Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

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Rias
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Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Rias »

Smelting has received a small overhaul:
- Furnace contents can now be seen when in use
- Molten metal can now be seen when looking in the furnace
- Amount of slag by-product for ore-smelting has been reduced
- The amount of ore being smelted now dictates how much flux is needed, where before 1 lump was sufficient for even the biggest smelting job. It now requires roughly 1 charcoal per every 6 crushed ore powders, which shouldn't be much of a change for most people. (Having more than necessary will have no ill effects.)
- Hopefully fixed those fiddly cases when melting down completely pure blooms/ingots would end up with severely impure metal.

This was all done while setting up the system for metal alloys! Bronze and steel are now technically possible to produce, though without any sources of tin or coal available to PCs yet, players can't actually make them quite yet. I'm still deciding how I want to introduce them, but in the meantime I may throw some limited quantities up for sale somewhere to let people get their hands on them and test the system. Expect the wiki to be updated with the ratios required for the common alloys.

And expect a fancy new alloy or two to show up soon(tm).
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Shaula
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Re: Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Shaula »

Wahoo! When can we get some coal and tin to play with?
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Re: Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Rias »

I've added a few ingots of tin and lumps of coal to the Emberlight market. Presumably some vessel stopped by with some to sell, or something. Please don't any one person hog it all! I'll get these posted in-game in the workyards soon, but for now:

Steel: 4 iron, 1 coal
Bronze: 5 copper, 1 tin
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Re: Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Rias »

I messed up the bronze recipe before, and have updated the previous post. I'll happily provide replacement ingots for those who lost them due to the misinformation.
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Agelity
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Re: Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Agelity »

I've been tinkering with the new smelting procedure and wanted to double check what the ratio is for iron powder to lumps of charcoal (to ensure the resulting blooms can be made pure). I've had issues with anything that's more than 2-3:1 (iron:charcoal) where the resulting blooms are too impure to be made pure, closer to that 2:1 or even 1:1 ratio seems to be workable (1:1 only has minor impurities and is easiest to work with). However, I also noticed that it created several small blooms instead of one large bloom like before. Further attempting to smelt such a bloom results in... not such a great result.

Is there currently a way to smelt the iron so that 10+ powder can be made into a huge bloom to be then purified that I haven't discovered yet? If it involves using a dozen or so lumps of charcoal so be it (would certainly help the charcoal market!), just wished to make sure that the powder isn't "wasted" in the event the ratios for creating blooms are not what I suspect. As there is also currently no way to combine smaller (pure) blooms into one larger bloom, it does cause some difficulties with planning out larger items to be made (like longswords).
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Re: Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Rias »

The removal of pig iron means you can now melt down your iron into one nice big blobby bloom without issue.

I did some updates to metal impurity mechanics, and a good rule of thumb now is that you won't get away with more than 5 ore powders on 1 charcoal. So 1 charcoal per 5 is the bare minimum, but more charcoal per ore means it'll be more pure from the get-go and you'll spend less time hammering out impurities.
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Re: Minor smelting overhaul (preparation for alloys!)

Post by Rias »

For those who have been playing with this and only getting iron instead of steel, the bug should be fixed.

Again.

For the last time!

(Hopefully.)
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