This. They're disabled. It says they're temporary, but they've been off for around a year, if not more.
I wasn't yet watching this thread so I didn't realise it was old. I did think "Huh, just a year? I thought fire charges had been disabled for a while". I wasn't actually surprised at Porphos being back, interestingly.
My sincere apologies for raising a thread from it's grave but it was to help prove a point as to how long this has been an issue gone unresolved. We have arrows out of dispensers, so why not fireballs? Not that I plan on setting up player-traps (TNT works wonderfully for that and is quite illegal) but fire-charges+dispenser combinations makes for an easy way to put working cannons on a ship outside TNT and red-stone, or for setting up a mob-wrecking bridge gun.
The primary reason that I recall from when the decision was made is that it's so easy to grief with them. You can very easily set up a repeating clock to launch fire charges and just like that, someone's entire build or an entire forest is on fire. They don't add a whole lot to the game, but can make it lose quite a lot, so there's not a ton of point in activating them.
As far as I know, fire spread is turned off everywhere. There wouldn't be any harm with fire charges.
Thank you for the replies. I agree that getting EMC up to speed (we now have bees in MC!) is of higher priority in the back-log. If people are concerned if fire-charges are still something that can affect builds, put some wood in front of a Blaze, and see what happens. As stated previously, there are no forest-fires in EMC, and build-protected blocks don't burn.... unless they're netherrak?
They are just disabled, I'm sure you can enable them for certain worlds. Town and wastelands is the only places I can think of re enabling them. To think about it, why aren't invis enabled in town 🤔. That's for a different thread
