more efficient iron smelting?

[boyo]

I was just wondering if there's a better, more efficient way of smelting iron. the bloomeries and refining on an anvil make sense given iron has an extremely high melting point, but at the same time is very tedious and will take a lot of fire clay as the bloomeries don't give back all the bricks used and there's not a whole lot of fire clay near my base. I was just curious.

[LadyWYT]

10 minutes ago, boyo said:

I was just wondering if there's a better, more efficient way of smelting iron. the bloomeries and refining on an anvil make sense given iron has an extremely high melting point, but at the same time is very tedious and will take a lot of fire clay as the bloomeries don't give back all the bricks used and there's not a whole lot of fire clay near my base. I was just curious.

Welcome to the forums! A helve hammer will speed up the process of turning blooms to ingots significantly, provided there's a strong enough wind to power the helve hammer. As for fire clay--in the current release, it's easy enough to go find a deposit somewhere else, clean it out, and turn it into bricks for the bloomeries(or refractories, in the case of steel). When 1.20 releases, I believe fire clay will only spawn naturally under coal seams, so you'll want to seek out coal deposits and clean out any clay that's there, in addition to acquiring fuel for smithing. Aside from that, you'll be able to process flint into powder, and mix it with blue clay to make fire clay, I do believe, so in 1.20 you'll be wanting to mark deposits of blue clay and stockpile flint in preparation for iron/steel, assuming you haven't got access to a coal deposit. I think a quern might also be needed for processing the flint, so you'll probably want to power the quern via windmill in order to speed up that process.

Otherwise, there's probably a mod or two out there that prevents bloomeries from breaking, or makes them return all bricks when broken. I think XSkills covers that, in that it has a skill you can learn(with enough smithing experience) that allows you to remove the contents of a bloomery without breaking it, in addition to adding various other skills to enhance your character.

[boyo]

4 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the forums! A helve hammer will speed up the process of turning blooms to ingots significantly, provided there's a strong enough wind to power the helve hammer. As for fire clay--in the current release, it's easy enough to go find a deposit somewhere else, clean it out, and turn it into bricks for the bloomeries(or refractories, in the case of steel). When 1.20 releases, I believe fire clay will only spawn naturally under coal seams, so you'll want to seek out coal deposits and clean out any clay that's there, in addition to acquiring fuel for smithing. Aside from that, you'll be able to process flint into powder, and mix it with blue clay to make fire clay, I do believe, so in 1.20 you'll be wanting to mark deposits of blue clay and stockpile flint in preparation for iron/steel, assuming you haven't got access to a coal deposit. I think a quern might also be needed for processing the flint, so you'll probably want to power the quern via windmill in order to speed up that process.

Otherwise, there's probably a mod or two out there that prevents bloomeries from breaking, or makes them return all bricks when broken. I think XSkills covers that, in that it has a skill you can learn(with enough smithing experience) that allows you to remove the contents of a bloomery without breaking it, in addition to adding various other skills to enhance your character.

yeah I have a helve hammer and barely enough mechanical power to make it work, still tedious when compared to copper or bronze but it is what it is i suppose.

[ArcticWarfare]

3 hours ago, boyo said:

still tedious when compared to copper or bronze

My recommendation is to heat iron blooms on multiple forges. When blooms reach 1100, grab them into your inventory and add a new batch to the forges. Make sure there is always a bloom on the anvil. Have at least 2 helve hammers hitting the same anvil. Use your regular hammer to knock off slag alongside the helve hammers. In my singleplayer world I kept upgrading my facilities and improving my process until eventually I was cranking out like 128+ iron ingots in a session and copper/bronze now felt tedious by comparison.

[boyo]

2 hours ago, ArcticWarfare said:

My recommendation is to heat iron blooms on multiple forges. When blooms reach 1100, grab them into your inventory and add a new batch to the forges. Make sure there is always a bloom on the anvil. Have at least 2 helve hammers hitting the same anvil. Use your regular hammer to knock off slag alongside the helve hammers. In my singleplayer world I kept upgrading my facilities and improving my process until eventually I was cranking out like 128+ iron ingots in a session and copper/bronze now felt tedious by comparison.

oof, i only have one set of sails on my windmill and had to reduce the ratio using a large gear to get the hammer to work, that stuff is pretty far away lmao, the winter just ended for me so I'm going to be trying to crank out as much flax as I can using some terra preta I got recently.

[ArcticWarfare]

2 hours ago, boyo said:

I'm going to be trying to crank out as much flax as I can

Yeah, just maximize flax. Make sure you never have an unplanted flax seed. While you wait for it to grow, look for the stuff you need to progress to steel in the meantime. Bauxite (orange rock), Olivine (spawns in green rock (peridotite)), and titanium ore (ilmenite)

[Maelstrom]

20 hours ago, boyo said:

still tedious when compared to copper or bronze but it is what it is i suppose.

Indeed.  Which is part of the base game design as primarily a survival game.  I like that it is difficult to do things in mid to late game.  It keeps the challenge factor dialed up while making early game aspects (primarily basic resource gathering) easier.  Tyron and team are doing a masterful job of keeping this game on point.