Iron bloom didnt spawn with enough voxels to finish the thing

[Zane Mordien]

Its so mildly annoying when I have just one bloom left and I need just one more ingot and this happens.  

It's definitely a feature at this point.

[Bumber]

On 11/20/2025 at 8:11 AM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

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.

If it's for realism, you'd need to be able to throw a bit of extra ore into the bloomery to compensate. Chiseling it down and re-smelting is a huge waste of time. Never mind that the 20 bits you need are in the bloom the entire time. (Also, your reasoning for it never being fixed seems to be predicated on the devs focusing on IRL over gameplay? Somewhat shaky logic, as they're known to make allowances in either direction.)

As a feature, fixing the problem with a helve hammer cannot stay. If you're set on VS being uncompromising and realistic, you need to not only chisel it down, but also add additional iron ore/bits to replace what's missing. Naturally, smelting entirely from bits must still allow for defective ingots, because you could spill some. This will finally bring the level of difficulty the late Rudometkin would've enjoyed.

Edited November 22, 2025 by Bumber

[Teh Pizza Lady]

10 hours ago, Bumber said:

(Also, your reasoning for it never being fixed seems to be predicated on the devs focusing on IRL over gameplay? Somewhat shaky logic, as they're known to make allowances in either direction.)

Keep reading in the thread.

What I actually said was that they left it in and Thorfinn pointed out that they even added more code to reinforce it so I said that what maybe started out as a bug turned out to be an undocumented feature. And then I implied that it was a happy accident that the behavior just happened to mimic real life so that's why I'm in favor of it staying. I'm not sure if that was clear so I'm just pointing it out.

10 hours ago, Bumber said:

If you're set on VS being uncompromising and realistic

I'm not. I'm set on it being fun. Then it can be realistic or "uncompromising", whatever that means. Currently it's fun and mimics IRL so I don't see any reason to change it.

[Soulstuff]

On 11/19/2025 at 11:58 PM, Thorfinn said:

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. 

I think what is happening is that they are trying to make it really realistic or just ended up like that without actually realizing it

IRL slag sometimes can trap some iron due to how this type of smelting works, i think that its the same thing happening here
You smack some slag off and it might take off 1 voxel of iron with it, get unlucky and you end up with voxels missing due to how the game works

If anything we are lucky that slag doesnt generate holes in our blooms
IRL blooms were just random sized chunks with sometimes slag trapped inside and took long time to work them out of the metal

While its annoying at least helve hammer can fix them and you should have mechanical power at that point of progression

In my opinion the only thing they should do about this is to add some information in the handbook, that if you cant finish the bloom you need to use helve hammer

Ill be honest it still irks me that 1 bar is 1 knife blade instead of at least 2 but this is not the topic on hand

[Bumber]

14 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Currently it's fun and mimics IRL so I don't see any reason to change it.

Fun is subjective. A lot of players seem irritated by it. The solutions not mimicking IRL remains my gripe with using IRL as an argument.

Not enough iron in bloom → Hit it with a bigger hammer

That line of reasoning shatters my immersion more than never having a defective bloom.

Edited November 23, 2025 by Bumber

[LadyWYT]

6 hours ago, Bumber said:

Not enough iron in bloom → Hit it with a bigger hammer

That line of reasoning shatters my immersion more than never having a defective bloom.

Pretty sure that's why there's been a suggestion or two to allow the player to chisel said bloom back into bits for smelting, and include a note in the handbook about it, if the mechanic remains in effect.

[Bumber]

20 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Pretty sure that's why there's been a suggestion or two to allow the player to chisel said bloom back into bits for smelting, and include a note in the handbook about it, if the mechanic remains in effect.

IIRC, all blooms give you 20 bits back, so you'd need to nerf them to only give you ~19 due to missing voxels. Then you put the material and coal into the bloomery and hope that the result is a complete bloom (which you don't find out until another day later and some hammering).

It would be practical to be able to put a little extra iron ore into the bloomery to reduce the risk of wasting time resmelting blooms to near zero. But I have to ask: At which step in any of this does the fun occur?

Is it the chance to fail? Is planting fruit trees and hoping they don't die fun? Can we improve the game by pottery randomly shattering when heated? Unpreventable crop and livestock disease? Tripping while running and fighting? Choke while eating (2x chance blackguard)? It's all realistic, but definitely not why I bought the game. I find no entertainment in having to do restart a task just because I got shafted by the RNG.

Edited November 24, 2025 by Bumber

[Teh Pizza Lady]

4 hours ago, Bumber said:

It would be practical to be able to put a little extra iron ore into the bloomery to reduce the risk of wasting time resmelting blooms to near zero. But I have to ask: At which step in any of this does the fun occur?

It's not that the chance to fail is where the fun is, but it's knowing it's probably going to work right away and if it doesn't you have a fallback, that it's not a complete loss. If you find no joy in RNG, then you might as well just play the game on the exact seed every single time so you don't have to run the risk of getting a world with a bad start. Also you should turn off temporal rifts because you might get interrupted by a drifter or two while you're doing some task. In fact, while you're at it, find a way to turn off *all* RNG in the game and make it 100% deterministic because you might get shafted in some infinitesimal way....and we can't have that.

Or just accept that this bug turned into a feature after going "unfixed" for 5 years.... yeah that sounds way easier.

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, Bumber said:

IIRC, all blooms give you 20 bits back, so you'd need to nerf them to only give you ~19 due to missing voxels. Then you put the material and coal into the bloomery and hope that the result is a complete bloom (which you don't find out until another day later and some hammering).

It would be practical to be able to put a little extra iron ore into the bloomery to reduce the risk of wasting time resmelting blooms to near zero. But I have to ask: At which step in any of this does the fun occur?

I mean, just speaking for me personally, but I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other on this particular matter. If a note is put in the handbook about the matter, and the player allowed to chisel the bloom back into bits(20 bits) to try smelting it again, and the mechanic otherwise left unchanged, that's fine. If the mechanic is changed so that one bloom always produces one ingot, no exceptions, that's also fine.

In other words, the crux of the issue is that the player needs to be able to understand what is happening, and have a clear way to solve the problem. Currently, the occasional messed up ingot feels like a bug, since there's no mention of it in the handbook, fixing it via helve hammer isn't immediately obvious, and there's otherwise no option to break it down into bits and try again(like you can with other forge projects).

[Bumber]

5 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

It's not that the chance to fail is where the fun is, but it's knowing it's probably going to work right away and if it doesn't you have a fallback, that it's not a complete loss. If you find no joy in RNG, then you might as well just play the game on the exact seed every single time so you don't have to run the risk of getting a world with a bad start. Also you should turn off temporal rifts because you might get interrupted by a drifter or two while you're doing some task. In fact, while you're at it, find a way to turn off *all* RNG in the game and make it 100% deterministic because you might get shafted in some infinitesimal way....and we can't have that.

Or just accept that this bug turned into a feature after going "unfixed" for 5 years.... yeah that sounds way easier.

That's not what I said. The player can overcome all the situations you mentioned with sufficient skill. They're merely at a slight disadvantage. (You didn't mention getting struck by lightning, but even that can be countered.)

The bloomery process is not a skill issue. The result is entirely out of the player's hands. Roll a die. If it lands on 1, do the exact same process with no variation. You cannot improve beyond not screwing up viable blooms.

Edited November 24, 2025 by Bumber

[MKMoose]

5 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

It's not that the chance to fail is where the fun is, but it's knowing it's probably going to work right away and if it doesn't you have a fallback, that it's not a complete loss. If you find no joy in RNG, then you might as well just play the game on the exact seed every single time so you don't have to run the risk of getting a world with a bad start. Also you should turn off temporal rifts because you might get interrupted by a drifter or two while you're doing some task. In fact, while you're at it, find a way to turn off *all* RNG in the game and make it 100% deterministic because you might get shafted in some infinitesimal way....and we can't have that.

I'm inclined to say that the defective iron blooms are one of the least punishing random mechanics, but are among the most annoying ones. The distinction from other random mechanics lies in where this randomness appears and in the player's agency in interacting with it.

The reason why people dislike it, as I see it, is that after the player has gone through the whole process of searching for iron, which itself is riddled with a whole bunch of random factors, the raw ore already feels like a reward. Then they smelt this ore, get the bloom, heat it up if necessary, hammer it to clear the slag. It is so close to the next ingot, and finally... the bloom is missing a voxel for some reason. It feels like a waste of time and resources, there is almost no way to tell if it's defective without getting most of the way through the bloom, and the player can't do anything about it before the helve (but, as already pointed out, it needs to at least be better communicated, because a new player has little reason not to just discard the dud). 

 

On 11/22/2025 at 7:47 PM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Currently it's fun and mimics IRL so I don't see any reason to change it.

If we wanted it to be realistic in any way, then the first thing that has to be done is allow to refine the defective blooms into slightly smaller quantities of iron. Alternatively, make the defective blooms actually flawed and not missing a single voxel, and make them unprocessable regardless of tools or producing only some 5 to 10 nuggets when processed in some way. Throwing away entire blooms was historically a very rare occurence, and it would primarily be done with heavily defective blooms that had extremely low metal yield or excessive impurities, not with an ingot that had an ounce of metal less than expected.

And while helves have historically greatly improved the ironmaking process, they served primarily to offload most of the heavy work onto a water wheel and to accelerate the speed of production, not to magically fix defective blooms.

It would arguably be more realistic to always get an ingot from every bloom, since that's right about what would actually happen barring exceptions. The ingots may just be a different size each time, but we can abstract that away the same way that we abstract away the amount of metal used for a product, they all simply take one ingot. I don't think the realism argument holds water, no matter how you paint it.

 

I'll also add that, purely from a design perspective, I greatly dislike that the helve allows to entirely disregard the problem of defective blooms. It does kind of work as an incentive to set up mechanical power, but also serves as an unnecessary complication which disproportionately affects beginners.

It's kind of like, I don't know, adding new soil mechanics or weeds but disabling them for terra preta, or adding an injury system but giving full injury protection to armor, or adding additional penalties to having low nutrition for an extended period of time, or something in that vein. What purpose does trying to make the game deeper or more realistic serve in the long run if it's rendered irrelevant by something that the player will want to reach either way?

It would be cool to let all players experience these fun mechanics but allow experienced players to handle them more efficiently to actually reinforce game mastery, instead of removing complexity as the player progresses.

Edited November 24, 2025 by MKMoose
Phrasing.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Really, it's no mystery that I think the "bug" should stay, but I actually think the game is better keeping the bloom defects exactly as they currently, even if they started life out as a bug (new sub plot for A Bug's Life?). A lot of the concerns you raise don't contradict what the mechanic of imperfect blooms is accomplishing in the pacing of the overall game.

58 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

The distinction from other random mechanics lies in where this randomness appears and in the player's agency in interacting with it.

But that's precisely the point! Sure the randomness shows up late in the process, but that's also exactly why it works! Most of the smithing and bloom processing in this game is extremely deterministic once you learn the steps. Heat ingot, select template, pound metal, get product. Tedious...  Having one small moment of uncertainty ("Am I gonna have this bloom fail??") preserves the tension of a system that otherwise becomes braindead and fully rote memorization of the process. If the result were guaranteed every time, the entire bloom-to-ingot loop would lose one of the only points that still feels dynamic within the whole smithing process.

58 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

It feels like a waste of time and resources, there is almost no way to tell if it's defective without getting most of the way through the bloom

But the resource loss IS trivial. The iron ore deposits underground are often huge, with each ore guaranteed to produce at least 3 nuggets (worth 5 units each). But it doesn't meaningfully slow progression, it just paces it. The game already has small friction points such as resin scarcity for mechanical setups, crop cycles and rotation, charcoal pit production variances. Defective blooms fall into the same category of momentary setback, not a punishment. Removing it would shave away one more piece of pacing that the game has to prevent players from just blasting their way through the iron age without a care in the world.

58 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

If we wanted it to be realistic in any way, then the first thing that has to be done is allow to refine the defective blooms into slightly smaller quantities of iron. Alternatively, make the defective blooms actually flawed and not missing a single voxel, and make them unprocessable regardless of tools or producing only some 5 to 10 nuggets when processed in some way. Throwing away entire blooms was historically a very rare occurence, and it would primarily be done with heavily defective blooms that had extremely low metal yield or excessive impurities, not with an ingot that had an ounce of metal less than expected.

And while helves have historically greatly improved the ironmaking process, they served primarily to offload most of the heavy work onto a water wheel and to accelerate the speed of production, not to magically fix defective blooms.

It would arguably be more realistic to always get an ingot from every bloom, since that's right about what would actually happen barring exceptions. The ingots may just be a different size each time, but we can abstract that away the same way that we abstract away the amount of metal used for a product, they all simply take one ingot. I don't think the realism argument holds water, no matter how you paint it.

This is where your argument really starts to get under my skin. Vintage Story borrows realism where it's fun, not where it becomes administratively heavy. I suppose if you're saying that realism should have an effect on the end product, then we should have variable ingot sizes, variable impurities and metal qualities, variable carbon levels, different bloom grades, and tools that require more or less metal to craft depending on quality and the size of the wielder. For that matter, we might as well add a height slider to the character creation process so that the player characters aren't all the same size, too! The game abstracts all of that because excessive granularity creates more complexity than it does benefits. Having a bloom missing a voxel doesn't do that. It doesn't create complexity, rather it encourages the player to make use of the helve hammer to extract a usable ingot from an otherwise failed part of an historically imperfect process as you yourself pointed out.

Holding the bloom mechanic to a realism standard that the rest of the game and the metallurgic processes don't follow creates an inconsistency in the game. Removing the mechanic altogether deadens the impact of the thematic journey of loss and recovery that the game promotes throughout it's story and lore.

58 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I greatly dislike that the helve allows to entirely disregard the problem of defective blooms.

But this is how progression works in the rest of the game.

• Querns are slow to operate; windmills solve it
• Panning for copper nuggets is slow; making tools solves it
• Pit kilns are slow; beehive kilns solve it

Early-game friction (the loss of a bloom) gives way to late-game convenience (I can just repair it on the helve) and is a core part of the dynamics within the Vintage Story ecosystem of mechanics. It doesn't trivialize the mechanic, it integrates it naturally into the tech curve. If the helve could no longer repair defective blooms, then it's only use would be to hammer out plates from ingots... which if you know what you're doing, can actually be slower than doing it by hand. The helve would just be a useless bit of tech at that point. No use at all to the skilled player.

58 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

What purpose does trying to make the game deeper or more realistic serve in the long run if it's rendered irrelevant by something that the player will want to reach either way?

Not every game mechanic needs to scale upwards. Some exist specifically to give weight to later-game progression (panning -> mining as an example). Removing the bloom defects would not add meaningful mastery to iron. It would just make iron progression just as flat and predictable as copper or bronze.

And also this mechanic has existed for over 5 years at this point without significantly harming player enjoyment or balance. No one is throwing a raging fit and uninstalling their game because one bloom was defective. In my mind, that's strong evidence that the defect is not only survivable, but important for the health of the game overall. If we change it now, we're not just "removing a bug", but completely restructuring one of the pacing anchors of early iron tech... and for what benefit?? Sometimes bugs become features and the game benefits from it as a whole.

Edited November 24, 2025 by Teh Pizza Lady
spelling

[LadyWYT]

30 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

But that's precisely the point! Sure the randomness shows up late in the process, but that's also exactly why it works! Most of the smithing and bloom processing in this game is extremely deterministic once you learn the steps. Heat ingot, select template, pound metal, get product. Tedious...  Having one small moment of uncertainty ("Am I gonna have this bloom fail??") preserves the tension of a system that otherwise becomes braindead and fully rote memorization of the process. If the result were guaranteed every time, the entire bloom-to-ingot loop would lose one of the only points that still feels dynamic within the whole smithing process.

Well first... hands over Snickers bar 

But I do have to be "that guy" and counter with...that's also kinda why the process doesn't work. Or rather, why the process ends up feeling mildly unsatisfying to some players. The player is expecting to get an iron ingot from an iron bloom, with no indication otherwise that the process can fail, aside from managing to screw up working the bloom themselves. Thus when the ingot nears completion but turns out to be missing a voxel or two, the player is left scratching their head wondering what went wrong, and course getting frustrated when there doesn't seem to be an answer other than "bug".

34 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

But the resource loss IS trivial. The iron ore deposits underground are often huge, with each ore guaranteed to produce at least 3 nuggets (worth 5 units each). But it doesn't meaningfully slow progression, it just paces it. The game already has small friction points such as resin scarcity for mechanical setups, crop cycles and rotation, charcoal pit production variances. Defective blooms fall into the same category of momentary setback, not a punishment. Removing it would shave away one more piece of pacing that the game has to prevent players from just blasting their way through the iron age without a care in the world.

While it's true that the resource loss is trivial, it's also something that the player ought to know about ahead of time, lest they get frustrated and assume it's a bug. I'm also not so sure that resin, crops, and charcoal are great examples to use in comparison either. Resin isn't really something the player can "lose", to my knowledge, unless they chop down the tree producing resin, or are a Blackguard(pretty sure that the Heavy-Handed drawback means that the class will miss the occasional bit of resin). Crops have some variance in how much they produce, but they always have a decent yield unless the crop just dies entirely/is harvested prematurely. Charcoal...I mean you're burning wood in order to get it, so it stands to reason a bit of it will burn to ash in the process(unless you build the pit wrong).

The iron lost from defective blooms, however, can't really be prevented by the player, unless of course they have access to a helve hammer. Which they're probably going to end up building eventually, but still...

45 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

If the helve could no longer repair defective blooms, then it's only use would be to hammer out plates from ingots... which if you know what you're doing, can actually be slower than doing it by hand. The helve would just be a useless bit of tech at that point. No use at all to the skilled player.

Eh, have to disagree here. The sole purpose of the helve hammer is to lighten the player's workload when it comes to the most tedious parts of forging...that is, working blooms and forging plates. There's not really skill involved with either, and it's not really a "skill issue" if a player doesn't know that helve hammers can work defective blooms into ingots. It's a knowledge issue, if anything.

 

48 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Removing the bloom defects would not add meaningful mastery to iron. It would just make iron progression just as flat and predictable as copper or bronze.

It would make the process more consistent though, in that you get out of it what you put into it.

 

49 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Holding the bloom mechanic to a realism standard that the rest of the game and the metallurgic processes don't follow creates an inconsistency in the game. Removing the mechanic altogether deadens the impact of the thematic journey of loss and recovery that the game promotes throughout it's story and lore.

And here is where I'll call back to my earlier post:

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

In other words, the crux of the issue is that the player needs to be able to understand what is happening, and have a clear way to solve the problem. Currently, the occasional messed up ingot feels like a bug, since there's no mention of it in the handbook, fixing it via helve hammer isn't immediately obvious, and there's otherwise no option to break it down into bits and try again(like you can with other forge projects).

I don't think it matters whether this particular mechanic stays in the game or gets removed, but if it stays it really ought to be noted in the handbook somewhere so the player doesn't just assume it's a bug when they encounter. Likewise, the player should probably have some sort of option to deal with it, aside from just throwing it onto the helve hammer to sort out. However, if the mechanic is removed and one bloom always produces one ingot(regardless of hand-forged or helve-forged), I don't really see any particular detriment to gameplay either.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

27 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

it really ought to be noted in the handbook somewhere so the player doesn't just assume it's a bug when they encounter.

I've said it twice and I'll say it again... the dev team is notoriously bad at keeping the handbook up to date. It's on the todo list, but it's very far down because most things are either well-known or announced in Tyron's news posts.

But yes, it does need to be explained that the helve hammer can even assist with producing ingots from blooms that might otherwise be impossible to recover.

[Bumber]

8 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

But this is how progression works in the rest of the game.

• Querns are slow to operate; windmills solve it
• Panning for copper nuggets is slow; making tools solves it
• Pit kilns are slow; beehive kilns solve it

None of these undergo spontaneous failure. They are all improvements of efficiency. The helve hammers out ingots and plates automatically without wasting durability. There's value even in helving copper plates for chutes, or of any material for repairing armor. None of these require RNG to justify their existence; they're just better.

8 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

The game already has small friction points such as resin scarcity for mechanical setups, crop cycles and rotation, charcoal pit production variances.

I think this resin's actually a visibility issue. I've got the mod that lets you see it on all sides of the block, and it's basically everywhere. Same with bees and buzzwords.

Time invested in crops and charcoal are never wasted unless the player screws up. You always get a reasonable amount of the end product for your efforts.

Edited November 25, 2025 by Bumber

[Teh Pizza Lady]

Okay I think I need to clarify something, because I don't think my other comments have said what you're insinuating they did... I'm not arguing that RNG is what justifies the helve's existence. I'm arguing that the RNG of the bloom defects fits cleanly into the overall progression and that the helve benefits from that in mechanic in a natural way because of how the helve is intentionally coded to operate (spawning missing voxels in favor of simply moving them around).

9 hours ago, Bumber said:

None of these undergo spontaneous failure. They are all improvements of efficiency. The helve hammers out ingots and plates automatically without wasting durability. There's value even in helving copper plates for chutes, or of any material for repairing armor. None of these require RNG to justify their existence; they're just better.

Mostly correct....and nowhere did I actually claim that RNG justifies the helve. Where your argument is breaking down is what I actually said was that the defects give the helve an additional purpose...a niche, if you will, and in the same way that the various frictions in early game give their later upgrades a niche. And to be perfectly clear, the helve cannot be automated. The player still has to babysit it unlike the quern which is fire and forget for a stack of input. The helve still requires the player to swap in fresh blooms or ingots (for ingots and plates respectively) to keep the workflow going. Its strengths is in freeing your hands while it works, not replacing the player completely. This is why the helve can only do the ingots and plates. You are correct that it saves durability, a comment I made previously in this thread.

The defects of the blooms don't validate the helve. They just simply interact with the way the helve operates and is intentionally coded and feels consistent with how other early/late progression transitions work.

9 hours ago, Bumber said:

Time invested in crops and charcoal are never wasted unless the player screws up. You always get a reasonable amount of the end product for your efforts.

That's true for THOSE systems, yes... but it doesn't mean the game completely avoids random and/or unrecoverable losses. Take resin for example.

1. not every pine tree generates resin
2. if you cut down a resin-bearing tree, the source is lost forever
3. newly grown trees do not spawn fresh resin nodes
4. resin nodes cannot be created by the player

So resin is now both random AND permanently exhaustible but it's still considered normal friction in the tech loop.

Compared to a resin node disappearing forever (a huge loss if you don't live around a bunch of naturally spawning pine trees), a bloom missing a voxel and needing to be tossed on the helve is extremely tame. Granted if you live in a pine forest, then resin is probably not an issue for you, but due to the RNG nature of the game, it is for some players. My first play through that I remember gathering resin for was in a Larch forest. I had to travel nearly 2000 blocks to find resin because it was all either maple or birch trees with very few oaks and pines nearby.

And back to the quern... it does randomly fail when the wind speed drops too low to power it. That's a random environmental event halting all progression on wind-powered tools in exactly the way you're saying that it doesn't do. Yet it's still considered a healthy part of the tech curve for the quern, pulverizer, and helve to be strictly reliant on the wind patterns in the game?

This further supports my claim that the game already uses minor RNG and temporary setbacks to pace progression... not punish the player, just slow them down.

And just to reiterate my points from before, I'm not claiming that the helve exists because bloom defects exist. My point was simply that the defects add value to the helve in the same way that other early-game frictions give value to every other mid-game conveniences. Removing the bloom defect would detract from that value because it would flatten iron progression into the same predictable, zero-tension loop of heat, bang, repeat. I don't think the game benefits from such processes becoming boring like that.

I don't know how I can make it more clear....

[Bumber]

21 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

So resin is now both random AND permanently exhaustible but it's still considered normal friction in the tech loop.

There are likely more resin nodes than iron nodes in the game, and the later don't even regenerate the resource. Given a continuing demand for iron (and very little for resin), I feel like there's already enough friction in the iron making process. Don't forget the fire bricks that aren't recovered from the bloomery. (Traders actually sell resin and fire clay, but not iron.)

21 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

And back to the quern... it does randomly fail when the wind speed drops too low to power it. That's a random environmental event halting all progression on wind-powered tools in exactly the way you're saying that it doesn't do. Yet it's still considered a healthy part of the tech curve for the quern, pulverizer, and helve to be strictly reliant on the wind patterns in the game?

You can turn the quern by hand. Regardless, you can simply do something else while you wait for the wind to blow again, losing nothing.

The helve is unique in that your metal will cool down and become unworkable. So you attempt pull out your hammer and bang it into shape really quick. Except... D'oh! Double whammy!

21 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

My point was simply that the defects add value to the helve in the same way that other early-game frictions give value to every other mid-game conveniences. Removing the bloom defect would detract from that value because it would flatten iron progression into the same predictable, zero-tension loop of heat, bang, repeat. I don't think the game benefits from such processes becoming boring like that.

I don't think it's done well at all. For starters, the helve is not a logical solution for a problem of missing voxels. You'd need a different problem involving a lack of player strength.

Secondly, the hammering of the bloom already requires more player attention than the entire bronze casting process. The layout of the bloom even has more variation than smithing bronze tools from a uniform ingot.

It's like saying the clay forming process is missing a little something to disrupt the player from making their boring bricks. (You encountered a hard lump! Try spinning the clay on a potter's wheel to remove the lumps until it's properly brick-shaped!)

The whole process is already demanding enough that I tend to use bronze heavily even after obtaining steel. Certainly not going to waste iron to make firewood or collect charcoal. Wolves howling outside? Take the bronze chain; steel is for spelunking and temporal storms.

Edited November 26, 2025 by Bumber

[Teh Pizza Lady]

9 hours ago, Bumber said:

It's like saying the clay forming process is missing a little something to disrupt the player from making their boring bricks. (You encountered a hard lump! Try spinning the clay on a potter's wheel to remove the lumps until it's properly brick-shaped!)

Don't give Tyron ideas...

9 hours ago, Bumber said:

The whole process is already demanding enough that I tend to use bronze heavily even after obtaining steel. Certainly not going to waste iron to make firewood or collect charcoal. Wolves howling outside? Take the bronze chain; steel is for spelunking and temporal storms.

I hear you and I understand where you're coming from on your arguments, I just disagree with them. I think it's fine because I don't see the helve as JUST the solution for the missing voxels, but that it's an added benefit that gives the helve MORE value than just being the tool that hammers out blooms into ingots and ingots into plates... especially when you start mass producing and start running into more instances where a bloom was imperfect, which you said yourself was rare IRL. I think I've encountered a grand total of 3 each time I play the game... and my friends and I process a LOT of iron.

[MKMoose]

On 11/25/2025 at 12:36 AM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

On 11/24/2025 at 11:37 PM, MKMoose said:

The distinction from other random mechanics lies in where this randomness appears and in the player's agency in interacting with it.

But that's precisely the point! Sure the randomness shows up late in the process, but that's also exactly why it works! Most of the smithing and bloom processing in this game is extremely deterministic once you learn the steps. Heat ingot, select template, pound metal, get product. Tedious...  Having one small moment of uncertainty ("Am I gonna have this bloom fail??") preserves the tension of a system that otherwise becomes braindead and fully rote memorization of the process. If the result were guaranteed every time, the entire bloom-to-ingot loop would lose one of the only points that still feels dynamic within the whole smithing process.

On 11/24/2025 at 11:37 PM, MKMoose said:

It feels like a waste of time and resources, there is almost no way to tell if it's defective without getting most of the way through the bloom

But the resource loss IS trivial. The iron ore deposits underground are often huge, with each ore guaranteed to produce at least 3 nuggets (worth 5 units each). But it doesn't meaningfully slow progression, it just paces it. The game already has small friction points such as resin scarcity for mechanical setups, crop cycles and rotation, charcoal pit production variances. Defective blooms fall into the same category of momentary setback, not a punishment. Removing it would shave away one more piece of pacing that the game has to prevent players from just blasting their way through the iron age without a care in the world.

Apologies for taking this long. Those are decent arguments, but I'm not sure what you're arguing for or against.

I do agree that the metalworking mechanics could use a bit of uncertainty for better moment-to-moment engagement, and I take issue with the way that this uncertainty is currently implemented, not with it being there in the first place.

The resource loss being mostly insignificant in the long run is also the reason why I specifically said that the defective blooms are among the least punishing random mechanics in the game, and instead focused on the more subjective aspect of why people find it annoying. And that was in response to you going off in the vein of "if remove this randomness, then why not other randomness as well", so I'm explaining why this randomness specifically is much more annoying than many other examples.

 

On 11/25/2025 at 12:36 AM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

On 11/24/2025 at 11:37 PM, MKMoose said:

If we wanted it to be realistic in any way, then the first thing that has to be done is allow to refine the defective blooms into slightly smaller quantities of iron. Alternatively, make the defective blooms actually flawed and not missing a single voxel, and make them unprocessable regardless of tools or producing only some 5 to 10 nuggets when processed in some way. Throwing away entire blooms was historically a very rare occurence, and it would primarily be done with heavily defective blooms that had extremely low metal yield or excessive impurities, not with an ingot that had an ounce of metal less than expected.

And while helves have historically greatly improved the ironmaking process, they served primarily to offload most of the heavy work onto a water wheel and to accelerate the speed of production, not to magically fix defective blooms.

It would arguably be more realistic to always get an ingot from every bloom, since that's right about what would actually happen barring exceptions. The ingots may just be a different size each time, but we can abstract that away the same way that we abstract away the amount of metal used for a product, they all simply take one ingot. I don't think the realism argument holds water, no matter how you paint it.

Expand  

This is where your argument really starts to get under my skin. Vintage Story borrows realism where it's fun, not where it becomes administratively heavy. I suppose if you're saying that realism should have an effect on the end product, then we should have variable ingot sizes, variable impurities and metal qualities, variable carbon levels, different bloom grades, and tools that require more or less metal to craft depending on quality and the size of the wielder. For that matter, we might as well add a height slider to the character creation process so that the player characters aren't all the same size, too! The game abstracts all of that because excessive granularity creates more complexity than it does benefits. Having a bloom missing a voxel doesn't do that. It doesn't create complexity, rather it encourages the player to make use of the helve hammer to extract a usable ingot from an otherwise failed part of an historically imperfect process as you yourself pointed out.

Holding the bloom mechanic to a realism standard that the rest of the game and the metallurgic processes don't follow creates an inconsistency in the game. Removing the mechanic altogether deadens the impact of the thematic journey of loss and recovery that the game promotes throughout it's story and lore.

I didn't phrase myself especially well here, but the bottom line is that the current defective bloom mechanics are less realistic than just always getting one ingot per bloom. It would be fine to just disregard the randomness in the amount of metal, because it's not a thing in all other parts of the game.

If I was told about blooms sometimes having insufficient iron for an ingot before I learned about this mechanic, my immediate assumption would be that they could still be processed using the same methods as full blooms into a bunch of smaller pieces. That would be realistic, would retain a dose of uncertainty, and may even point to a new progression step associated with building a more advanced hearth for welding smaller pieces into ingots, among other potential uses.

But instead we have blooms that have a small percentage of metal below an arbitrary threshold required for an ingot, which can't be processed in any way except using a bigger hammer that magically repairs them.

 

On 11/25/2025 at 12:36 AM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

On 11/24/2025 at 11:37 PM, MKMoose said:

I greatly dislike that the helve allows to entirely disregard the problem of defective blooms.

But this is how progression works in the rest of the game.

• Querns are slow to operate; windmills solve it
• Panning for copper nuggets is slow; making tools solves it
• Pit kilns are slow; beehive kilns solve it

Early-game friction (the loss of a bloom) gives way to late-game convenience (I can just repair it on the helve) and is a core part of the dynamics within the Vintage Story ecosystem of mechanics. It doesn't trivialize the mechanic, it integrates it naturally into the tech curve. If the helve could no longer repair defective blooms, then it's only use would be to hammer out plates from ingots... which if you know what you're doing, can actually be slower than doing it by hand. The helve would just be a useless bit of tech at that point. No use at all to the skilled player.

On 11/24/2025 at 11:37 PM, MKMoose said:

What purpose does trying to make the game deeper or more realistic serve in the long run if it's rendered irrelevant by something that the player will want to reach either way?

Not every game mechanic needs to scale upwards. Some exist specifically to give weight to later-game progression (panning -> mining as an example).

I'm sorry but I have no clue what you're getting at here. The examples of mechanized querns, panning getting replaced by mining and the pit kiln being replaced by the beehive kiln all have vastly different purposes in the game's progression. They are quite representative of a lot of the game's design, but the helve fixing defective blooms absolutely is not.

My point here was primarily that if you're using realism and fun as an argument for the defective blooms, then realism and fun should persist throughout the game and not be thrown out the window once the player gets a helve.

But now you've largely ditched all other arguments and focused on justifying the existence of bloom defects as a source of early-game friction, and I absolutely can agree with that line of thought in isolation, with a few caveats. But I never questioned that line of thought, so what were you arguing against?

 

The reason why I don't think it's beneficial that the helve completely eliminates the problem of defective blooms (aside from it being unrealistic and the helve already offering several other incentives) is that complexity in game design tends to work best either as a progression ladder (see especially the ever-increasing complexity of metalworking processes) or as an opt-in challenge with additional rewards (see automation and the variety of tasks non-integral to progression like animal husbandry or cheesemaking).

Defective blooms, as it stands, increase complexity of manual ironworking, which already is significantly more advanced than bronze processing, only to immediately be made irrelevant by the optional helve, which simplifies ironworking back down closer to bronze. So you have a feature which intentionally raises the barrier to entry, but can be trivially circumvented by a more experienced player, especially since the helve is actually a Bronze Age unlock. The defective blooms also cannot reinforce mastery, since the better player interacts with them much less often if at all. It is an annoying inconvenience which primarily affects beginners who don't have a good mechanical power setup, don't have a developed resource supply, and naturally start off small and put more value on individual ingots.

Now, I can see the argument that this is largely intentional as a way of giving more value to the helve, but I believe this would be much better served by making the helve faster or more versatile, and not by making the manual process more annoying. Ideally, I'd argue that the helve should be more difficult to operate correctly (i.e. not entirely automatic), and when used skillfully it should allow significantly faster forging than it currently does. It could be a pretty big rework and may require a larger pass across the metalworking system, but it's something to consider.

 

I don't really know if I'm making much sense at this point, but I hope this at least clarifies my previous points, because it didn't seem like they came through well enough.

[TFT]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

It is an annoying inconvenience which primarily affects beginners who don't have a good mechanical power setup, don't have a developed resource supply, and naturally start off small and put more value on individual ingots.

The player can also just never encounter it in the first place. Despite working many blooms, by hand without a helve hammer, I never had this bug come up. I've only seen it discussed in forums.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

@MKMoose

I think maybe I see where your confusion happened. I was reading your posts as saying that the bloom defect mechanic should be removed entirely, so I was arguing that they should stay and trying to justify it in a way that was defensible and sound in logic. From what I'm reading here, it's now clear to me that you're fine with the uncertainty of the bloom mechanic, but that you want the mechanic to operate differently. You're confused because I was having a completely different conversation with you than the one you were having with me.

And honestly, if I'm being fair, most of the game's systems are probably prototypes or at least designed to be extensible by modders. I think a bit of realism is necessary, but going strictly by what we experience in real life is a bit too much, so I get why the inconsistency is probably bothering you. You say that partial blooms could produce smaller ingots or be forge welded together into full ingots. It might work... and it gives the helve hammer (a useful tool for forge welding) a more interesting role than "It fixes the bloom."

However if you change nothing, the current defect system still accomplishes what it needs to. It causes early-game friction that is solved by a tool later. Even if the helve hammer erases the issue entirely afterwards, it's still consistent with how the early bottlenecks get smoothed out once you advance in the tech tiers.

Yes, it hits beginning players harder than more experienced players. Yes it feels like a nuisance. So we can probably agree that:

1. Some early-game friction is good.
2. The way it's handled could be better, given that I've gone on record stating that I was fine with removing the "hammer fixes things" mechanic with chiseling it down and adding it as scrap in the next bloomery.

We probably won't ever agree on this but hopefully... NOW... we both understand each other.

[SIGILL]

Hi everyone, I hope it's okay that I join this thread to learn a bit more about iron blooms. I'm working on a mod that modifies the smithing system and I have been looking into how blooms work. I thought I understood how they are generated, but based on this thread I have a couple of questions. I hope I didn't simply miss this information while reading through this discussion, my apologies if I did!

1. There are multiple mentions here of this being a confirmed bug (which would mean it's not intentional, despite the generation explicitly using randomness without safeguards that ensure generation of enough metal voxels). Where is this confirmed and can I possibly find more information on it?
2. How would the shape and any children being disabled make a difference? When I checked the mentioned file out, it only showed me the 'world model', so the shape that is used when the bloom is placed on the ground. Which is a generic shape, not one uniquely modified for each individually generated microvoxel 'work item'. @Thorfinn mentions variations, keys and disabled voxel ranges that I can't seem to find? As far as I could find the anvil-workable microvoxel grids are purely generated in C# code, but my probability calculations for each microvoxel to appear that I based on the C# code don't match the in-game results so this might explain why.
3. @Teh Pizza Lady mentions "Thorfinn pointed out that they even added more code to reinforce it", when was that? I can only find the current code being added in this commit ?

It feels like I'm completely missing some important information and files despite serious effort to figure this out, so any help would be much appreciated!

[MKMoose]

46 minutes ago, SIGILL said:

It feels like I'm completely missing some important information and files despite serious effort to figure this out, so any help would be much appreciated!

Welcome to the forums! Quite frankly, I don't think you're missing any important information. Not that I could find anything important, that is, despite having also looked into the code, but maybe someone else will chime in. I could hazard a guess that you know more about the bloom's voxel generation than any other person that has posted in this thread.

 

46 minutes ago, SIGILL said:

There are multiple mentions here of this being a confirmed bug (which would mean it's not intentional, despite the generation explicitly using randomness without safeguards that ensure generation of enough metal voxels). Where is this confirmed and can I possibly find more information on it?

There's an issue on the tracker here, there's redram's posts in this thread, and maybe some other stuff. I haven't seen explicit confirmation on whether it's intentional or not.

[SIGILL]

Thank you! It seems there hasn't been any official word on it then, other than redram confirming that iron blooms can have too few voxels. Which I can confirm by reading the code (in fact it was while reading the code that I realized it could lead to this issue, haven't encountered it myself yet).

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I could hazard a guess that you know more about the bloom's voxel generation than any other person that has posted in this thread.

I don't know about that, but I guess I'll share a bit of my findings in case it might be useful to anyone searching for information in the future (including future-me!), or for those that might be interested to know a bit more about it. And hopefully someone more knowledgeable could chime in. As I mentioned in my previous message they don't seem to fully match the observed in-game results, but I think the overall idea is pretty close.

The microvoxels that you work on the anvil are generated in ItemIronBloom.CreateVoxelsFromIronBloom and goes through the following process:

1. Generate full ingot. An ingot is a rectangular cuboid of 7x3x2 (LxWxH, or x,z,y) metal (micro)voxels.
2. Loop through each voxel in a 9x6x5 grid, with the ingot in the 'center'. This means it loops through an extra slice of voxels on each side of the ingot on the x-axis (length), one extra slice of voxels on one side and two extra slices of voxels on the opposite side on the z-axis (width) and 3 extra slices (or 'layers') of voxels on the y-axis (height). This basically allows for enough room for the ingot to 'grow' into iron bloom.
3. If the voxel is a metal voxel of the initial ingot on the bottom layer, don't do anything. This ensures that the bottom layer stays intact, which guarantees the presence of 21 metal voxels.
   
   For any other voxel in the grid, continue with these steps:
    
4. Calculate the (Manhattan) distance from the center 3x3x2 area of the ingot. For example, looking top-down at the second (top) layer it results in these values (dashed line indicates voxels that are part of initial ingot):
   
    
5. Generate a random number (uniformly distributed) in interval [0,0.99999999999999978], but let's just say [0,1)  If this number is smaller than 

   rand.NextDouble() < dist / 3f - 0.4f + (y - 1.5f) / 4f

   the distance of the voxel as calculated in step 4 / 3 - 0.4 + (y-coordinate of the voxel in the grid - 1.5) / 4, skip this voxel and continue to the next one. I'm not sure what the significance is these numbers, but for example for the second layer I calculated the following probabilities of the random number being smaller, thus skipping:
   

6. If not skipped, generate another random number in [0,1). If it's greater than

   rand.NextDouble() > dist / 2f

   half the voxel's distance value as calculated in step 4, set the voxel to metal. If not, set it to slag. For the example of the second layer I calculated the following probabilities of the voxel ending up being metal, taking into account the probabilities to skip in step 5:
   
   
   And the probabilities of the voxel being set to slag for the second layer:
   
   
   The metal/slag probabilities of the voxels in the initial ingot add up to 1, because they start out as metal and will either stay metal or change to slag, whereas for other voxels it doesn't add up to 1 (the upper corners for example add up to 0) because they may be left empty.
   
   This guarantees another 9 metal voxels, for a total of 30 guaranteed metal voxels out of the 42 required for an ingot.

 

These calculations appear to be not entirely correct though, as I have observed metal voxels in places where the probability of getting metal is supposed to be 0. I have been unable to find the problem yet though, and it at least gives an idea of how iron blooms are generated. I'm far from skilled in math, but based on these results (of all 5 layers), I added up all of the probabilities to generate metal voxels in the locations where they are not guaranteed, which resulted in '14.0875', which I think would mean that on average 14.0875 metal voxels would be generated. We still needed 12 on top of the 30 that were guaranteed, so on average this should be more than enough. However, because we're dealing with randomness and probabilities it's perfectly possible to have more or less of them in an individual iron bloom. In-game I've observed there to be more than 2 extra metal voxels on average, which would be consistent with my earlier observation of metal voxels where they shouldn't be according to my calculated values, but the point still stands.

 

The way this is set up also leads me to believe that the possibility of not having enough metal voxels to create an ingot is intentional and not a bug, because the generation algorithm appears to be pretty closely tuned to generate enough metal voxels most of the time, implying some thought has been put into it. Or the programmer just hoped for the best and didn't run into any issues during testing, who knows. Whether it's a fun design decision *if it's intentional* is subjective of course; I don't like it too much so with my mod I hope to make changes that will always guarantee enough metal voxels to finish an ingot, or perhaps add the ability to add more material (and recover the metal you are forced to remove that way).

Edited December 27, 2025 by SIGILL