty equipment slots now show a faint hologram of what belongs there, so it’s obvious at a glance what’s missing before you roll out. A first fire extinguisher is also in the works.

Burnham Grows Up

Real roads

The old test area is gone. Burnham now has a modular road network built from straight segments, T and X junctions and narrowings, plus houses, street lights and trash cans along the way. There’s finally a route to follow instead of a direction to point the truck in.

Real forests

Forests are now planted procedurally instead of placed tree by tree. There are six new tree types that can all burn, and they sway in the wind. We also made idle trees nearly free to keep around and improved the fire effects’ performance, which is what makes a whole forest possible. Fire can now spread across the entire forest rather than stopping at a handful of neighbors.

New things to find

A new vehicle, the Discovery car, has joined the garage, and trash cans can now catch fire too.

The Firehouse and Your Career

The station stopped being an empty shell. It now has a chair, a whiteboard, a picture on the wall, a closet, a computer, a digital clock and working room lights.

Every call now counts toward something. Putting out fires earns money and experience, shown on your HUD next to the time of day. A shop lets you spend those earnings on new gear and unlocks. The first catalog entries include a helmet, an axe, a fire extinguisher, tank upgrades and a bigger fire truck. Some of those are still only names on the shelf, and the items behind them are coming.

Saving Your Progress

Ignis now has save slots. Each slot keeps your crew’s career, the time of day and your play time. The host saves manually from the new pause menu and picks a slot when loading. A save that fails to load can never overwrite a good one.

What’s Next

Now that emergencies are built from tasks and scenarios, the next step is building more calls on top of them. Forest fires were the first, and they won’t be the last.