Campfires
A placed or found fire that provides warmth, light, cooking, and often a safe checkpoint — a fixed point of relief in a hostile world. Campfires are emotionally load-bearing in survival games: they concentrate the day's tension into a moment of respite, and the walk back to one at dusk is a core dramatic beat. Mechanically they bundle several systems (heat, light against darkness, cooking, sometimes respawn anchoring). Designers use them to pace risk and reward, to make night meaningful (you either prepared a fire or you didn't), and to create meaningful geography around safe zones. Key decisions: fuel economy (a fire you must feed creates ongoing pressure), whether they're craftable anywhere or fixed locations, what they gate (cooking, sanity restoration, save points), and light radius as a tangible safety bubble. Pitfall: campfires so cheap and spammable that darkness and cold stop being threats, deflating the whole survival loop.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: survival
Seen in
- Don't Starve
- Valheim