View source for Talk:Fire/@comment-6896023-20160119151948/@comment-70.161.224.207-20190103095814

The people at Hinterland have made it clear they do not strive for absolute realism all of the time within TLD. In some cases, liberties are taken when being completely realistic would make aspects of the game too hard... or too easy.

For example: you don't -always- need matches in real life. But if you could just, say... rub two sticks together to start a fire in game, well... you'd basically never have to be worried about not being able to start a fire. That would be a BAD thing for gameplay. So the devs decided to do something about it, and thus require that you have certain things for starting a fire to be possible.

If you take a moment to think aboout it, there's loads of clear examples of  game developers adjusting reality for the sake of better gameplay, both in and out of the survival genre.