Getting started with smelting

[16towers]

Hi! First of all- so nice to finally get back into forums after so long. Ive missed this style of posting

I'm new to the game and though a lot of the early game features are coming naturally to me, I'm having a hard time grasping smelting, and the wiki/guide are not meshing well with my brain for some reason. Could someone give me like... a bulleted step by step on how to make my first metal tools?

[gilt-kutabe]

@16towers

- Get clay and make a crucible, a hammer mold, and a pickaxe mold. A prospecting pick mold is also a good idea. You'll also want to make an anvil and ingot mold eventually to forge tools by hand that can't be cast (like the saw)

- Make and fire a charcoal pit (the ingame guide details this well). You can also use coal, if you stumble across it, but that's unlikely.

- Find at least 40 copper nuggets on the ground or through panning (or through other methods). Make sure to mark on your map where the ground copper is - there's a copper vein underneath it.

- Make tongs

- Put the crucible in a fire pit, fill it with copper nuggets in increments of 20 (20 nuggets = 100 units = 1 tool/ingot)

- Heat with charcoal (optionally preheat it with wood/peat and then put in charcoal - saves charcoal) and wait for it to fully smelt

- Hold tongs in offhand, pick up crucible, pour molten metal into hammer and pickaxe molds

- Any leftover metal in the crucible can be reheated and poured into molds as much as you like, but it cannot be otherwise removed or mixed into an alloy.

- Don't leave hot molds in the rain or let them get wet

- Remove items from molds once cooled (<200 degrees C)

- Items forged from ingots on an anvil can be quenched in a water source

Once you have your first pickaxe and hammer, return to the places you found copper on the ground and dig up the veins. Use the hammer to crush the ore chunks into usable nuggets. Use the prospecting pick to locate more ore veins once you've made it.