Alloy Filler to melt alloy nuggets with its ingredients

[Topminator]

I suggest being able to add nuggets of the target alloy when making alloys.

Let me try to explain multiple times what i mean so i'm sure people understand what i mean:

I have tin bronze nuggets and i am making new tin bronze. i should be able to mix in the already made bronze nuggets in the same crucible i'm smelting the copper and tin in, but right now i can't because bronze is not in the recipe for bronze.
To be able to do this i suggest adding an "Alloy Filler" to alloy recipes and adding the filler amount after the alloy % calculation is done.

(alloy1+alloy2)+alloyFiller=alloyTotal is what i'm thinking of.translated to a math equation

Right now having for example 90 copper and 10 tin will give you a ratio of 90% copper and 10% tin, which is valid for bronze, but when you add 100 of bronze to it, it makes the ratio 45% copper, 5% tin and 50% bronze, which is invalid for bronze. But if you calculate the bronze out of the ratio and before the amount then you can have 90% copper and 10% tin from the 90 and 10 of ores, then you add in the 100 bronze directly to the total, getting 200 bronze.

Basically if the nuggets are of the target alloy of the recipe then count it as filler, adding to the amount but not to the ratio.

I hope i got it across

[marmarmar34]

This, and being able to melt nuggets of different variations of the same element together. It's kinda sucks to have an odd number of different types of copper and iron that can't mix for whatever reason.

[Vexxvididu]

This would be convenient, but in practice might be a bit hard to program out.  It's just a lot of different combinations of stuff that has to be accounted for.  I like the idea, and it should work, but I'd not count on this becoming a priority for the developers.

Many good ideas are kind of limited by the combinatorial explosion problem.  It's much more of an issue in VS than most other block games.

[LadyWYT]

11 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

This would be convenient, but in practice might be a bit hard to program out.  It's just a lot of different combinations of stuff that has to be accounted for.  I like the idea, and it should work, but I'd not count on this becoming a priority for the developers.

Many good ideas are kind of limited by the combinatorial explosion problem.  It's much more of an issue in VS than most other block games.

This is my general line of thought as well. It would be convenient on the player end, yes, but I'm not sure what it would take to get the code for such to work. It seems like it would be something that extends to more than just crucibles, in that different types of iron ore would need to fit in the same bloomery as well. 

[Vexxvididu]

To add to this, I think it's honestly 100% fair to just open the creative menu to swap out resources that SHOULD be interchangeable but just are not due to gameplay limitations.  An example would be if you have 4 malachite and 16 native copper and need the 20 bits to actually make something.

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, Vexxvididu said:

This would be convenient, but in practice might be a bit hard to program out.  It's just a lot of different combinations of stuff that has to be accounted for.  I like the idea, and it should work, but I'd not count on this becoming a priority for the developers.

Many good ideas are kind of limited by the combinatorial explosion problem.  It's much more of an issue in VS than most other block games.

It would be quite trivial to implement, with practically zero added complexity. And I say this having read through the code responsible for alloy recipe matching. It would be as simple as excluding the output alloy from recipe matching and only adding it back in when calculating the output quantity.

Allowing to use alloys in other alloys (e.g. brass in bismuth bronze, electrum in black bronze) would be a bit more annoying since alloys don't retain their ratios once smelted, which would allow to manipulate the ingredient ratios somewhat, and if not implemented carefully then also converting some resources into others at a 1:1 ratio and no cost besides time, fuel and some miscellaneous expenses like tongs. Preventing this fully would require to propagate that ratio from the new alloy bits across at least all items that can be crafted and broken back down into bits, and that is probably more effort than it's worth due to the current implementation of item stacks. A simpler implementation would work as well, though.

 

On 2/16/2026 at 4:54 PM, marmarmar34 said:

This, and being able to melt nuggets of different variations of the same element together. It's kinda sucks to have an odd number of different types of copper and iron that can't mix for whatever reason.

34 minutes ago, Vexxvididu said:

An example would be if you have 4 malachite and 16 native copper and need the 20 bits to actually make something.

Nuggets of the same metal can be mixed freely in the crucible, because it only depends on the metal in the nugget and not the nugget itself.

Iron in the bloomery is a different story, though. The bloomery and iron smelting are currently much simpler in implementation than the crucible and alloy smelting, which means that it's not currently possible to mix different iron nuggets. Still pretty trivial to implement, because it would be enough to give it a few extra inventory slots and add a small bit of logic to manage the slots appropriately, keeping in mind that it would need to check the smelted stack ID against the first item that was added.

Edited February 17 by MKMoose

[Vexxvididu]

27 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Allowing to use alloys in other alloys (e.g. brass in bismuth bronze, electrum in black bronze) would be a bit more annoying since alloys don't retain their ratios once smelted, which would allow to manipulate the ingredient ratios somewhat, and if not implemented carefully then also converting some resources into others at a 1:1 ratio and no cost besides time, fuel and some miscellaneous expenses like tongs. Preventing this fully would require to propagate that ratio from the new alloy bits across at least all items that can be crafted and broken back down into bits, and that is probably more effort than it's worth due to the current implementation of item stacks. A simpler implementation would work as well, though.

This is part of what I was thinking of when I said the whole family of such requests is too much work.  Yes, there are plenty of cases where you can make resources interchangeable, but every such case all together is A LOT of work for the dev's.  There are thousands of items in vintage story and many cases where you should be able to use them in different combinations.  In total, it's overwhelming.