Scene elements reference
Elements are what you place on a view: fire, smoke, victims, apparatus, hazards, and hydrants. This page covers placing them and every setting each type has.
Placing and manipulating#
- Click a tool in the toolbar: Fire, Smoke, Victim, Apparatus, Hazard, or Hydrant.
- Click the scene where it goes.
- Select an element by clicking it. Its settings appear in the right panel.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Move | Drag it. |
| Resize | Scroll over it. |
| Turn | The Rotation slider in the inspector, for victims and apparatus. |
| Delete | Select it and press ⌫, or use Delete element in the inspector. |
Elements belong to the view they were placed on. Place fire on Side B and it is visible from Side B only. Build each side to show what is actually visible from that position.
Apparatus and hydrants are not offered on interior views. There are no rigs or water supply inside the structure.
Fire#
| Setting | Range | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Stage | Smoldering, Incipient, Growth, Fully developed, Flashover | How advanced the fire is when the drill starts. |
| Growth per minute | 0.00 to 2.00 | How fast it advances on its own during the drill. |
Growth is per minute of exercise time. At 0.00 the fire stays where you set it, which is what you want when an inject or a level is going to drive the escalation instead. At 0.30 it advances roughly one stage every three minutes. At 1.00 or higher it runs away quickly, which is useful for a scenario about recognizing a losing fight.
Fire also produces smoke on its own; you do not need to add smoke to a fire for it to look like something is burning. Add smoke separately when you want to control what shows from a given side.
See Fire and smoke behavior over time for what happens once the clock runs.
Smoke#
| Setting | Range | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Density | 0.0 to 4.0 | How much smoke is produced. |
| Darkness | 0.00 to 1.00 | How black it reads, from light gray to near black. |
On an exterior view, smoke rises and drifts as a plume. On an interior view it behaves like smoke in a room instead: overlapping banks that churn and roll in place while visibility drops from the ceiling down. Dense, dark interior smoke approaches blackout, which is intentional: reporting conditions you can barely see through is the exercise.
Placed smoke also follows a knockdown. Once every fire on its view has water on it, the smoke converts to white steam over about twenty seconds (with a surge in volume, since steam is more, not less), then thins to nothing over the next three minutes. Anything the instructor authors later wins: a situation level or a hand edit fired after the knockdown shows exactly as set. See Fire and smoke behavior over time.
Victim#
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Status | Ambulatory, Down, Rescued |
| Rotation | 0 to 359 degrees, so a down victim can lie across a doorway or slump into a corner the way the room suggests. |
Each status has its own figure, and none of them carry a label: the artwork
says it. Down is a victim on the floor. Ambulatory and Down wear a red
halo so they stay findable against a light wall or a bright roof; Rescued
does not, because the halo means somebody is still in there.
Rescued marks one already removed, which is useful when you are staging a
scenario mid-incident, and it is also what an instructor sets during a drill
the moment a crew carries someone out.
Victims are visible to whoever can see the view they are on, so a victim at a rear window is information a crew has to earn by walking around.
Apparatus#
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Responding unit | Which unit this rig is, chosen from the scenario's own units. Leave it on Scenery (no crew) for a rig that is only set dressing. |
| Type | Engine, truck (aerial), rescue, medical, tanker, brush, hazmat, command, police, UTV, boat, drone |
| Callsign | Free text, for example E52 |
| Rotation | 0 to 359 degrees: which way the rig is pointed. On an overhead photo that is how it sits in the street. |
Every type has its own photograph, drawn to a common height so their relative lengths stay honest: an aerial reads longer than an ambulance, which reads longer than a UTV, because that is how they are. Scroll to size a rig to the photo.
Naming the responding unit matters on an aerial. With the apparatus placement module off, the side of the structure a rig is parked on is the side its crew arrives looking at, and the only way the drill knows whose rig it is is the unit you picked here. Picking one also fills in the type and callsign from the unit, so the two cannot disagree. See Module: apparatus placement.
With the module on, do not place apparatus at all: the crews park their own as they arrive.
Hazard#
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Label | Text shown on the scene, for example Propane tank or Downed line. |
Use hazards for anything a crew should size up and report: utilities, storage, exposures, access problems.
Hydrant#
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Status | In service, Out of service |
Place hydrants where they actually sit on the street so crews have to find them and command has to plan water supply around them. An out of service hydrant renders dimmed with a red slash and an OUT OF SERVICE label, which is a useful curveball: nothing announces it, so a crew has to walk to it and report the problem, and command has to find water somewhere else.
Hydrants are exterior only.
Fire perimeter (wildland)#
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Spread direction | Compass heading the fire is running toward (0 = north) |
| Length, feet | Heel to head, real feet on the ground |
| Width, feet | Across the flanks |
| Flame length, feet | At the head: the number every wildland check reads |
The perimeter is the wildland scene element, offered on a georeferenced terrain view in a wildland scenario, because its numbers are real feet: the point you click is the heel, and the fire runs the authored length along the spread direction to the head, drawn with a burned interior, a dull heel edge, and a glowing head.
As you set the flame length, the panel reads back the IRPG fire behavior class and what it means tactically: 4 to 8 feet is already too intense for handtools, and past 8 feet control efforts at the head are ineffective (IRPG PMS 461, 2025). Scroll to resize edits the real footprint in feet.
Grow the fire by capturing situation levels: each level snapshots the perimeter's size and position, so firing levels in sequence walks the fire across the map.
Practical notes#
- Size matters for readability. An element scaled too small on a wide image is easy to miss on a phone screen.
- Everything you place here is the starting condition. The instructor can change any of it live during the drill, and situation levels let you prepare whole rearrangements ahead of time.
- Fewer, well-placed elements read better than a scene covered in them. Crews should have to look.