The fire finally knows how to spread

For a while, an Ignition Zone just marked where a fire could start — nothing decided how much of it caught. This week that changed.

An Alarm now picks one random Burnable from the zone’s pool as a seed, then walks outward along the same spread-neighbor graph the fire system already uses to jump between trees, buildings, and everything else that can burn. It keeps walking until it’s ignited as many Burnables as the Alarm called for. Small alarms stay small. Big ones sprawl — sometimes past the edge of the zone that started them, if two zones sit close enough together. We’re treating that as a level-design problem for now, not a bug.

The Emergency itself — the thing your crew is actually responding to — is tracked separately from the zone. It doesn’t care about the zone’s whole candidate pool, only about the fire’s actual causal chain: whatever ignites, plus whatever that ignites next. Put out every Burnable in the chain and the call resolves as a win, even if some of them just burned out on their own before you got there. Let all of them burn out instead, and it’s a loss.

Only a short summary of all this — where, what kind of area, whether it’s still active — gets sent to other players. Everything else stays server-side until it matters.

Next up: getting a truck out to one of these alarms.