I mean you absolutely could add a flammable tag to terrain but I'm not working on NPC AI in any way. For factions and companion missions, I can't use the existing "dig-able" check because it doesn't include things that the NPCs should be able to deal with without micromanagement like bushes/small trees. You could go through and add all sorts of tags like "npc_can_alter" or "easy_change_terrain" to let any method that might want to alter the terrain know what is good to change and what isn't. Lots of man-hours for a minor change that you might have a hard time convincing someone to include if it is used once.
There's lots of stuff that has limited application or implementation at the moment that makes implementing new things a bit more difficult. I got a request to update the faction camp system to better support the region map default terrain types... as in if you choose the desert world where the default terrain is sand and scorched earth, the camp buildings shouldn't overwrite the local terrain with grass and dirt. I thought the desert world stuff was an experiment that no one had worked on in years and very few players even touched, but I guess they're right... There are also requests for changing and re-balancing construction times according to the world setting construction rate multiplier. Since food consumption is based on work duration, that means that would also have to be re-balanced to some factor of the season length multiplier and food consumption multiplier. On top of that there are requests to move all text to jsons for easy modding, which requires adding json support for misc formatted strings. Spending handfuls of hours ensuring support for custom settings that I've never used sucks because it feels like a waste of time.
LOL, that isn't directed at you though! Just giving you an idea of some of the things I think we could improve upon as a community. My number one goal is trying to keep the game as welcoming to new developers as possible so that the inevitable turnover doesn't result in the game dying-off. Doing a bit of math you realize that the person most likely to make huge game changing improvements to the game is someone in their early twenties with lots of time that is looking for experience working on a big project with others. I'm pretty sure most of the past major contributors have moved beyond that stage with families, careers, and other obligations. I don't work in IT nor do I have much of a computer science background so projects like this are about the limit of my ability (probably beyond it if you read some of the github comments
), but I am a little bit of an outlier since I'll probably never have anything better to do while on a nine month "work trip" every couple years, if you know what I mean.
Just keeping expectations to a manageable level so y'all aren't disappointed.