My original lignite blocks burned out after about a year. They were still going when the caravan returned the fall after I bought them, and then a little while later I noticed they had finally gone out.
I am currently collecting the materials to perform the following experiments.
Item group 1: Objects
not in bins: Lignite, lignite blocks, bituminous coal, b-coal blocks, graphite, graphite blocks, logs, wooden blocks, charcoal, coke, green glass blocks, copper bars.
Item group 2: Iron barrel of an alcoholic beverage, iron barrel of fat, iron barrel of tallow.
Item group 3: Blocks in individual iron bins: Lignite blocks, bituminous coal blocks, graphite blocks, wooden blocks, charcoal, coke, green glass blocks, copper bars.
Procedure for each group of items will be:
Throw in an item, immerse it in magma, wait a moment, drain the magma. Does it melt, catch fire, etc?
Pump water in horizontally. Is it extinguished, does it evaporate the water?
Dump water in from above. See what happens then.
Objects which catch fire and can't be extinguished will be dropped through the newly installed floor hatch in the magma chamber and observed to see which burns longest.
Then I'll duplicate them and see if they can be ignited by being dropped onto another heat source, without need for another magma ignition process.
I'm curious if there's something in the raws that influences these things. Clothes, for instance, I've seen burn away in a short period of time. Is there be a way to mod in a material that would keep burning for a hundred years?
I know how i'll build an underwater dome now! drain the ocean, build a bubble, and dig tunnels to land. then I just wait for the bins to die and I'd be underwater!
Yeah, that was the idea that most excited me when I discovered this and when I saw that Akhler confirmed that it did what I thought it would do to an ocean.
Every ocean-floor construction project I've seen has seemed pretty awkward to me. Set some of these off and you can drain it pretty quickly, and then after a year (or longer, if you refuel them), you've got your ocean back automatically.
If you're really clever, you can build something to light a new bin and expose it to the ocean if you ever want to get back out of your underwater fort.