Smelting furnace slag chutes, and no more pig-iron

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Rias
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Smelting furnace slag chutes, and no more pig-iron

Post by Rias »

Two updates to metallurgy today.

First, smelting iron will no longer result in pig-iron. It served no purpose other than a potential way to mess up one's iron, and the mechanics of it were fiddly anyway. And also, I'm not even sure I got the actual metallurgical facts correct. Iron is complicated stuff, man. So at least for now, we're simplifying and just saying iron is iron is iron.

Secondly, and probably what will impact the day-to-day of metallurgy more: Smelting furnaces now have slag chutes. Each will have a lever you can PULL to toggle the chute open or closed. You DO want the chute open on smelting slag out of raw ores, because the slag will just pour down the chute into a "waste pit" and be gone. No more waiting for the furnace to cool in order to remove the lumps of slag. But be careful to make sure the chute is closed when you get to smelting down the actual metal you want - if you melt down that copper or iron or whatever else and the chute is open, your precious metal will slide right down the chute just like slag, and be lost. LOOK at the furnace to see whether the chute is currently open or closed.

Oh, and: When looking at a furnace, if there's molten metal currently inside it shows in a spiffy mix of red, yellow, and bright right letters. I did this because - I don't know about the rest of you, but I always managed to somehow glaze over the molten metal line, so this make it more noticeable at least for those of us who don't use screen readers and are prone to skipping over lines of text sometimes.
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Rias
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Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:06 pm
Location: Wandering Temicotli

Re: Smelting furnace slag chutes, and no more pig-iron

Post by Rias »

The slag chute lever now simply drains any molten material when pulled, rather than acting as an open/closed toggle. So don't ever touch it unless you want to drain what's currently molten in the furnace (like initial ore-smelting slag and failed alloys).

Not sure why I didn't set it up this way originally.
<Rias> PUT ON PANTS
<Fellborn> NO
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