Campfire

A lit campfire hands everyone nearby Cozy Fire, which speeds up natural health regeneration and adds a small constant trickle on top of it. The constant part is the useful half, because it keeps ticking while something is chipping at you. Standing in range while poisoned or on fire often means recovering instead of slowly bleeding out. The area it covers is a large rectangle centered on the fire, and inside that rectangle nothing weakens it. Distance does not matter, walls do not matter, and being on the other side of a mountain does not matter. You are either in the box or you are not. NPCs get nothing from it at all.

The Heart Lantern grants its own regeneration effect over a similar footprint, and the two stack rather than one overriding the other. Every permanent base and every boss arena wants both, and there is no reason to pick between them.

Because the effect is a flat rectangle with no falloff, the efficient layout is to space fires so their areas just barely meet instead of piling them on top of each other. Roughly every 340 feet is the spacing to aim for, and a Compass makes that easy to measure since it reads out your horizontal position as you build. Keep one in the hotbar as well. Dropping a fresh campfire mid fight is a legitimate emergency heal and it is faster than drinking anything.

They can be toggled by hand or wired into a circuit, and switching one off cancels the buff immediately for everyone in range. That is worth remembering before you run wire past one on the way to something else. Liquids destroy most varieties on contact, so a flooded arena loses its fires; the cursed, ichor and coral versions survive everything except lava. In a Constant world any fire left exposed to open sky goes out when it rains.

A campfire counts as a crafting station now, though every recipe it hosts is also available at a Cooking Pot or at a furnace and anything that upgrades out of one, so it is rarely the station you go out of your way to build. The exception is the Marshmallow on a Stick, which nothing else will cook. The Fireplace puts out the identical buff with a different silhouette, but it is furniture only: no crafting, no marshmallows.

• Campsites generated underground usually come with a fire already burning and loose silver or gold scattered around it.
• Once the Moon Lord has arrived every campfire in the world burns black. The buff carries on unaffected.
• Rain makes them smoke heavily, which is purely decorative.
• The Bone Campfire shows the wrong tooltip on hover, borrowed from the Shadowflame Bow.