Firefighting Simulator has infinitely long hoses, so I filled the neighborhood with it
After I played a little bit of Fire Fighting Simulator – Squad Maybe I should talk about the features of Firefighting Simulator – The Squad but instead I’ll focus on one feature of Firefighting Simulator – The Squad that I immediately became obsessed with: infinitely long fire hoses.
The problem started during the tutorial, when I was running with one end of the supply hose attached, the other end connected to the fire truck. I noticed that the hose kept expanding no matter how far I pulled it. While running around the truck multiple times, the hose never ran out or hit anything.
I said, “Well, it goes all my morning.” I began to wonder how much hose was actually in and what would happen if I extended it as long as possible. The small tutorial area didn’t feel like the place to test it. I need a bigger canvas.
So, on my second proper firefighting assignment, I decided to see how much hose I could extend. The fire was in my residential neighborhood, and after driving the fire truck all the way, I plugged the first water hose. Instead of using it to douse the flames, she ran in circles on the street.
I was doing well when suddenly the mission told me that I had failed, because this simulation is seemingly militant around houses burning out of control while helpless victims are trapped inside and firefighters are practicing on the street instead of helping. This is not an open world game but a mission-based game so failure on a mission propels you to the list.
Obviously, I needed to complete enough of the task not to fail in it, but not so much of it that I finish it, which I hope gives me unlimited time to test the Infinite Hose. I restarted the mission, and eagerly stole another fire truck to the scene by taking shortcuts to get ahead and causing little property damage in the process.
When I arrived, I directed my AI teammates (you can play cooperatively with real people too) to start fighting the fire while I was trying to rescue the three occupants of the house. She smashed open windows and doors with an ax and carried her away. I delivered two of them to the paramedic, but left the last victim unconscious on the street a few meters from the ambulance.
Then I went through the problem of actually putting out the fire with my AI team (I don’t have any screenshots of this because I consider it an unimportant achievement) which took a while because it was a massive fire and I was distracted just thinking about all the nice things the hose that I was going to spread around the neighborhood. Finally, the fire was extinguished, and the last victim was lying a few feet from the safety zone. I did enough to get rid of the danger without actually being finished. Now, it was Mine time. I grabbed the water hose and started running like a dreaded idiot.
There is ample space to fill it with the infinite hose. There is the street in front of the house and the street next to the house. There is a patio on both sides and at the back. There is a little yard across the street in front of another house. There’s the house itself, with a roof that I can climb on.
Luckily, I remembered that I could also direct both of my AI team mates to pick up the hoses and my followers. They are slow, and they really don’t like to have their hoses wrap around signs, vehicles, trees, and other non-playable characters the way I do, but they still seem to be helping a little.
Minutes pass by, like 30 minutes running around with a long hose, and the job hasn’t failed yet, luckily. Progress is going well. She filled the street a little. I start working in the yard, too. I switch from the red hose to the yellow hose because it looks a little thicker and therefore more pleasing to spread around.
As the yard began to fill up, I began to climb onto the roof of the house and jump, making the hose look like a strange sculpture frozen in midair. I have fallen in, but I’m regaining my health quickly, just like a real firefighter, and I can jump again after awhile. My AI crew isn’t going stupidly jumping off the edges like I do, so they don’t tie their hoses around as much as I do, but I still appreciate their efforts. Good job squad!
As we neared 45 minutes of running in circles, I filled as much of the arena as possible, or at least as much as I would like. It is not completely satisfactory as the hose is not easy to see in the grass, but I am still very happy with all the progress. However, my tire tools began to have success from cramming every available inch of virtual floor space into a hose. I am also concerned that there might be a time limit for this task, and I don’t want it auto-load after an hour or the game crashes. I decided to get it over. (My job is for the hose, not the actual hose. Packaging this hose can take a lot of days.)
I am very happy with what I have accomplished in the course of almost an hour of running back and forth. I drop the hose, take one last round of triumphs to reconnaissance my work, then pick up the still unconscious victim and put him in front of the very sick doctor. The game, visibly impressed with my efforts, gave me a great scene so I could enjoy some final moments of what I did here:
But the end result of my assignment is not great. I awarded 500 points for driving fast, but only 50 points for my nearly hourly mission time. Rest of the stats: I opened 7 doors, broke 3 windows, saved 3 victims, and walked 9,321 meters. That’s about 30,000 feet, which is about 5.6 miles. The standard length of this fire hose is 50 feet, so I took out the equivalent of 600 hose.
This isn’t an endless amount of hose, but it’s still a lot. It took a while, but it was worth every step.