ch75pr Posted January 24, 2025 Report Posted January 24, 2025 Currently, once an ingot is poured into a mold it is my understanding that you have to wait until it fully cools before being able to remove it from the mold in which case you would have to re-heat it all the way to working temp from scratch before working it. I think it would be an amazing addition if you could pull the hot ingot out of the mold after it cools to the point of being solid. Of course you would need to have tongs in your off-hand or you'd burn yourself. It would be nice to not have to wait for the ingot to cool all the way down and then wait again for it to heat all the way back up again.
Thorfinn Posted January 24, 2025 Report Posted January 24, 2025 Welcome to the forums, @ch75pr Don't hold your breath. They just patched out an exploit that let you break the mold to get a hot ingot. But I expect a mod for it.
Dilan Rona Posted January 24, 2025 Report Posted January 24, 2025 wasnt even aware that exploit existed.
LadyWYT Posted January 25, 2025 Report Posted January 25, 2025 10 hours ago, Thorfinn said: They just patched out an exploit that let you break the mold to get a hot ingot. But I expect a mod for it. This, but also: You don't need to wait for ingots to fully cool before removing them from the molds. You should be able to remove them just fine once they've cooled enough to register as "hardened", and there's also no need for tongs to remove them. But before you can do anything with them, you will need to heat them back up to a workable temperature. As to why it's coded that way? Not really sure. Maybe to give more incentive towards using iron and steel, rather than earlier metals, since you'll need to be working them into ingots anyway? Or possibly to prevent players from popping other things out of molds and turning them into tools/armor while they're still hot, instead of waiting for them to cool down, since the temperature of an item doesn't matter when crafting. Definitely one of those weird "videogame logic" things. 1
Thorfinn Posted January 25, 2025 Report Posted January 25, 2025 1 hour ago, LadyWYT said: Definitely one of those weird "videogame logic" things. Sort of. When I cast bullets, and lead/tin/antimony (85/4/11 or thereabouts) ingots for that, I have to let them cool enough to contract and pull away from the mold. Ingots with their sloped sides are pretty quick -- maybe 15 seconds of cooling, but bullets can be a minute or more, particularly for large calibers. If I end up with even minimal zinc in the alloy, it can easily take 5-10x that, because I'm pouring at a much higher temperature. But neither can really be taken from the molds until under 300C or so. Could well be copper could be pulled at a higher temperature. I've only messed with aluminum, linotype, lead and brass. I believe @StCatharines has a lot more experience. 2
StCatharines Posted January 25, 2025 Report Posted January 25, 2025 2 hours ago, Thorfinn said: Sort of. When I cast bullets, and lead/tin/antimony (85/4/11 or thereabouts) ingots for that, I have to let them cool enough to contract and pull away from the mold. Ingots with their sloped sides are pretty quick -- maybe 15 seconds of cooling, but bullets can be a minute or more, particularly for large calibers. If I end up with even minimal zinc in the alloy, it can easily take 5-10x that, because I'm pouring at a much higher temperature. But neither can really be taken from the molds until under 300C or so. Could well be copper could be pulled at a higher temperature. I've only messed with aluminum, linotype, lead and brass. I believe @StCatharines has a lot more experience. It really depends on the type of mold. I have, practically speaking, zero experience with traditional clay or stone metalcasting molds. The so-called "chill" a closed sand mold provides can be shocking, depending on the total thermal mass of what you're casting. The same is true to an even greater degree in a steel mold. You can watch things like copper freeze amazingly quickly, ready to be removed from an open mold in under a minute, real-time! It's a lot like casting linotype bullets in an aluminum mold, actually, just scaled up in size. The metal freezes readily. But really, if we want to be incredibly realistic about things, no one is forging copper from bars poured in the open air, from metal smelted in the open air. It just doesn't work worth anything, too many inclusions (specifically of oxygen) cause cracking issues. That's the entire reason people noticed the improved properties when certain ores were used from certain regions... they were making brass or bronze of some flavor, which forms a different crystal structure entirely, pushing both oxygen and hydrogen out of solution with the molten copper. The modern methods for dealing with molten pure copper generally involve methods for degassing the metal, or (very expensively) working in an inert atmosphere. Degassing is cheaper, but takes both skill and strict adherence to procedure to actually make it work. I tend to use phosphorous, which reacts with the oxygen and floats to the top as phosphorous pentoxide, and then argon bubbled through the copper with a gas lance to pull the hydrogen out. It's much cheaper, and more common, to just electrolytically purify the copper and cold form it, annealing as needed... but that doesn't work for every desired item. I could go on for a while, but you get the point. 1
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