More advanced charcoal manufacture?

[TyrantSabre]

Hi all. I'm sort of dipping my toes into the 1.20 release, and with natural fire clay becoming much more rare (in the saves I've played), I'm finding the need for coal fuels to be a lot more dire than before with the need for calcined flint. I've also been going through the natural tech progression of iron and steel, with the need for bricks up and down the block as well as using coke/charcoal for the steel, and I'm really feeling the pinch of needing refined fuel all together. It's one thing to be able to find brown/black coal for refining into coke, but as with the real world, it's a finite resource needing constant exploration for new deposits.

One technique for charcoal manufacture in the real world is the use of a charcoal retort, which is a reusable/engineered structure to hold wood within to pyrolyze it (and often using the wood gas that comes off as additional fuel for the reaction and to burn more cleanly). I'm struggling to point to a single design or structure which would best be represented within the tech level available within VS, but I fully believe that it should be possible. At its core you're really just looking at a metal vessel, fabricated in such a way that you can open it, fill it with wood, seal it, and then light a fire under it hot enough and long enough to pyrolyze the wood completely.

It could be that I'm simply overlooking existing mods that already do this, but I would very much like to have a less onerous (possibly more efficient) means of making charcoal than the process of building and firing a charcoal pit every time I want to make some more charcoal. I'm not sure what the community feels on the subject, or what the 'meta' is, so at the risk of asking a common question... Is there a solution like this that doesn't simply involve tweaking the payoff of a charcoal pit?

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @TyrantSabre!

Destructive distillation. Good idea. The game already has such an item, the coke oven. All you need is a recipe that uses wood or firewood instead of coal. Brown coal to coke is 50% efficient. Charcoal pit is a little worse -- low 40-ish %. But on the other hand, a pit is early tech, easily scalable, and best, no iron door, 

There's no reason you couldn't add a charcoal recipe, though. It's certainly realistic, and would be maybe 15% more efficient that a charcoal pit, not counting all the firebrick and doors. I'd say it's a good addition. At the very least, it gives you something to do with all those coke ovens when you run out of coal.

[TyrantSabre]

That was actually one of the first things I tried in-game - putting firewood into a coke oven and lighting it. (Obviously, it didn't work, but you see why I might think that.)

Perhaps the thing to do would be to treat a charcoal recipe like brown coal ➡ coke and give it a defined fractional payout per batch; so if you begin with 32 firewood, you might get six or seven charcoal out the other side. It would be a little more efficient and consistent than a charcoal pit in terms of batch yield and prep time, but more expensive in terms of setup cost and smaller batch size. It might be one of those 'extreme environment' options where you need to make each bit of your raw resources count, such as if you're in an area low on both wood and coal.

I took a look through the VS asset folders and didn't immediately see the location of the coal-to-coke recipe code. Is that something you can point me toward, or share?