Butane should spawn more often

[lapis413]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently, butane comes in 3 forms in the game. Either from butane lighters, which cannot be unloaded, from cans of butane, which can be looted from various places, including houses (though they are fairly rare), and tanks of butane, which are stupidly rare, only dropping from FEMA camps and hazardous waste sarcophagi. While butane is not phenomenally useful, mostly being only used as fuel, it is also required currently to use the essential oil extraction system.

Solution you would like.

Butane is not particular rare, and should have a few more spawn locations, such as hardware stores, outdoorsman stores (it can be used as a fuel for grills), or potentially gas stations. If tanks of pressurized butane aren't suitable for those locations, they would likely be more suitable to be added to the lab spawn pool.

Additionally, if possible, there could be extra devices that use butane, such as camping stoves or standing grills, to justify them appearing in more places.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

No response

Additional context

No response

[Photoloss]

A weed burner could be interesting. Not a flamethrower "gun" by any means but probably controllable enough to set enemies alight in melee range in a manner similar to the stun gun's zap. Property maintenance places would have them, some houses might and most farms probably have one.

How prevalent are bottle-fed gas stoves in New England? In my experience they tend to be fuelled with propane rather than butane but that's a minor inconsistency.

[lapis413]

Unsure, as I'm not a New Englander. However, a cursory glance at a wikipedia page did show that some forms of butane are used as refrigerants, which could be another source of the stuff. However, I'm not sure if that's useful or extractable for purposes other than being a refrigerant, nor how common it is

[Photoloss]

Well if we want easily craftable explosive fridges apparently this is a thing. Unless we proclaim this to be the commercial default this is another use for butane rather than a source though as we would be using existing pressure tanks to craft refrigerant tanks for the coolers.

[Alex-Folts]

How prevalent are bottle-fed gas stoves in New England? In my experience they tend to be fuelled with propane rather than butane but that's a minor inconsistency.

Those stoves seems use both gases.As i understand for summer butane is fine, for cold winter propane would be more preferable as it boils at lower temperatures. But i also know that some of that propane cans actually filled with propane-butane mix.

And ofc there is isobutane thing, which is different gas, it is also known as refrigerant r134 i think.

[Photoloss]

R-134 seems to be an HFC and based on ethane not propane or butane. Isobutane has the same atomic constituents as regular butane but a different geometric structure.

OP already mentioned camping stoves though, I was asking about something like this or this which you would find in a household kitchen. They're reasonably common in Europe but many are fuelled via gas pipelines rather than bottles. Also note the oven in my second example is powered electrically unlike the ones marketed for camping and thus wouldn't collide with the new appliances.

[Alex-Folts]

Oh i seems messed stuff, isobutane r600a is replacement for r134.

I get you now, those large ovens fueled with lagre propane tanks or natural gas pipelines, idk if it is a thing in US.

[coyo7e]

Unsure, as I'm not a New Englander. However, a cursory glance at a wikipedia page did show that some forms of butane are used as refrigerants, which could be another source of the stuff. However, I'm not sure if that's useful or extractable for purposes other than being a refrigerant, nor how common it is

It's pretty uncommon. I took a couple years of HVAC engineering and almost all non-commercial refrigerator units just use R-22 (freon, which is largely banned moving forward and has been for years, with aporpos classification certs required to handle it, and leaky units are pretty illegal although it'll take decades for them all to get aged out of the market), and many HVAC cycles use a form of water pressurization/depressurization and evaporation over coils, to reach at least a temp nearing 44 degrees F, aka 6-7 celsius) before it kicks over to the chemical unit. Any pressurized gas when released, brings temps down drastically as it no longer is forced into pressurized conditions which change its state from a solid to a liquid to a gas or the reverse.

I don't see a lot of use for butane in-game though, and most lighters aren't refillable with butane anyway, the ones that are are commonly called "crack torches" because they emit a near-invisible flame that is often used to do things like smoke heavy drugs. Your average cigarette lighter doesn't allow this though - their seals are melted shut ad trying to use a lighter for more than 30-60 seconds will end with either you burning your hands or melting the plastic parts sooner than you heat the substance to desirable temps. This would mean that a second kind of "refillable lighter" that only accept pressurized gas/fluids would need to be added for butane to be used in anything outside of weed-oil production though, imho.. And you'd still burn your hand or destroy the lighter in many cases. This is called "phase changing" iirc from my physics 101 and 102 classes, where there's a significant "bump" in energy required or released as a substance is changed from gas to liquid to solid or vice-versa.

There are also old-styles of lighters which you can fill with "loose" non-pressurized lighter fluid etc fuels and they work fine, but they're like, 100 year-old technology, and generally are stuff like a Zippo lighter, or oldschool brass and flint models which have a real wick just like zippos do, to soak up the depressurized fluid rather than forcing it out in a stream which is ignited by a electric spark most of the time. FWIW those type of lighters and the"crack torch" versions are much more windproof - as a teen I used to smoke weed on a ski lift using a Zippo, because its flame would keep going in high winds and sub freezing conditions. (it tastes awful and is probably unhealthy as heck though)

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