Breaking down copper anvil to make one of bronze... if you need the copper from the anvil, you need to prep 2 chisels?

[Andael]

I'm playing Wilderness Survival... and been having a tough roll. Copper (and most other early ore) has been scarce.

It's the first time I made a copper anvil though, because I couldn't find any tin or bismuth.

I've now found some meagre tin (24 nuggets)... but needed to recycle the copper anvil for enough bronze to make a new anvil (I've found sources of iron, so a bronze anvil, hammer, and pick will get me past this struggle).

Well, I didn't expect the anvil to break into 8 copper ingots. I did expect to use up the copper chisel (more precious copper gone). But now I don't think I can do anything with the ingots. Can't smelt them, no chisel to break them down to smelt, no way to make a chisel now that I have no anvil. Effectively, breaking the copper anvil left me with less copper (usable copper in my current state).

Or is there a way to fix this? Without just finding enough copper nuggets for the anvil -- because that's the only path I see now. And a frustrating one in this locale... half of my copper was obtained through panning. I've found 3 small surface deposits and one "minuscule" prospecting reading. Whereas I've found plenty of hematite and three meteors.

If there's no alternative, the harsh lesson is "build two chisels, or one of bronze, if you actually want to upgrade copper->bronze anvil".

 

[Echo Weaver]

I don't know that there's a vanilla solution to your problem (plenty of sympathy btw), but there is a mod that provides a chisel mold. https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/13685

There's also a mod that allows you to smelt ingots, which is probably more what you need: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/4240

 

[LadyWYT]

On 12/6/2024 at 1:01 AM, Andael said:

Or is there a way to fix this? Without just finding enough copper nuggets for the anvil -- because that's the only path I see now. And a frustrating one in this locale... half of my copper was obtained through panning. I've found 3 small surface deposits and one "minuscule" prospecting reading. Whereas I've found plenty of hematite and three meteors.

If you don't mind a bit of "cheating"--change gamemode to creative and spawn in a bronze anvil, at the cost of deleting materials that you have to fashion one(so a few copper ingots + bits of stuff that would turn it to bronze). Then switch back to survival and proceed as normal. It's a lot faster and less frustrating than locating more ore and processing it into an anvil.

For future reference though, I would wait until you have a bronze anvil before breaking down the copper one, or make two chisels ahead of time. That way you'll still have the old one to work with, should you need it.

[Andael]

Thank-you for the advice, both!

I did end up eventually finding more copper to make the new anvil from smelted bits.

What really misled me was the way it's presented in the Handbook. It suggests breaking down a copper anvil to make a bronze anvil. It also makes it clear that a chisel (of equal tier to the anvil) will be consumed in the process. And there are diagrams of various chiseled items being broken down into bits... but (as far as I could find) there is no information on how the anvil breaks down -- I knew there was a loss of material (maybe said somewhere in the handbook or I caught in a comment on here), but had no expectation it would become ingots... and further, than I would be so blocked by having the ingots!

Perhaps following the handbook's note about upgrading an anvil, it could mention something or warn that a chisel will further be needed to break down the resulting ingots. Or even if it had something on the chisel page about the breakdown of anvils I would have seen the problem I'd create.

It's not a big issue, and one that a person will only get caught by once (and even then, likely in Standard play, where more copper can be found readily). But damn I regretted breaking my anvil for a solid in-game week!