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[TheHossofMoss]

So I built a magma pump stack on a heavily forested swamp type map, coincidently this exercise confirmed that things like piercing aquifers and pump stacks work just as before, no surprises or new behaviour at all. Having built the stack the next logical thing to do was to set the forest on fire for the sake of !!SCIENCE!! ala seeing what happens.

First of all, it's about as cool as you'd imagine, the fire sweeps up into the branches then spreads through the canopy and stuff. It does not appear to jump gaps, but only spreads from one burnable tile to another (in 3-diminisons)

But then things start getting a bit weirder.

The fire isn't very destructive and when a tree is burned out the parts all show as 'dead XYZ' (i.e. dead trunk, dead branches, dead twigs), oddly enough the bottom z-level of trunk does not burn and does not become dead. If you cut down a dead tree you still get logs. After a while the dead trunk and dead branches spontaneously come back to life, this appears to rely on a percentage chance per tick that the tree will return to life, as it can both happen nearly instantly after burning, and take basically forever. A regrown tree is immediately flammable again.

Tree regrowth is fast, within one season a fully burned out forest will look pretty normal again. It's fast enough that trees come back to life before the fire has finished sweeping the map, also there are hotspots which keep burning for a long time then re-ignite the regrowth meaning you could conceivably have a permanent forest fire. But as noted above, fires don't appear to jump gaps nor burn dead trees, since it takes a while for twigs and leaves to regrow, the regrowth fires have more trouble spreading.

As before, trees are generally unperturbed by being flooded with magma. They don't even catch on fire if there is nothing flammable below (like a forest fire has already swept through recently), it probably requires grass->leaves to start a canopy fire. I have not built the stack high enough to dump magma on a tree from above, but that is the next logical step.

There is one serious disappointment though, as trees burn the game will announce "Something on the surface has collapsed!" and pause . This means you have to hit resume about a bazillion times a second. Unless you turn CAVEINS off, this makes forest fires totally unplayable until toady fixes this or DFhack is back in business - with autoresume it would be pretty cool. It seems the 'collapsed' bits are branches or perhaps twigs, as a fire seems to outright destroy a percentage of the canopy tiles leaving other bits unsupported. This results in big bombs of dust which in the rare times when it's not pausing it's ass off looks pretty cool to watch unfolding. It would be awesome to set a forest on fire when the elves come and have them burnt alive and bombed by their beloved trees! Right now though, the caving in thing just makes it uncool.

Here's a picture of the forest fire:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Note:
Core of dead trees where fire started, fire still spreading outwards.
Tree bombs going off! Especially around the top-right firefront.
Regrowth in the middle, some trees turning green or yellow.

The first time I saw the "something has collapsed" I about crapped my pants, because I thought that Toady had added a new entrance for Dragons: swooping down from the sky, ready to kill.