Iron bloom didnt spawn with enough voxels to finish the thing

[NastyFlytrap]

No, i did not use split on actual iron pieces, just the slag.

 

I took the slag off and there wasnt enough voxels to complete the ingot, and now i cant even melt this back into nuggets. What the hell am i supposed to do with this thing?

[idiomcritter]

yeah, this is a thing.

the work around is to put the bloom as it is (missing voxel) onto a helve hammer.  tough solution if that level of automation hasn't been reached yet...

[NastyFlytrap]

4 minutes ago, idiomcritter said:

yeah, this is a thing.

the work around is to put the bloom as it is (missing voxel) onto a helve hammer.  tough solution if that level of automation hasn't been reached yet...

Which is the case with me.

 

Load of bull. Fixing it cant even be hard. Its probably just some range calculation where randomness decides how many it spawns with, and they just need to put the minimum at the same level as the required.

[StCatharines]

Yeah, that's rough luck. I've had it happen only a handful of times in over a thousand hours of playtime, but it does happen unfortunately.

[Thorfinn]

That's one of the game's features. It detects negativity and punishes it.  

Assuming it's not intentional, (which I would not bet against -- why bother with a variable bloom size instead of just specifying a fixed size, like cast ingots?) something happening that rarely is not bad for a $20 early access game.

1 hour ago, idiomcritter said:

the work around is to put the bloom as it is (missing voxel) onto a helve hammer.

Only learned about this a few weeks ago. Before that anything missing voxels for whatever reason just got tossed into a deep hole.

[LuisEdGm]

This bug is happening on my playthough, 2 out of my 8 first iron blooms missed 1 or 2 iron voxels, when will it be fixed?

[NastyFlytrap]

17 minutes ago, LuisEdGm said:

This bug is happening on my playthough, 2 out of my 8 first iron blooms missed 1 or 2 iron voxels, when will it be fixed?

No clue, but its annoying as all fuck and i hope to god that the next patch fixes this.

 

For now i just typed into the chat:

/giveitem ironbloom 1

[LadyWYT]

On 10/20/2024 at 7:39 AM, idiomcritter said:

the work around is to put the bloom as it is (missing voxel) onto a helve hammer.

Huh, TIL. The rare times I've encountered the problem I've just chucked the thing and continued working on the other blooms. It's definitely annoying when it happens, but I usually have a bunch of iron, so missing one ingot every once in a while really isn't that bad. That being said...I would prefer if it didn't happen.

[The1Zorro]

Just happened to me twice in a row with my only 4 pieces of iron...

[Broccoli Clock]

Not going to lie, I'm with @LadyWYT on this one. It rarely happens, I'd prefer if it didn't, I know I can fix it with a helve hammer, but equally I find myself discarding the rogue bloom and setting it down for "later on" (*).

 

 

 

 

(* "later on", of course, never happens and I spend a playthrough looking at a cooled lump of incomplete iron as I work through the rest of my smithing.)

[GeekFather]

My impression is that it is intentional to push you into automation and getting a helve hammer up and running.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Well not only this, but the helve hammer will save your actual hammer from going kaput needlessly, especially when you haven't quite gotten enough iron to be spending it on frivolous things like upgrading your hammer.

[NastyFlytrap]

1 hour ago, GeekFather said:

My impression is that it is intentional to push you into automation and getting a helve hammer up and running.

Well its a quite terrible way of incentivizing that, not gonna lie.

 

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Well not only this, but the helve hammer will save your actual hammer from going kaput needlessly, especially when you haven't quite gotten enough iron to be spending it on frivolous things like upgrading your hammer.

As for this, not really. The helve hammer can only make plates, which you should use it for, but for anything else you still need a hammer, and you need plates a lot less than the others, so it really wont do much to save your hammer.

If you are playing with the mod where the helve can make anything, then sure, but thats not basegame, and i'd argue thats quite cheaty.

[Soulstuff]

Not so rare in my case, time to make the helve hammer i guess as i do have most of the things for it
Ended up with 2 duds missing 1 voxel in 12 bars

[hstone32]

On 10/31/2025 at 3:09 PM, NastyFlytrap said:

Well its a quite terrible way of incentivizing that, not gonna lie.

Have you seen the size of your typical iron vein? What's a lost ingot every now and then? There's plenty, plenty more where it came from.

[Vexxvididu]

I'm definitely of the opinion this is a bug that needs to be fixed.  ...there are plenty of other good reasons to get a helve hammer running without this issue.

[TFT]

On 10/31/2025 at 3:36 PM, GeekFather said:

My impression is that it is intentional to push you into automation and getting a helve hammer up and running.

Banging out the nth bloom, plates, or god forbid chains by hand is the reason you want a helve hammer. Not because you randomly cant process a bloom by hand that a helve hammer can.

3 hours ago, hstone32 said:

Have you seen the size of your typical iron vein?

Like real life, you're going to find way more iron than copper or tin. It is no wonder why iron was used for everything once the means to refine it became widespread. Even if you can refine several hundred ingots of iron out of a vein, I find it very hard to believe there's an intentional mechanic to "spoil" random blooms of iron.

[MKMoose]

7 hours ago, hstone32 said:

On 10/31/2025 at 10:09 PM, NastyFlytrap said:

Well its a quite terrible way of incentivizing that, not gonna lie.

Have you seen the size of your typical iron vein? What's a lost ingot every now and then? There's plenty, plenty more where it came from.

How much iron there is in a vein is entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

But even still, why are we wasting the player's time and resources with occasional blooms unprocessable by hand, which supposedly don't even matter for resource availability due to the sheer size of iron veins? There is already plenty of incentives to build the helve.

 

It could at least be worth to keep in mind that the player has no reason to assume that the helve hammer will solve this problem, as somewhat demonstrated by several posts in this thread.

Just adjusting the voxel count is the simplest solution, but if not that, then I would point to two ideas:

1. Inform the player explicitly in some way that the helve hammer can finish refining the bloom.

2. Allow to chisel down the bloom into nuggets, which could be used in the bloomery again (potentially alongside removing the helve's regenerative capability).

[SilverSquid]

Got the game on the 8th Nov, & I finally have iron (somehow I only got a small iron vein so this sucks a bit). This happened on my second iron bloom... Oh well, guess I'll have to wait for enough flax, fat & resin to make even a simple helve hammer.

It sucks that it happened, but if a helve hammer can fix it, then I guess it's just something that I'll have to keep in a corner.

[DeSaerth]

On 11/1/2025 at 8:09 AM, NastyFlytrap said:

The helve hammer can only make plates,

It can also process Iron Blooms and Blister steel into their respective ingots. Main use of the thing really.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Helve_hammer#Usage

[NastyFlytrap]

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

How much iron there is in a vein is entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

But even still, why are we wasting the player's time and resources with occasional blooms unprocessable by hand, which supposedly don't even matter for resource availability due to the sheer size of iron veins? There is already plenty of incentives to build the helve.

 

It could at least be worth to keep in mind that the player has no reason to assume that the helve hammer will solve this problem, as somewhat demonstrated by several posts in this thread.

Just adjusting the voxel count is the simplest solution, but if not that, then I would point to two ideas:

1. Inform the player explicitly in some way that the helve hammer can finish refining the bloom.

2. Allow to chisel down the bloom into nuggets, which could be used in the bloomery again (potentially alongside removing the helve's regenerative capability).

Just do away with this stupid thing completely and dont change anything else. Anyone suggesting this is an intentional mechanic to incentivize helve hammer usage is crazy.

 

No person would make the connection that the helve hammer can just spawn voxels out of nothing. It doesnt make intuitive sense. Fuck this entire thing

[Teh Pizza Lady]

7 hours ago, DeSaerth said:

Blister steel into their respective ingots

using a hammer and anvil is faster because breaking off scale happens in a 3x3 area with a hammer, but the helve hammer does it one voxel at a time. I wouldn't use the helve hammer for much more than processing iron blooms as well as plates of any metal type just because it saves time and wear and tear on your hand hammer. The wear when processing blister steel is negligible when compared with the fact that you're making steel in a medieval survival game.

5 hours ago, NastyFlytrap said:

Just do away with this stupid thing completely and dont change anything else. Anyone suggesting this is an intentional mechanic to incentivize helve hammer usage is crazy.

 

No person would make the connection that the helve hammer can just spawn voxels out of nothing. It doesnt make intuitive sense. Fuck this entire thing

A very... polar... response to the topic. It's a game and games are supposed to be fun. If a tool in the game repairing your iron blooms is making you this upset, then I not sure any solution would actually make you happy with it in the long run. The helve hammer is a time-saving tool. The fact that it can form ingots that would be impossible with normal hammering puts it squarely in the power hammer category of modern blacksmithing where blacksmiths use heavy hammer blows to move massive amounts of metal around an ingot to reshape it if a normal hammer would take too long or otherwise be impossible.

And true to real life, when smelting iron ore, there is a chance that you won't get enough iron to make a complete ingot. That is one of the hazards of melting down metals en masse. I agree with MKMoose's suggestion that failed blooms can be chiseled into bits and smelted again. Also breaking off bits with a normal hammer should yield a few nuggets that can also be resmelted. Scrap iron gets thrown in the furnace all the time because of how smelting the ore into metal is not a 100% efficient process and they want to make sure the furnace produces the amount they need every time.

[Thorfinn]

Another way to solve the problem is when you fill the bloomery, you select what tool you want popping out when you open the thing up. Get rid of the whole banging stuff on an anvil nonsense. Or maybe select what block you want mined, and forego the whole absurd business of seeking out rare stuff like cinnabar and chromite. Pop open the bloomery and you get 1000 durability's worth of that material.

[EDIT]

Oh, or how about during character creation, you look through a selection of homesteads, choose the one you want, and it teleports you there and gives you credit for having beaten the game, including filling your journal with all the lore?

Edited November 19, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

OK, now that I have that out of my system, if it really bothers you, just have the bloomery drop iron ingots, like it does for everything else. The file is:

.\assets\survival\itemtypes\resource\nugget.json

Or alternatively, if you want to retain the idea of blooms, likely one (or more) of the children doesn't have enough voxels for a full ingot.

.\assets\survival\shapes\item\ironbloom.json

I don't know that it's necessarily a bug. As easy as it would be to voxelcount and figure out which was short, there must be a reason they chose not to.

[EDIT]

If you want to go the latter route, the first thing I think I'd look at is trying to figure out why they set some of the faces to 

"enabled": false

and whether you need to just delete that, or if one (or more) would set something out of bounds. Either way, creating an "enabled" key and implementing the code to use it doesn't sound like a bug to me. More like a conscious design decision.

Edited November 19, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

I can't be sure, but it sure looks like @Soulstuff's blooms are the same. Has anyone looked to see if their deficient blooms are the same? That would sure make tracking it down easy. May take nothing more than overwriting one of the children with another.