Allow removing soft ingots from molds

[Bumber]

We should be able to remove soft ingots from molds. It's a bit weird waiting for the metal to harden just so you can waste fuel to soften it up again.

You probably wouldn't do this with other molds as you'd risk deforming the poured shape.

Edited September 9, 2023 by Bumber

[Owktree]

A soft ingot in a mold isn't of a uniform temp.  The outside could well be hard while the center is still molten and liquid - the latter being something you don't want to be trying to smith with since the metal states are so varied across the ingot and the desired matrix possibly not even established yet.

Instead of this being modeled at great expense the solution is to let it harden and then require the necessary uniform forge heating before forging it into something.  Which also grants a slight advantage to the otherwise more difficult to work with iron in that a recently formed iron ingot can immediately be worked with since it is generally already uniformly hot and in a proper metallic state since the bloomery did the smelting part.

[Thorfinn]

Rather than making ingots removable while soft (which doesn't work, btw -- you have to let the metal cool enough to contract away from the edges of the mold) I think I'd prefer if forges could accept any fuel. Firewood would be enough for the easy copper forgings, like chisel, shears, probably scythe, because there are so few voxels to move that you can finish up before it cools to, um 541C? More complex forgings or higher temperature alloys might take too long, depending on player skill, so would have to be reheated or heated with a higher temperature fuel, like peat or maybe even coal/charcoal. There's certainly no need to heat copper to smelting temperature to forge it; indeed, that would not work as you would have molten copper instead of a forgeable ingot.

[Bumber]

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

More complex forgings or higher temperature alloys might take too long, depending on player skill, so would have to be reheated or heated with a higher temperature fuel, like peat or maybe even coal/charcoal. There's certainly no need to heat copper to smelting temperature to forge it; indeed, that would not work as you would have molten copper instead of a forgeable ingot.

You can pull the ingots out as they start to glow and put in new ones before the coal burns out. That means you're in for about 8 ingots of copper/bronze smithing, though.

More fuels would be nice, even just peat (which I only ever use for pre-heating crucibles before burning the coal.)

Edited September 10, 2023 by Bumber