Blast Furnace, Pig Iron and Crucible Steel

[LuisEdGm]

I would love to see Blast furnaces as late game multi-block structures, They would require steel and sturdy leather for the giant bellows, as well as mechanical power to operate. You would need to add iron ore, charcoal/coke and flux (lime/borax), connect the bellow to your windmill and light it up, after a few hours liquid pig iron would drop on a crucible placed under the furnace.

Pig Iron can be used on molds to make tools and ingots, Pig Iron has the same hardness tier as steel (tier 4), but is brittle, giving it the same durability as copper tools, if made into ingots the player would be able to heat it up and bring it to the anvil for refining. Similar to how you beat slag out of iron blooms, you would be able to beat the extra carbon out of pig iron to get steel, this could involve a slight modification of the smithing minigame where you have to use Smash on 3 highlighted voxels, then hammer the smashed mess back into ingot shape, do it quick enough and minimal hammerings to get steel, if you take too long it becomes wrought iron (the game considers it normal iron) instead.

The alternative would be smithing/molding the pig iron into rods, then placing the pig iron rods together with normal iron rods in a crucible that is sealed with clay and heated on coal/coke until the rods inside start merging together, after it cools down break the crucible to get a steel puck, then hammer the puck into ingots.

I would also love to see some kind of proccess mixing pig iron, steel and meteoric iron (maybe throw some Titanium too) to make vintage story's own kind of Damascus Steel.

Here a video showing the proccess of making crucible steel. 

 

[Luke_ksmith]

Fantastic idea

[Khornet]

On 11/30/2024 at 5:46 PM, LuisEdGm said:

to make vintage story's own kind of Damascus Steel.

Nobody really knows what Damascus Steel is/was, the actual recipe/process was lost in history. The "Damascus" steel you may have seen in modern context is a reproduction based on estimations.
I'm personally against using real-world etymology for in-game terms (Damascus is a real life city - it makes no sense for the Vintage Story world to use that word).

I would love to see another post-steel alloy tier, however. The game already has its premise in code - you can find stainless steel items in the survival handbook. And before that, I would like us to be able to turn meteoric iron into meteoric steel - kind of makes no sense that we're not already allowed to do that.

A blast furnace is a neat idea overall. And finally one that would let us smelt mis-acquired steel bits that are currently unusable.

[LuisEdGm]

I just hope that when we get the Blast Furnace we don't need to keep replacing refractory bricks, that is so annoying