Iron bloom didnt spawn with enough voxels to finish the thing

[Vexxvididu]

51 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

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.

 

THANKS.  I need to figure out which bloom variant is missing voxels since I don't want to skip the game mechanic entirely, I just think the blooms with missing voxels seems like such a weird choice it's hard to not think of it as a bug.  Part of why I suspect it was an accident is because it comes off as an unexplained oddity.  it just seems weird...

[LadyWYT]

Honestly the rare time or two it happens to me, and I don't have a helve hammer to fix it...I just smite it with the console and go on with the rest of my day.

[hstone32]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't feel like there's too huge a difference in progression from your first iron ingot, to the helve hammer. As a matter of fact, the only reason I refined my first two iron ingots by hand was because I wanted my helve hammer to be made of iron instead of bronze.

come to think of it though, isn't copper heavier than iron? Maybe I should have used bronze...

[Thorfinn]

44 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

 

THANKS.  I need to figure out which bloom variant is missing voxels since I don't want to skip the game mechanic entirely, I just think the blooms with missing voxels seems like such a weird choice it's hard to not think of it as a bug.  Part of why I suspect it was an accident is because it comes off as an unexplained oddity.  it just seems weird...

If you have one of these blooms now, you could try overwriting the definition, close the world, open the world, see if the bloom you have still looks the same. Undo your change, apply it to a different child, close, load. Repeat until you find out which it is.

[Thorfinn]

9 minutes ago, hstone32 said:

Maybe I should have used bronze...

I do. I'm not sure it makes any difference, and the bronze is cheaper. The anvil does make a difference, I'm pretty sure.

By the time I'm making a second helve, I'm second guessing myself, and always make it out of iron so I don't get blindsided if it really does take iron to do steel.

[Vexxvididu]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

If you have one of these blooms now, you could try overwriting the definition, close the world, open the world, see if the bloom you have still looks the same. Undo your change, apply it to a different child, close, load. Repeat until you find out which it is.

  Don't got one at the moment, but I was already thinking of ways to brute force it to figure out which one it is....  I'll do that when I am feeling less lazy, haha.  thanks!

1 hour ago, hstone32 said:

Maybe it's just me, but I don't feel like there's too huge a difference in progression from your first iron ingot, to the helve hammer. As a matter of fact, the only reason I refined my first two iron ingots by hand was because I wanted my helve hammer to be made of iron instead of bronze.

come to think of it though, isn't copper heavier than iron? Maybe I should have used bronze...

I have a TON of iron ore but very little resin for mechanical parts and not enough linen for the sails yet.  I'm sure this can happen at different rates for all sorts of reasons.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

7 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

[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?

top tier edit

Brutal Savage Wrecked

[Bumber]

The issue I have with the "realism" argument is that we're hammering off parts of the ingot to make tools anyway. We don't realistically need a full ingot. It's a gameplay mechanic that ingots need X voxels and a knife takes 1 ingot. We can identify the quality of our ore before smelting, so every bloom should contain sufficient iron by any reasonable metric.

9 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

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.

Why not both? I hammer the bloom while the helve works on it, letting it handle the stray voxels. I try to get through as many as possible while they're still hot from the bloomery, with minimal re-heating on the forge.

Edited November 20, 2025 by Bumber

[TFT]

9 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

A very... polar... response to the topic.

Honestly this whole thing is just making a mountain out of a mole hill on something that can be very clearly called a bug and an old one at that.

It's not severe enough that anyone should be getting all upset or needlessly passive aggressive about. Making sure that blooms have with enough voxels to finish by hand seems like a solution no one would take issue with. At the end of the day it's a very minor bug that's an inconvenience at worst with easy workarounds, so I don't anticipate it being very high priority to fix.

16 minutes ago, Bumber said:

Why not both? I hammer the bloom while the helve works on it

This is what I do too. Until my hammer setup is fast enough to not care, it's quicker to help the hammer by banging off the slag and then process another by hand on a separate anvil while it finishes up. 

[NastyFlytrap]

6 hours ago, TFT said:

Making sure that blooms have with enough voxels to finish by hand seems like a solution no one would take issue with.

You say that but our local forum troll really cant just keep it to himself

[Vexxvididu]

6 hours ago, TFT said:

Honestly this whole thing is just making a mountain out of a mole hill on something that can be very clearly called a bug and an old one at that.

Agreed. I don't see this as that big of a deal.  ...but it is clearly a bug.  It's an easy mistake to make as a bug, but seems too absurd to do on purpose.  I also can understand why it's not necessarily the highest priority for them to fix.

Edited November 20, 2025 by Vexxvididu
Adding another note.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

10 hours ago, Bumber said:

Why not both? I hammer the bloom while the helve works on it, letting it handle the stray voxels. I try to get through as many as possible while they're still hot from the bloomery, with minimal re-heating on the forge.

You can do that with iron blooms, sure, but I was specifically talking about blister steel. I even quoted someone who was talking about blister steel ingots. I would not use the helve hammer for blister steel. It's too slow for that. My process for blooms, if I want to be speedy, is to knock off the slag with a hammer and then toss it under the helve hammer while another bloom is heating up. in my current play through, I only have one forge, but in the past I've had two just because it's faster that way.

10 hours ago, TFT said:

At the end of the day it's a very minor bug that's an inconvenience at worst with easy workarounds, so I don't anticipate it being very high priority to fix.

 

3 hours ago, Vexxvididu said:

I don't see this as that big of a deal.  ...but it is clearly a bug.  It's an easy mistake to make as a bug, but seems too absurd to do on purpose.

I mean looking at the evidence, it's clear (especially from redram's comments) it's a bug, but I don't think it will *ever* be fixed because you cannot reasonably expect the blooms that come out of a furnace IRL to be complete 100% of the time, especially since operating a bloomery IRL is not an exact science. Fuel and ore go in. Metal and slag come out. Eventually you're going to get a hunk of metal and slag that is just mostly slag. Sorry (not sorry) but I place this firmly in the "bug that became a feature" category, especially since most people have learned to deal with it and it does mimic real life to an extent. 

My solution is to do what @MKMoose said and just chisel the failed bloom into bits and re-smelt it if it's that big of an issue that the helve hammer can just "magically" repair the blooms that didn't have enough voxels.

[LadyWYT]

7 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Sorry (not sorry) but I place this firmly in the "bug that became a feature" category, especially since most people have learned to deal with it and it does mimic real life to an extent. 

My solution is to do what @MKMoose said and just chisel the failed bloom into bits and re-smelt it if it's that big of an issue that the helve hammer can just "magically" repair the blooms that didn't have enough voxels.

Overall I do agree here, however, I would note that if it's intended to be a feature, it would be a good idea to make a note of it in the handbook somewhere. That way, the player not only knows that's an intended outcome, but they also know how to address the issue(helve hammer, or break down into bits and resmelt).

[hstone32]

3 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Overall I do agree here, however, I would note that if it's intended to be a feature, it would be a good idea to make a note of it in the handbook somewhere. That way, the player not only knows that's an intended outcome, but they also know how to address the issue(helve hammer, or break down into bits and resmelt).

Considering this whole topic is apparently contentious (though I really don't understand how people would get up in arms over this of all things), this sounds to me like a good compromise. I suspect that those who feel cheated would no longer feel that way if there was some in-game confirmation that it is indeed a feature, not a bug that the devs are so rudely ignoring.

[Dilan Rona]

encountered it a few times myself, and I do agree its a hassle, but since I play with Smithing Plus (https://mods.vintagestory.at/smithingplus), its more of a minor headache really, if I do run into a voxel or 2 thats missing, I just add it in from voxels split off from previous iron ingot forging.

Hopefully that bug with the iron ingot gets fixed one day...

[NastyFlytrap]

1 hour ago, hstone32 said:

Considering this whole topic is apparently contentious (though I really don't understand how people would get up in arms over this of all things), this sounds to me like a good compromise. I suspect that those who feel cheated would no longer feel that way if there was some in-game confirmation that it is indeed a feature, not a bug that the devs are so rudely ignoring.

Its contentious because 

1: Its a confirmed bug, not an intended mechanic and a small select bunch insist on that which bothers me, and fuels conflict

2: Even if its an intended mechanic, its a VERY shitty one at that, its undocumented and intuitively this doesnt make sense why this'd happen, so its not even obvious what even is going on here, and it absolutely does not feel like an intended mechanic because thats stupid

3: And because a handful of unnamed forum users just whine, moan, and put up resistance against everything. Contrarians, forum trolls, just being a pain in the ass. I am mainly talking about one person here but a handful of others presented some minor resistance aswell so plural it is.

Edited November 20, 2025 by NastyFlytrap

[Thorfinn]

Meh. I've already explained how easy it would be to count voxels and figure out which blooms are problems, and most likely fixing it by simply re-enabling the problem "children", so easy that anyone here could do it, there has to be a reason it's remained. I'm with @Teh Pizza Lady -- someone miscounted, and liked the result, so it remains.

But by all means, fix it if it bothers you so much. Literally no one is preventing you from doing that except you. Who would apparently prefer to have something to bitch about.

[EDIT]

I remember you once got around to patching something that bothered you. Don't remember what, but I do remember it was nowhere near as popular as one would think from all the bitching and moaning there was. Linen sacks being too expensive maybe?

Edited November 20, 2025 by Thorfinn

[TFT]

8 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

you cannot reasonably expect the blooms that come out of a furnace IRL to be complete 100% of the time, especially since operating a bloomery IRL is not an exact science

Sure, IRL ore quality is variable and we're running on iron age tech, and complexities stemming from that would be cool for a mod to tackle, but this is esoteric at best and nonsense at worst. The IRL argument is just odd when the only in-game solution is a helve hammer fabricating missing metal out of thin air into perfectly formed bars. When working as intended no one questions the logic as vintage story does a good job at maintaining its own verisimilitude and keep you immersed, so for this to be the one standout when the rest is gamefied and deterministic is strange. If left in and made a "feature" it would've been a patch note already, so the only sensible explanation is that it's not fixed is because it's not game breaking and it's too rare to be a priority, as redram said. I myself haven't encountered the bug and neither has anyone I've played with. Maybe complain loud enough like OP to get your answer one way or the other.
To be hypocritical for a moment, why do you want a rare bug to be a bespoke feature so much? If it was, what steps would you propose to polish and bring the rest of the game in line since it's clearly out of place? Again, it's a bit of an insignificant thing to make a big deal of. Sorry (not sorry) but it's a bug and the mental gymnastics to justify it as anything but is silly. As Thorfinn demonstrated, making a json edit is a quick fix and the simplest solution other than ignoring it, dont know why you'd need to go the extra mile to contrive a game mechanic out of this.

[Thorfinn]

Right, @TFT. Once you build your helve, you will never encounter the missing voxels again, which is why it's so rare. The people who will encounter it are those who for whatever reason can't find resin, or who choose to skip the bronze helve for some reason. There's very little point in putting it off and using up durability of your hammer for forging when a helve is so cheap and easy.

Edited November 21, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Teh Pizza Lady]

40 minutes ago, TFT said:

Sure, IRL ore quality is variable and we're running on iron age tech, and complexities stemming from that would be cool for a mod to tackle, but this is esoteric at best and nonsense at worst. The IRL argument is just odd when the only in-game solution is a helve hammer fabricating missing metal out of thin air into perfectly formed bars. When working as intended no one questions the logic as vintage story does a good job at maintaining its own verisimilitude and keep you immersed, so for this to be the one standout when the rest is gamefied and deterministic is strange. If left in and made a "feature" it would've been a patch note already, so the only sensible explanation is that it's not fixed is because it's not game breaking and it's too rare to be a priority, as redram said. I myself haven't encountered the bug and neither has anyone I've played with. Maybe complain loud enough like OP to get your answer one way or the other.
To be hypocritical for a moment, why do you want a rare bug to be a bespoke feature so much? If it was, what steps would you propose to polish and bring the rest of the game in line since it's clearly out of place? Again, it's a bit of an insignificant thing to make a big deal of. Sorry (not sorry) but it's a bug and the mental gymnastics to justify it as anything but is silly. As Thorfinn demonstrated, making a json edit is a quick fix and the simplest solution other than ignoring it, dont know why you'd need to go the extra mile to contrive a game mechanic out of this.

TL;DR?

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, TFT said:

As Thorfinn demonstrated, making a json edit is a quick fix and the simplest solution other than ignoring it

Why did they instead create something that disabled some of the voxels in the json AND created the C# code to use those keys? No one has even made a guess yet. If they considered it a bug, it would have been much easier to just fix it rather than create a new key/value and the code to use it.

Change it if it bothers you. I do not believe it was a mistake. I think it is in the same vein as the nerfed leaf drops if you just chop down the tree. It's an incentive to make shears. Maybe @Teh Pizza Lady is right and this is the same thing. This is an incentive to build the helve.

Edited November 21, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 minute ago, Thorfinn said:

Change it if it bothers you. I do not believe it was a mistake. I think it is in the same vein as the nerfed leaf drops if you just chop down the tree. It's an incentive to make shears. Same here. Maybe @Teh Pizza Lady is right and this is the same thing. This is an incentive to build the helve.

I think it was 100% a bug that they just left in because exactly that. It gives you a reason to build the helve beyond time savings.

As with 2983749283 other things, they just didn't update the handbook to state that. Probably forgotten over time. I honestly don't care whether it's a bug or a feature, it's how the game works and I think it's cool that it mimics real life, even if accidentally.

[Thorfinn]

12 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I think it was 100% a bug that they just left in because exactly that.

I thought so, too, until I spent some time reading the json and the code. There's a lot more work than needed to be done just to fix a bug. And he didn't even use the variation on all of them, just a few. Maybe he added the code so he could tweak the frequency of missing voxels, sure, but adding that code only makes sense if it were intentional at some point.

I don't get the complaining, though. Course, I didn't get the complaining about ebony and purpleheart and redwood not dropping enough seeds to have an ongoing woodlot. Maybe that was intentional? Sure would have been easier to have all uniform drops rather than adding extra code to treat them as variant drops.

It's the game. Play it. On its terms. Or set up your own terms. He's bent over backwards to make that easy.

Edited November 21, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

On further review, I think you are right, @Teh Pizza Lady. I was focusing too much on the definition of the bloom itself, and the mix of voxel ranges being disabled, and not enough on the implications of the means chosen to add voxels and turn it into a usable ingot, the helve hammer. It would have been easier to just let the helve nudge voxels around, and just add those voxels to the original bloom, that that was not the route chosen.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

30 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

On further review, I think you are right, @Teh Pizza Lady. I was focusing too much on the definition of the bloom itself, and the mix of voxel ranges being disabled, and not enough on the implications of the means chosen to add voxels and turn it into a usable ingot, the helve hammer. It would have been easier to just let the helve nudge voxels around, and just add those voxels to the original bloom, that that was not the route chosen.

yeah, that's why I say it probably started out as a bug and they just... left it. Over the course of 5 years, if a bug isn't fixed, then that means it's actually a feature. An undocumented feature for sure, but one nonetheless.