Beacon fuel & timing

[majorvex]

A thread about fueling beacons, length of time, etc. (moved from this thread)

[Xaldafax]

@Nightstar

@georgegroeg

Even when gleamclub ends you get another 4 weeks(basic fuel) in your beacon.

I’m pretty sure it’s whatever you used to start the beacon. If you started your beacon with a greater beacon fuel it will go the 16 weeks if it was a campfire, you got 2 hours.

This is not a solid thing to follow no matter what as I see it. I also keep the counter on the official one it nows with the current fuel and not hope there is some “left over fuel” from when you first started the beacon. I’ve seen some with none.

[georgegroeg]

I wouldn’t believe the you get whatever the last fuel you put in before adding gleamclub thing. But you definitely get 4 weeks. I had a guild mates gleamclub run out before and I was confused why there beacon had 4 weeks fuel. So I message James at the time. And he told me that it was so people who had gleamclub wouldn’t feel punished for forgetting to refill there gleamclub. At no point did he say you get the last fuel that was put in the beacon. So expect 4 weeks to be safe.

[Xaldafax]

@georgegroeg

So expect 4 weeks to be safe.

With respect I completely disagree with that statement no matter what James might have tried to explain.

I’ve watched beacons go from full gleam club timers down through many weeks to smoking and then when the timer went out it a new timer showed of only 7 days. This I’m 100% sure I have seen. I’m not as certain on if I have seen it go right out but instead do think I saw one that only had a few days. I’m also pretty certain I’ve never seen a month given like that. If there a 4 week freebie then it isn’t working or something that didn’t exist last year when I saw those beacons act the way I mention.

Either way I would never believe that all the beacons would be covered like that because once gleam club is gone each beacon is on its own. I’m not trying to argue, but maybe at the start of them offering GC they did something like that but I don’t believe it is like that now.

No one should EVER risk their beacons by letting gleam club expire if they have a build they want to keep. It isn’t worth any of the risk in my view.

[georgegroeg]

Whether you believe it or not. In this instance, it’s exactly what happened.
This was a couple years ago.

[Soju-VB]

There is something odd with guild aligned beacons that may play a part here. A player with some guild aligned beacons and some non aligned will see shorter timers on the guild aligned ones after GC expires if I remember correctly. This is what caused our semi recent ashing of a portion of the TNT hub.

[Nightstar]

There have always been issues with beacon timers showing different values to permissioned users (even sometimes alts) from the owner where gleam club is involved. They said once they had it all fixed but compactness and reclaim each brought back old or confusingly similar issues.

I could have a misunderstanding of some older comments from James and/or Luca as well TBH.

@Xaldafax

No one should EVER risk their beacons by letting gleam club expire if they have a build they want to keep. It isn’t worth any of the risk in my view.

Probably true. You should be able to put fuel in your beacon at least near your gleam club expiry and see that it extends your beacon expiry past your gleam club expiry.

@james

Owning 2 months of Gleam Club is equivalent to having 2 months of fuel in your beacon.

You can still put fuel in the beacon.
If you then put a Greater Beacon Fuel into a beacon it will fuel the beacon up to 16 weeks.

All beacons are protected by 2 months of Gleam Club, but this beacon has 4 months of fuel.

There is more around about having gleam club that is less time than the beacon fuel but it’s mainly in conversations about beacons that existed before the gleam club was purchased. I can’t find any actually less confusing comments

@lucadeltodecso

Gleam club sets beacons to expire no sooner than the gleam club subsription.

Buying 1 month GC means any beacon with fuel less than 1 month will ‘be fueled’ by GC up to 1 month; any beacon can still be fueled higher than the gleamclub duration (so you can pre-fuel beacons as your GC is running low if you dont intend to renew), and in this case the beacon already had more fuel than GC would provide, so GC has no effect on the beacon right now.

With moderate confidence you should be able to fuel your beacons in the days or weeks prior to gleam club expiring so that they will be fueled past the gleam club expiration.

I cant find anything to explicitly confirm my earlier post, or mention of any courtesy extension. James did have quite the tendency to reveal critical info only in PMs or on discord though.

[Tmmk]

I can confirm its 4 weeks of fuel a beacon gets when GC ends.
In both situations guild aligned and not.

All remaining beacons had 4 weeks when I checked them after my GC ended.

[Tmmk]

I forgot to add. To keep in mind if you use beacon fuel on your GC beacon it wil burn the Beacon fuel first before it returns to GC fueling. So im not sure what happens when you have fuel in it and GC ends if it then also adds 4 weeks to the fuel timers.

(Edit)
That was changed at some point to.
From GC fueling takes priority (adding additional time past GC). To Beacon fuel takes priority (beacon fuel burns first before returning to GC (no additional time is added if within the GC time))

Also not sure if it was fixed but the “flame” on a beacon could possibly glitch out for “you” while it doesn’t for anyone else.

So it might be possible you see smoke on a manually fueled GC beacon, when the beacon it’s on it’s last days of the beacon fuel. But returns after to GC.
Again im not sure about this bit but could be a possibility .

[Solgato]

When Tiggerness’ GC ran out a few months ago the beacons for Tigg’s Tunnels had 4 more non-GC weeks in them. The beacons were in my guild (CAT/Schrodingers) with Tiggerness as owner.