Too much of a good thing

[Christian Crusader]

I recently found myself delving into a cave looking for coal when I happened upon a MASSIVE vein of Bountiful Iron Ore, I have mined four stacks of the stuff and vein keeps going. I was looking into how to smelt all this and it looks like single-use bloomeries are my only savior. Is there a way to make the process easier or will I be subjected to hours of hard labor in the forge?

[Streetwind]

You really want a windmill driving a helvehammer. That device will automatically convert blooms into ingots.

You can also use it to make plates out of ingots with minimal effort, which is great for kitting out your whole base with lanterns.

[Christian Crusader]

15 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

You really want a windmill driving a helvehammer. That device will automatically convert blooms into ingots.

You can also use it to make plates out of ingots with minimal effort, which is great for kitting out your whole base with lanterns.

Streetwind is there a faster way to smelt these ores as I believe I can only do 25 at a time in a bloomery but I have 5,000 to smelt.

[Streetwind]

Each bloomery does 120 nuggets (5 blooms) at a time, yeah.

The solution is moar bloomeries. I typically do two or three in parallel when I work iron, but I only smelt some when I need it. I have never tried to smelt a whole iron vein all at once - I value my sanity Processing those blooms without at least four helvehammers would take ages, and I can't be bothered to build that many when one or two will cover my actual needs.

But if I tried to do mass-smelting... Well, I'd crush all my ore into nuggets, and then count the number of slots taken up by those nuggets. 1 slot holds 128, a bloomery holds 120, so it's a good first order approximation to build one bloomery per slot. Whatever's left over can go into a second run. It'll likely be done well before you get the blooms from the first run processed.

One bloomery happens to take 12 fire clay bricks, and you fire clay bricks in sets of 12... so you just fill one pit kiln with bricks for every bloomery you want to build.

You also get like 8-10 bricks back when you break a bloomery, so you can use those in a second run for whatever ore you'll have left over.

[Ivan Stamenov]

QPTech mod comes to the rescue, but it takes a while before getting to the point where the iron/steel making process is mostly automated...

[Thorfinn]

Medieval lets you make waterwheels, though they are quite resource intensive in their own right. But at least then you can get by without a flax farm as far as the eye can see.

If you actually intend to do anything with the metal, Helve Hammer Extensions will save some sanity points.

But if you are playing vanilla, I'd just leave that ore in a chest until I needed it. At most, I'd use only as many bloomeries as I need to keep the helve hammer in business knocking out iron ingots for an eventual steel industry. Which, really, is maybe just 4. Or that's about as much tedium as I can tolerate. I can cook and store food while I'm waiting for the ingot, and, well, that's about it. If I start building, I soon forget that the reason I'm building is to fill time while waiting for the helve hammer to finish.

[Christian Crusader]

Thank you everyone for the mod reccomendations, which I might use, and the vanilla assistance. I'll push through with the vanilla style till I go insane, thank you!