Expanded Ferrous Metallurgy

[Nootman]

Ferrous metallurgy is a poorly represented mechanic in a lot of games (looking at you, other inferior block game), primarily just making iron ore act as all others are and smelt into perfect bars when put into a furnace/forge. In actuality, the smelting process of iron is incredibly complex and there are a wide variety of methods by which it can be done, only one of which (bloomery) is represented currently in vintage story. As such, I think it would be good for this game overall to implement an even more involved system of ferrous metallurgy. This change would be particularly important for an eventual implementation of industrialization where iron would be needed in significant quantities.

General Additions

Coal Deposits

In order to match with an increased demand of coal coke and coal for heating work pieces, coal deposits should be increased in size (especially if heavy industrialization is ever planned for this game)

Bellows

A block made of precisely cut wood and leather, fastened together by nails and with a tuyere to direct airflow. Can be used to bring a forge to a higher temperature than it normally could reach but in trade for a faster rate of fuel consumption. Normally this isn't very useful for heating up low melting point materials but it can be used to make working on materials that have a high work temp with even cheap cold burning materials like wood.

The bellows can further be automated by way of a mechanically powered toggle, allowing for a constant airflow to be produced. This isn't particularly useful in the case of a forge but it can provide great value for mechanics that will later be discussed.

Forge Welding

In the same way that any ferrous anvil in this game requires the use of borax to to weld the two parts of it together, so too should every case of ferrous welding require some amount of flux. This flux does not only need to be in the form of borax with the primary other form of flux being that of limestone. Each addition of a piece of iron to a work piece should require the sprinkling of a small amount of flux on the welding point and then the pounding of the two pieces together so that they form one. This process of forge welding can also be done by the helve hammer.

Bloomeries

At the moment, bloomeries are a bit excessive in terms of how much they can produce. A full six large iron ingots would require a huge amount of ore and charcoal and a very, very large bloomery. Additionally, as the first method of producing iron ingots, it should not be so easy to simply place a bunch of bloomeries next to each other and run them at the same time in order to get an endgame supply of iron. As such, bloomeries should be nerfed so that they will become the player's first option but not one that is continually returned to throughout the game for large scale iron production.

Obviously with such a large nerf to the only way to produce iron, there should be another option. And to that end, I present

Industrialized Ferrous Metallurgy

Pig Iron

The product of most industrial methods of producing iron, for all intents and purposes practically equivalent to cast iron.

Coke Ovens

Obviously these are already a feature, but in their current state they do not provide nearly enough coke for the annoyance of individually lighting each furnace which only produces a small amount of coke. As such, coke ovens should be able to be increased in size at the cost of taking longer to cook but not in direct proportion to the amount of extra coke which they produce. Around 2 days time for a large coke oven would be reasonable.

A real life example of an early coke battery, coal is shoveled into the top and is left to cook before being pulled from the front after it is fully cooked.

Sandcasting

Sandcasting would be an alternative to clay tool casting that allows for multiple molds to be filled at one time. Additionally, it would allow for complex concave shapes (such as anvils which simply should not work with clay molds or at least should break them after every use) and large multiblock casts if such castings are ever needed.

This system would be particularly important for large scale casting from a stationary block as clay molds simply would not be feasible in such a situation. The way to go about this sort of system would be through a network of channels that lead to molds where molten metal flows from where it is poured out into the various molds connected to it.

As to not make casting be able to propagate through infinite channels, each channel would individually be a "cast" of exactly 5 units of metal, meaning that a setup with 5 channels connected to 10 ingot molds would take 225 units of metal, 200 for the ingots and 25 for the runners. Runners can be harvested and will return one nugget of metal.

Blast Furnace

The pinnacle of high volume iron production, capable of melting down iron and casting it directly without having to beat slag off of a bloom. Consists of refractory brick that can be lined with iron or steel to increase efficiency. Charges of coke/charcoal, crushed limestone, and iron ore are added into the furnace through the chimney in equal parts. The furnace is then ignited and supplied with fresh air throughout the smelting process by way of a manually operated or mechanically operated bellows.

The small patch of discolored material at the bottom of the blast furnace is a chunk of refractory clay known as the tap cover. Once the iron is molten and ready to be cast, the tap cover can be broken and the iron can flow outwards into whatever cast is in front of it. After the tap cover is removed, it can be replaced with a hunk of refractory clay when the furnace is completely emptied of molten iron.

Blast furnaces can also be scaled up in size from 1x2x1 to 3x6x3 allowing for a vastly greater volume of ore to be smelted at one time but in turn necessitates mechanized air input.

Additionally, blast furnaces can be surrounded with iron or steel sheets in order to more effectively contain heat and therefore consume less fuel and require less airflow to process ore.

Puddling Furnace/Finery Furnace

A final step in the production of wrought iron when using a blast furnace. Pig iron has an incredibly high carbon content compared to wrought iron or even steel and cannot be shaped as easily as wrought iron, so conversion into wrought iron is a necessity for applications such as armor and tools. One of the most effective ways to do this is with a puddling furnace, a large furnace which takes in pig iron, burns off the impurities, and then spits out a large chunk of relatively pure wrought iron.

A puddling furnace consists of multiple parts.

1: The basin where pig iron is melted.
2: The chimney out which hot gasses exit.
3: The barrier between the burning fuel and the basin of pig iron.
4: The burning fuel over an ash grate.
5: The hole for removing pure wrought iron and inserting pig iron.
6: The hole for inserting fuel.

The process involves placing hunks of pig iron inside of the basin and then lighting a fire with a high temperature burning fuel over the grate, separated by a wall such that none of the contaminants of the fuel are incorporated into the partially molten iron. The fumes of this gas then flow over the iron, heating it to an extreme temperature while removing impurities through a chemical reaction and pulling them out through the chimney. Once the metal has reached a sufficiently pure state, the work hatch is opened and a large set of metal tongs is used to grab the partially molten hunk of iron so it can be hammered into a uniform and usable state.

Final Thoughts

So, in conclusion, a blast furnace and puddling combo would produce a system of ferrous metalworking that allows for the large scale production of iron that would greatly surpass even the existing bloomeries that are currently in the game, especially in regards to cast iron which is an essential component in any reasonable industrial setting. The addition of cast iron also makes cast iron cookware and a large cast iron cookstove possible    : ^ ]

Also please make it so when you tap a blast furnace there's sparks and flames flying fucking everywhere, it'd be cool as hell and would be realistic to how tapping looks in real life.

 

[Ruyeex]

Does a average player will understand all of your ideas since of your complexity 

[Yeetiee]

I like your idea in general but Ruyeex is right - it is too complex. IMHO the notion of making bloomery a primitive form of obtaining iron and blast furnance an "upgrade" is really good. It would need some elements to either "hold up" players from jumping straight to blast furnance bypassing bloomery or making blast furnance an unnecesary, frivolous thing. So it needs balance.

If blast furnance is available:

Bloomery shouldn't make blooms large enough to make 1 ingot. It should take 2-3 blooms which are firstly hammered into iron bits and then smithed together to make an ingot. In other words bloomery iron making should be inefficient and time-consuming. 

Blast furnance should be made of refractory bricks and be more efficient in iron output with higher fuel cost per cycle. It should also be capable of making several ingots at once by casting them into molds.

But to avoid making bloomery a totally redundant tech, some parts of the furnance or the bellows should require iron or even steel parts - for example tip of the bellows delivering air into the furnance. The bellows should be either powered by mechanical power or seraph - in latter case it should consume large amount of satiety. 

The feeling of making progress in the game is very important. For me steel making sometime feels like an unnecessary thing with too much hassle involved because bloomery is so easy and efficient, especially with helve hammer.

 

[Maelstrom]

I don't think leap frogging past bloomeries is an issue.  People often leapfrog over the copper anvil.  I don't see leapfrogging past bloomeries any different.  If anything it's less of a leap than going straight to bronze after getting only a copper pick and hammer.

[Nootman]

10 hours ago, Ruyeex said:

Does a average player will understand all of your ideas since of your complexity 

Yea. It worked out for TerraFirmaCraft, it'll work out here.

7 hours ago, Yeetiee said:

But to avoid making bloomery a totally redundant tech, some parts of the furnance or the bellows should require iron or even steel parts - for example tip of the bellows delivering air into the furnance. The bellows should be either powered by mechanical power or seraph - in latter case it should consume large amount of satiety.

The tuyere which transfers air to the blast furnace necessarily needs to be made out of iron due to the fact that it is in nearly direct contact with the molten metal, and the blast furnace simply will not operate without a bellows and a tuyere. So yes, there is a requirement for players to interact with the bloomery for at least as long as it is needed to make these necessary components. Additionally, the tuyere could be a smithing only item and not castable, making it so that players that wish to make one would not be able to get the necessary wrought iron to get one from a blast furnace without first making a puddling furnace which requires iron at multiple points anyways.

Also, most iron items in game are only workable on an iron anvil and since the tuyere, a necessary component for the blast furnace, is only workable on an iron anvil, the player would have to use bloomeries to get the necessary wrought iron to forge an iron anvil in addition to the tuyere.

7 hours ago, Yeetiee said:

Bloomery shouldn't make blooms large enough to make 1 ingot. It should take 2-3 blooms which are firstly hammered into iron bits and then smithed together to make an ingot. In other words bloomery iron making should be inefficient and time-consuming. 

As for this, I was considering the idea of making the bloom hammering process yield only disconnected hunks of iron that would have to be forge welded together but I thought that for the high iron cost of an anvil this would be quite excessive.

 

[Yeetiee]

19 minutes ago, Nootman said:

Also, most iron items in game are only workable on an iron anvil and since the tuyere, a necessary component for the blast furnace, is only workable on an iron anvil, the player would have to use bloomeries to get the necessary wrought iron to forge an iron anvil in addition to the tuyere.

Actually for working with iron bronze anvil is sufficient. So I would propose steel tuyere as it would require the following progression path: 

Making large amount of iron using bloomery (inefficient - 2-3 blooms per ingot)

Making steel (need iron for furnance input, anvil etc.)

Smithing tuyere (allows making iron ingots with blast furnance more efficiently and  faster) which unblocks getting easy source for iron ingots for input in steel furnance. 

 

[Nootman]

https://github.com/anegostudios/vssurvivalmod/tree/fecc4d6c50c74e08a5dc7869eff7f967bc2577ac/BlockEntity/Unfinished

Blast furnace and bellows in the code for the game, but in an unfinished state. : ^ ]

[Yeetiee]

So we will have something better than bloomery  Good because they take a lot of space, are a one-use thing and eat up from my fire clay storage. I hope for a quick implementation 

 

 

[Hells Razer]

Also another thing about the bloomery: you will not be getting rid of it very fast as you will still need it for glass making.

[Davis]

Some really solid ideas here Noot, I don't find this too complex at all. In fact, this adds to the game. Wiki's exist for a reason, people will figure it out. 

Specifically, I like the scaled coke production, coke isn't worth it at all to make in its current state. 

Your ideas for the blast furnace the "upgradable" aspects of the others for better heat retention etc are great. This adds a bit of fun to this whole process as well, I look at this game from almost always a MP view, this would all fit really nicely and require a player to follow the process and could occupy someone's time. 

Another well thought out idea.