Just some questions about what comes beyond steel

[Diregoldleaf]

48 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

No. Read the full context:

Cast iron came a thousand years after wrought iron...

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, Diregoldleaf said:

But you still go through the early iron ages, even if the technology exists, you are utilising early bloomery iron, which wouldn't be all that superior to bronze

5 minutes ago, Diregoldleaf said:

What I'm arguing for is a feature for the sake of realism and less-linearity, not for the sake of extending the bronze age

Right, but in my opinion this is a case where it's better to opt for gameplay balance over realism. The main reason for the player to seek out better materials for their main tools and weapons is so that those tools and weapons will be more effective at their job, as well as being more durable. If progressing from stone to copper to bronze keeps resulting in durability and power increases, the player is reasonably going to assume that iron is going to be better than bronze for both durability and power. Getting some durability increase but no power increase will likely result in the player being confused, frustrated, or otherwise just disappointed to have put in the effort to get the iron and refine it, only to figure out that it doesn't really make them stronger until they go through another whole refinement process to increase the power. 

As it stands now, the current implementation might not be the most realistic, but it does mean the player will have the satisfaction of having some better equipment once they acquire iron, with the potential to make said equipment even better if they're willing to put in the time and effort required. It gives a little more flexibility to how the player chooses to play, I think.

For the record, I'm probably a little biased here as well, as I don't really stone, copper, or bronze tiers that much and prefer to sink the extra effort in to get to iron. Iron has the durability needed to tackle more elaborate building projects, as well as the punch needed to start slapping monsters silly. Bronze is okay for basic protection, fighting, and building, but overall I don't find it very satisfying to use for anything other than pure basic survival or disposable tools.

12 minutes ago, Diregoldleaf said:

Of course players wishing to advance to iron age would continue as normal. I think this wouldn't affect many people

You'd be surprised. 

 

13 minutes ago, Diregoldleaf said:

You have a very good point with the steel argument and it's defo a genuine argument against what I'm saying. The only thing I can really say is early iron would be a stepping to late iron so there's incentive to progress. For steel, there's nothing beyond that

There's nothing beyond steel currently, but I'm expecting to see some steampunk contraptions and early steam power added someday. Steel is definitely the end game material, but overall I would say that iron and steel are mostly what opens up the game fully and switches the player from survival mode to actually thriving. Bronze I consider to be more of the transition point from surviving to thriving.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

53 minutes ago, Diregoldleaf said:

Cast iron came a thousand years after wrought iron...

Again, only partially true.

If you're going to continue to speak in partial truths, then you end up dismantling your own arguments.

The arrival of cast iron depends entirely on where in the world you're looking. In China, wrought iron existed around 1200–1000 BCE, and cast iron appears by roughly 500–400 BCE. That is not a 1000-year gap. In Europe, yes, cast iron arrives much later, but that is a regional delay, not a universal rule.

There is no distinction between cast iron and wrought iron in VS. There is simply iron. So drawing a hard line between the two here is injecting false specificity into the discussion. The iron we have in-game is clearly intended to represent early forged iron, which in real-world terms would align far more closely with wrought iron than cast iron anyway.

To put it bluntly: this is an argument over opinion masquerading as fact. You believe bronze is superior to iron. I do not see any meaningful advantage bronze holds over iron in practical use.

Bronze:

• is harder to obtain
• is harder, but more brittle
• is prone to fracture under stress
• tends to fail catastrophically when it breaks

Iron:

• is easier to obtain
• is slightly softer, but vastly tougher
• tends to bend instead of shatter
• resists fatigue and survives repeated impacts

That tradeoff alone heavily favors iron for tools and weapons, where toughness, impact resistance, and durability matter far more than raw hardness. And most importantly, for the purposes of a video game, making iron a side-grade makes little sense.

Games compress centuries of messy technological development into clean tech-tree steps. You are not reenacting history. You are progressing through capability tiers on the way to steel, which is the real technological breakthrough.

From a game design standpoint the tech tree...

    Stone >> Copper > Bronze >> Iron > Steel

...must represent clear, meaningful advancement as denoted by the double arrows vs single arrows. Bronze is a small upgrade to copper. Steel is a small upgrade to Iron. Iron cannot be a small upgrade to bronze for it to be a clear, meaningful advancement. If iron is reduced to a side-grade, progression stagnates, incentives collapse, and the tech tree loses coherence. Iron exists primarily as a necessary stepping stone to steel, and therefore it should be strictly superior to bronze, even if that slightly departs from early transitional history.

It's just simply good game design which trumps any sort of preconceived notions of how things actually work in the real world.

[Diregoldleaf]

Quote

The arrival of cast iron depends entirely on where in the world you're looking. In China, wrought iron existed around 1200–1000 BCE, and cast iron appears by roughly 500–400 BCE. That is not a 1000-year gap. In Europe, yes, cast iron arrives much later, but that is a regional delay, not a universal rule.

You can argue as hard as you want, it is a universal truth that wrought iron was discovered/used before cast iron.

Quote

There is no distinction between cast iron and wrought iron in VS. There is simply iron. So drawing a hard line between the two here is injecting false specificity into the discussion. The iron we have in-game is clearly intended to represent early forged iron, which in real-world terms would align far more closely with wrought iron than cast iron anyway.

This is ignorant on so many levels. The iron in VS is bloom iron that is wrought. Bloomeries don't get hot enough for cast iron. Cast iron has to be cast. You are taking the properties of cast iron and applying them to early wrought iron, which is why I responded with the "partially true" comment. Not sure if you did this out of ignorance or malice. I hope it's not the latter

Quote

Bronze:

• is harder to obtain
• is harder, but more brittle
• is prone to fracture under stress
• tends to fail catastrophically when it breaks

Iron:

• is easier to obtain
• is slightly softer, but vastly tougher
• tends to bend instead of shatter
• resists fatigue and survives repeated impacts

Such a simple minded thing to say. There isn't just 1 type of bronze or 1 type of iron. There are many types. Some bronze are better than some iron in some qualities, while worse in others. Thanks for comparing the weaknesses of bronze to the strengths of iron, such an unbiased and fair comparison. Your knowledge of material science is superficial

Quote

That tradeoff alone heavily favors iron for tools and weapons, where toughness, impact resistance, and durability matter far more than raw hardness. And most importantly, for the purposes of a video game, making iron a side-grade makes little sense.

Games compress centuries of messy technological development into clean tech-tree steps. You are not reenacting history. You are progressing through capability tiers on the way to steel, which is the real technological breakthrough.

From a game design standpoint the tech tree...

    Stone >> Copper > Bronze >> Iron > Steel

...must represent clear, meaningful advancement as denoted by the double arrows vs single arrows. Bronze is a small upgrade to copper. Steel is a small upgrade to Iron. Iron cannot be a small upgrade to bronze for it to be a clear, meaningful advancement. If iron is reduced to a side-grade, progression stagnates, incentives collapse, and the tech tree loses coherence. Iron exists primarily as a necessary stepping stone to steel, and therefore it should be strictly superior to bronze, even if that slightly departs from early transitional history.

It's just simply good game design which trumps any sort of preconceived notions of how things actually work in the real world.

All these words just to steelman what I'm saying. Not going to respond here. You came here extremely hostile, remained hostile, and you've made 0 attempt to understand what I'm saying and have consistently misunderstood things that I've said. Either you are going through some stuff or are trolling

Edited February 25 by Diregoldleaf

[Teh Pizza Lady]

5 hours ago, Diregoldleaf said:

You can argue as hard as you want, it is a universal truth that wrought iron was discovered/used before cast iron.

This is ignorant on so many levels. The iron in VS is bloom iron that is wrought. Bloomeries don't get hot enough for cast iron. Cast iron has to be cast. You are taking the properties of cast iron and applying them to early wrought iron, which is why I responded with the "partially true" comment. Not sure if you did this out of ignorance or malice. I hope it's not the latter

Such a simple minded thing to say. There isn't just 1 type of bronze or 1 type of iron. There are many types. Some bronze are better than some iron in some qualities, while worse in others. Thanks for comparing the weaknesses of bronze to the strengths of iron, such an unbiased and fair comparison. Your knowledge of material science is superficial

All these words just to steelman what I'm saying. Not going to respond here. You came here extremely hostile, remained hostile, and you've made 0 attempt to understand what I'm saying and have consistently misunderstood things that I've said. Either you are going through some stuff or are trolling

I'm not being hostile. I'm being precise.

You said "cast iron came thousands of years after wrought iron."
I corrected that by pointing out that this is regionally true, not universally true, which is historically accurate. That is not an argument — that is a factual clarification.

Yes, wrought iron predates cast iron globally. That was never disputed. The claim I corrected was the timescale, not the sequence.

As for VS iron: we are in agreement. It is bloom iron. That is exactly why distinguishing between cast and wrought iron in this context is irrelevant. The game simply models iron, not metallurgical subcategories, which was my entire point.

Regarding bronze vs iron: of course there are many alloys and grades. That does not invalidate broad mechanical comparisons. General material trends exist for a reason. Bronze is typically harder and more brittle, while wrought iron is softer and tougher. That is basic materials science, not bias.

Finally, the game design argument is not "steel-manning your position." It is the exact opposite: it explains why historical nuance cannot directly map onto a compressed tech tree without harming progression clarity.

At no point did I misrepresent your position. I disagreed with it, explained why, and backed that up with metallurgy and game design logic.

If disagreement is being interpreted as hostility, that is not something I can fix.  But make no mistake, I'm not attacking you, just your arguments.

[Diregoldleaf]

33 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I'm not being hostile. I'm being precise.

Everyone else has disagreed healthily without being hostile

33 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

You said "cast iron came thousands of years after wrought iron."
I corrected that by pointing out that this is regionally true, not universally true, which is historically accurate. That is not an argument — that is a factual clarification.

Yes, wrought iron predates cast iron globally. That was never disputed. The claim I corrected was the timescale, not the sequence.

No I didn't. I said cast iron came a thousand years after wrought iron, as if to say, the first cast irons came a very long time after the the first wrought iron. Anyone can easily see what is meant here. For some reason you are so focussed on the timescale when it doesn't matter. You're missing the point, it doesn't matter if it's a thousand years or even 1 year, the statement that cast iron came after wrought iron is true. You realised your comparison of bronze to cast iron irl vs bronze to iron in VS was illogical but don't wanna admit it, so you're grasping at chances to be right. This is just childish and moving the goalpost. I will reiterate this again, arguing about the timescale of cast iron brings up no points relating to my idea.

Quote

As for VS iron: we are in agreement. It is bloom iron. That is exactly why distinguishing between cast and wrought iron in this context is irrelevant. The game simply models iron, not metallurgical subcategories, which was my entire point.

Earlier you said iron is VS has no distinction, then said it could be compared to early wrought iron, then said because of that, my idea doesn't make sense because iron is stronger than bronze. ??? You keep bringing up historical points then not using them in your arguments. Just cos the game doesn't explicitly say it's bloom/wrought iron, doesn't mean it isn't. It 100% is. We know this because iron blooms come out of bloomeries in solid form. You are arguing a completely different thing because it's been made clear you don't understand what my original idea envisioned, nor have you made any attempts to ask for clarification

Quote

Regarding bronze vs iron: of course there are many alloys and grades. That does not invalidate broad mechanical comparisons. General material trends exist for a reason. Bronze is typically harder and more brittle, while wrought iron is softer and tougher. That is basic materials science, not bias.

Again, you have no clue what I'm saying do you? You are bringing up points that fundamentally miss the point of what I said

Quote

Finally, the game design argument is not "steel-manning your position." It is the exact opposite: it explains why historical nuance cannot directly map onto a compressed tech tree without harming progression clarity.

At no point did I misrepresent your position. I disagreed with it, explained why, and backed that up with metallurgy and game design logic.

If disagreement is being interpreted as hostility, that is not something I can fix.  But make no mistake, I'm not attacking you, just your arguments.

You've been misinterpreting my position the entire time, without asking me to clarify on anything. You're attacking an idea you perceived in your head, not my actual idea. You bought up history and metallurgy that in no way contribute to countering my idea. The only thing they bring is they make you seem smarter and more correct because of superficial knowledge. The Dunning kruger hill is a dangerous place to be. Having studied things like critical points, austenite martensite pearlite hollomon jaffe parameter, crystal structure of face vs body centric etc etc, I know how how complex it can get

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, Diregoldleaf said:

Everyone else has disagreed healthily without being hostile

No I didn't. I said cast iron came a thousand years after wrought iron, as if to say, the first cast irons came a very long time after the the first wrought iron. Anyone can easily see what is meant here. For some reason you are so focussed on the timescale when it doesn't matter. You're missing the point, it doesn't matter if it's a thousand years or even 1 year, the statement that cast iron came after wrought iron is true. You realised your comparison of bronze to cast iron irl vs bronze to iron in VS was illogical but don't wanna admit it, so you're grasping at chances to be right. This is just childish and moving the goalpost. I will reiterate this again, arguing about the timescale of cast iron brings up no points relating to my idea.

Earlier you said iron is VS has no distinction, then said it could be compared to early wrought iron, then said because of that, my idea doesn't make sense because iron is stronger than bronze. ??? You keep bringing up historical points then not using them in your arguments. Just cos the game doesn't explicitly say it's bloom/wrought iron, doesn't mean it isn't. It 100% is. We know this because iron blooms come out of bloomeries in solid form. You are arguing a completely different thing because it's been made clear you don't understand what my original idea envisioned, nor have you made any attempts to ask for clarification

Again, you have no clue what I'm saying do you? You are bringing up points that fundamentally miss the point of what I said

You've been misinterpreting my position the entire time, without asking me to clarify on anything. You're attacking an idea you perceived in your head, not my actual idea. You bought up history and metallurgy that in no way contribute to countering my idea. The only thing they bring is they make you seem smarter and more correct because of superficial knowledge. The Dunning kruger hill is a dangerous place to be. Having studied things like critical points, austenite martensite pearlite hollomon jaffe parameter, crystal structure of face vs body centric etc etc, I know how how complex it can get

I think this has drifted far past the original topic and into tone and intent speculation, which isn’t productive, as well as personal attacks, which are against forum rules.

My position has been consistent: in a compressed game tech tree, iron should represent a clear advancement over bronze, regardless of historical transitional nuance. That is fundamentally a game design argument, not a historical one, though it also happens to be supported by history once the advantages of iron were discovered through continued use and refinement of metallurgical processes. The game makes no such distinctions and just classifies iron as simply iron. It has no other forms until steel. Introducing that complexity reduces the value of iron as an immediate upgrade and forces it into an awkward position where the tech tree is forced to expand from its already compressed form.

We clearly conceptualize this differently, and that’s fine. What's not fine is perpetual attacks against my character and insinuations that I have no good faith in my responses towards you. At this point, I don’t think further back-and-forth is going to add anything useful.

So I’m going to bow out here. I’ve made my points and done so respectfully, while pushing back against what I see as inaccuracies in both historical and in-game context. No hostility intended.

[Diregoldleaf]

6 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I think this has drifted far past the original topic and into tone and intent speculation, which isn’t productive, as well as personal attacks, which are against forum rules.

My position has been consistent: in a compressed game tech tree, iron should represent a clear advancement over bronze, regardless of historical transitional nuance. That is fundamentally a game design argument, not a historical one, though it also happens to be supported by history once the advantages of iron were discovered through continued use and refinement of metallurgical processes. The game makes no such distinctions and just classifies iron as simply iron. It has no other forms until steel. Introducing that complexity reduces the value of iron as an immediate upgrade and forces it into an awkward position where the tech tree is forced to expand from its already compressed form.

We clearly conceptualize this differently, and that’s fine. What's not fine is perpetual attacks against my character and insinuations that I have no good faith in my responses towards you. At this point, I don’t think further back-and-forth is going to add anything useful.

So I’m going to bow out here. I’ve made my points and done so respectfully, while pushing back against what I see as inaccuracies in both historical and in-game context. No hostility intended.

What you're saying is, I stated my idea, and your entire arguement against it is your personal opinion. I realised this a while ago when you made clear you had no intention of understanding my points and simply wanted to shout loud your own views

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

My position has been consistent: in a compressed game tech tree, iron should represent a clear advancement over bronze, regardless of historical transitional nuance. That is fundamentally a game design argument, not a historical one, though it also happens to be supported by history once the advantages of iron were discovered through continued use and refinement of metallurgical processes. The game makes no such distinctions and just classifies iron as simply iron. It has no other forms until steel. Introducing that complexity reduces the value of iron as an immediate upgrade and forces it into an awkward position where the tech tree is forced to expand from its already compressed form.

Why should iron be a clear and immediate advancement over bronze, though? In-game it's especially drastic now with quenching in the picture, which makes the jump in effectiveness actually quite massive and very desirable in spite of the increased cost over bronze. While simplifying progression to a neat staircase can be beneficial in certain cases, especially in the early game, it is by no means necessary. There's practically no game which doesn't utilize some manner of nonlinearity and nuance within their progression with various alternatives, specializations, tradeoffs and sidegrades, and I think that this is a case where VS could very feasibly implement a distinction between wrought iron made from the bloomery process and made from pig iron. I don't really get the argument regarding the tech tree being "forced to expand", both because I don't see a reason why it would be forced to expand, and because even it it's forced to expand then it doesn't seem to me that it's necessarily undesirable.

Bloomery iron, even if weakened enough to be only a sidegrade to bronze (which could be done and to a large extent is already done through more difficult processing), would still serve as a progression gate for all the things that require iron, while the creation of the blast furnace could take place of the primary progression jump in terms of tool quality. A blast furnace could, of course, be a progression milestone even without any added changes to wrought iron, but then it could end up being difficult to make it worthwhile for anything besides cast iron, and endgame progression could end up even more compressed than it is now.

Edited February 26 by MKMoose

[williams_482]

The more I read this, the more I like the idea of early iron as being more durable and higher tier than, but otherwise equivalent to, (tin) bronze tools an weapons by default. More advanced processing like quenching and tempering brings iron equipment above bronze, and steel far and away exceeds both. I don't think it's necessary for cast/pig iron to produce significantly better equipment than processed bloomery iron, because a more efficient higher volume process for converting iron ore into useable iron would be a huge buff to iron usage all by itself, but I'm also not opposed to it. Maybe pig iron tools would draw slightly more benefit from quenching/tempering than bloomery iron?

I'm not convinced that making the bronze -> iron jump initially about durability and then gating quality benefits behind additional processing would be meaningfully more confusing. You'd still rather have iron for the durability benefits alone, you can still make your iron equipment better than your bronze equipment with some extra work. Game-wise, that should be fine.

Historically it's absolutely more accurate. People were using bronze equipment alongside iron well into the iron age, and it wasn't because they were morons. For example, we've recovered a number of bronze Montefortino-type helmets used by republican Roman soldiers, who at that point were very familiar with iron and used it for most equipment. The reason bronze was eventually phased out was gradual improvements in the processing and forging of iron to get slightly more favorable carbon ratios slightly more easily, slowly pushing the material upwards on the (very fuzzy!) spectrum between pure iron and modern steels. Bronze isn't meaningfully worse than typical early iron age wrought iron, but it is clearly inferior to low grade steel.

Also worth a mention here is that bronze (usually referred to as brass, but definitely actually bronze) had a meaningful battlefield role well into the 19th century. Because casting iron into large, precise shapes without cracking it as it cools is so difficult, bronze cannon were considered the superior type for a very long time. They were much easier to create with precise tolerances, which made them both more accurate and less likely to explode if something went wrong. They also wore out more easily, and risked overheating and "drooping" if fired too frequently in a short span of time, but these were considered manageable problems until steel cannons became fully viable. 

Edited February 26 by williams_482

[Teh Pizza Lady]

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Why should iron be a clear and immediate advancement over bronze, though? In-game it's especially drastic now with quenching in the picture, which makes the jump in effectiveness actually quite massive and very desirable in spite of the increased cost over bronze. While simplifying progression to a neat staircase can be beneficial in certain cases, especially in the early game, it is by no means necessary. There's practically no game which doesn't utilize some manner of nonlinearity and nuance within their progression with various alternatives, specializations, tradeoffs and sidegrades, and I think that this is a case where VS could very feasibly implement a distinction between wrought iron made from the bloomery process and made from pig iron. I don't really get the argument regarding the tech tree being "forced to expand", both because I don't see a reason why it would be forced to expand, and because even it it's forced to expand then it doesn't seem to me that it's necessarily undesirable.

Because from a game design standpoint, having your next material tier be a sidegrade or downgrade feels fundamentally wrong.

Most players neither understand nor care about the historical nuances of early metallurgy. They expect tech progression to feel like forward momentum, not lateral motion. When a player invests time, fuel, and infrastructure into unlocking iron, the result should feel meaningfully better, not a situational equivalent. Otherwise, the upgrade feels hollow, and the next tier feels like an improvement on a downgrade, which dulls its impact.

Introducing multiple types of iron (bloomery vs pig iron) primarily serves a very small subset of players who are deeply interested in real-world metallurgy. While that depth is fascinating, it comes at the cost of added complexity, confusion, and friction for the broader player base. For most players, this would not meaningfully improve gameplay, but it would complicate progression and increase frustration.

The current quenching and tempering system already adds meaningful depth and payoff. From the data and player experience available, it appears well-balanced. It may need fine-tuning in the future, but fundamentally it works. Iron could perhaps be slightly weaker than it currently is, but not to the point where players feel forced to improve it which is a costly process, I've been told. Many players will simply forge basic tools and move on without chasing perfect optimization, and that group is likely much larger than we tend to assume. Game balance should primarily serve that majority.

The argument of the tech tree being forced to expand is because it already currently offers clear upgrade paths for the player:
Stone > Scrap > Copper > Bronze > Iron > Steel

This is clean, intuitive, and easy to understand. Adding another iron tier introduces two problems:

1. It increases cognitive load and confusion for casual players.
2. It creates failure states where players produce the "wrong" iron and feel punished for not understanding hidden mechanics.

Steelmaking is a good example of the second problem. Pig iron contains too much carbon and impurities to be suitable for cementation and cannot be forged effectively without refinement. Wrought iron, on the other hand, works cleanly for both processes from the get-go. Introducing pig iron adds extra steps, extra failure cases, and extra frustration, without providing proportional gameplay benefit.

At some point, added realism stops improving immersion and instead starts harming clarity of the steps, flow of the game play, satisfaction of the player base. That is what kills games faster than bad reviews.

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Bloomery iron, even if weakened enough to be only a sidegrade to bronze (which could be done and to a large extent is already done through more difficult processing), would still serve as a progression gate for all the things that require iron, while the creation of the blast furnace could take place of the primary progression jump in terms of tool quality. A blast furnace could, of course, be a progression milestone even without any added changes to wrought iron, but then it could end up being difficult to make it worthwhile for anything besides cast iron, and endgame progression could end up even more compressed than it is now.

Unfortunately I think you're making the mistake of thinking that a blast furnace could produce any iron that would be suitable for forging or steel-making processes. Instead it produces cast iron which is cleaner than pig iron, but still unsuitable for forging or cementation because it already exceeds the carbon content of steel. Both cast iron and pig iron are brittle because of these impurities and suffer the same issues that bronze does being that they are brittle under stress, prone to breaking instead of bending, and failures are usually catastrophic and cannot be easily repaired and so they are unsuitable for tools of any type. Wrought iron is the best form of iron. The game compresses all types of iron into just iron so the player doesn't have to bother with burning off impurities and adjusting the carbon content in molten iron in a furnace with a lance. We're already hand-waving a lot here, so why add more to hand-wave when the tech tree exists the way it does now?

The only thing I'll concede here is that maybe iron could be lowered slightly so that players are incentivized to find out more about the quenching and tempering processes, but I don't think those two steps should feel forced, especially since doing so increases the risk of the hard-earned tool or weapon breaking in the owner's hands for no other reason than they got served a plate of RNG and it tasted bad.

Edited February 26 by Teh Pizza Lady
spelling

[LadyWYT]

1 minute ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Most players neither understand nor care about the historical nuances of early metallurgy. They expect tech progression to feel like forward momentum, not lateral motion. When a player invests time, fuel, and infrastructure into unlocking iron, the result should feel meaningfully better, not a situational equivalent. Otherwise, the upgrade feels hollow, and the next tier feels like an improvement on a downgrade, which dulls its impact.

Introducing multiple types of iron (bloomery vs pig iron) primarily serves a very small subset of players who are deeply interested in real-world metallurgy. While that depth is fascinating, it comes at the cost of added complexity, confusion, and friction for the broader player base. For most players, this would not meaningfully improve gameplay, but it would complicate progression and increase frustration.

The current quenching and tempering system already adds meaningful depth and payoff. From the data and player experience available, it appears well-balanced. It may need fine-tuning in the future, but fundamentally it works. Iron could perhaps be slightly weaker than it currently is, but not to the point where players feel forced to improve it which is a costly process, I've been told. Many players will simply forge basic tools and move on without chasing perfect optimization, and that group is likely much larger than we tend to assume. Game balance should primarily serve that majority.

This is my general thoughts on it. Iron might need a bit of a nerf so that the player needs to quench/temper once to get the same base power it has now, but it should still be better than bronze for base stats so that the player feels like they're actually getting an upgrade. I wouldn't say the tempering/quenching process is terribly expensive, however, I do think that there will be a decent chunk of players that doesn't bother delving too deeply into the process for whatever reason, and opts for the "easy" route. Which I think in this case, should be allowed. The reward for really putting in the time and resources to quench and temper an item several times(and risk losing it in the process) is the "carrot" to get players to tinker around with their forges a little more to see what kinds of cool stuff they can make.

What I would rather see, aside from keeping ironworking a bit simplified, is a way to smelt it for casting. That way the player can have more late game projects to work on aside from the blast furnace, and keep those old molds useful for longer. Plus I'd wager it will likely be easier to cast iron for train parts, if trains are added, than to have to forge every piece by hand.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

5 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

it will likely be easier to cast iron for train parts, if trains are added, than to have to forge every piece by hand.

I.... didn't think of that.

[williams_482]

The primary benefit to unlocking cast iron shouldn't be to unlock a new kind of iron, but to make it easier to produce iron in bulk. That bulk produced iron also needs to be useable for steelmaking. Fortunately, requiring that pig iron be reheated and worked with a helve hammer to create regular old wrought iron ingots (exactly the same as the output of a worked iron bloom) is both pretty close to reality and consistent with current ways of refining iron, so it shouldn't be too much of problem difficulty for players to understand. 

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, williams_482 said:

Maybe pig iron tools would draw slightly more benefit from quenching/tempering than bloomery iron?

If we were to make it really realistic, then quenching bloomery iron should indeed be less effective, and ideally it should actually be completely ineffective until the wrought iron is case-hardened first (which effectively transforms the surface layer of the workpiece into steel). Quenching requires high enough carbon content, which wrought iron normally doesn't have. This also applies to wrought iron produced from pig iron, though pig iron may allow it to retain slightly more carbon or be directly forged into steel without the cementation process.

 

3 hours ago, williams_482 said:

Also worth a mention here is that bronze (usually referred to as brass, but definitely actually bronze) had a meaningful battlefield role well into the 19th century. Because casting iron into large, precise shapes without cracking it as it cools is so difficult, bronze cannon were considered the superior type for a very long time. They were much easier to create with precise tolerances, which made them both more accurate and less likely to explode if something went wrong.

I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about, but there's a kind of alloy referred to as gunmetal or red brass, which is slightly different from typical tin bronze mainly due to the addition of zinc, though is generally still considered a type of bronze. I suppose I don't need to explain what the primary use of gunmetal was.

Leaded bronze and phosphor bronze (both including tin) have also seen notable use into the Middle Ages and beyond, mainly due to relatively high corrosion and wear resistance, in-game potentially useful in some mechanical parts. Leaded bronze is also much more castable, but mostly unusable for typical tools. Also, bell bronze could be cool for musical instruments. The most notable takeaway here, to me, is that once iron smelting took off, bronze was mainly used for specific applications where it had other strengths over iron, and I think that this is a useful direction to consider. Instead of focusing too much on power and durability, let bronze be similar to early bloomery iron or just weaker than generalized iron, but provide additional uses for which it is deliberately better than iron or outright the only viable metal. In this way, bronze could become highly useful all the way into the endgame, yet without messing too much with the mainline tool material progression.

 

2 hours ago, williams_482 said:

The primary benefit to unlocking cast iron shouldn't be to unlock a new kind of iron, but to make it easier to produce iron in bulk. That bulk produced iron also needs to be useable for steelmaking. Fortunately, requiring that pig iron be reheated and worked with a helve hammer to create regular old wrought iron ingots (exactly the same as the output of a worked iron bloom) is both pretty close to reality and consistent with current ways of refining iron, so it shouldn't be too much of problem difficulty for players to understand. 

This is pretty much exactly correct and would closely reflect the historical benefits of introducing blast furnaces. One potential issue that I would point to is that the bloomery process is already quite efficient in VS and there is very little need for bulk iron in the current state of the game. I guess minecarts and steam engines could increase the demand quite a bit, but I still feel like the blast furnace could easily end up less efficient unless drastically simplified. At that point, I would prefer the bloomery process to be made less efficient than it is now, while making the blast furnace into the massive chemical reactor that it really is, with all the risks and all the benefits.

 

2 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Most players neither understand nor care about the historical nuances of early metallurgy. They expect tech progression to feel like forward momentum, not lateral motion. When a player invests time, fuel, and infrastructure into unlocking iron, the result should feel meaningfully better, not a situational equivalent. Otherwise, the upgrade feels hollow, and the next tier feels like an improvement on a downgrade, which dulls its impact.

Introducing multiple types of iron (bloomery vs pig iron) primarily serves a very small subset of players who are deeply interested in real-world metallurgy. While that depth is fascinating, it comes at the cost of added complexity, confusion, and friction for the broader player base. For most players, this would not meaningfully improve gameplay, but it would complicate progression and increase frustration.

While as a general rule I absolutely agree with what you're saying (maybe with a couple small caveats), I don't really see how making iron slightly weaker or more difficult to produce in the bloomery process would cause any significant issues in that category. Not even counting quenching, just reducing damage and speed of early iron tools to be more similar to bronze would still make them better than bronze due to increased durability, whereas making early iron more difficult to process would let it retain the power advantage but be less worthwhile for anything besides a couple of the main tools. Still a quite meaningful milestone, especially if you count all the things that are gated behind iron, more of which are likely to come as the late game becomes more fleshed out. It doesn't seem to me like there's a lot of added complexity and confusion, because the relationship is simple - bloomery iron is relatively weak, wrought iron from pig iron is better. You still have clear progreassion tiers, and one of the tiers just isn't as significant as adjacent tiers in terms of tool power gains.

I don't want to paint early iron being similar to bronze as any sort of necessity, because the game would be quite fine without it, under the condition that bloomeries are fully superseded by the blast furnace for the purposes of ironmaking - I think the player shouldn't be incentivized to use the more crude and inefficient process for any reason.

 

2 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

The only thing I'll concede here is that maybe iron could be lowered slightly so that players are incentivized to find out more about the quenching and tempering processes, but I don't think those two steps should feel forced, especially since doing so increases the risk of the hard-earned tool or weapon breaking in the owner's hands for no other reason than they got served a plate of RNG and it tasted bad.

I think the best solution could be to add work hardening and annealing to bronze (basically improved power at the cost of some durability), and making iron equivalent in terms of power to probably black bronze (maybe even tin bronze), and leaving durability untouched. As long as quenching and tempering provide a greater power boost to iron than work hardening and annealing does to bronze, iron would be better once the player learns to process it well, but at the same time unquenched iron wouldn't be a strict power downgrade.

 

2 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Unfortunately I think you're making the mistake of thinking that a blast furnace could produce any iron that would be suitable for forging or steel-making processes. Instead it produces cast iron which is cleaner than pig iron, but still unsuitable for forging or cementation because it already exceeds the carbon content of steel. Both cast iron and pig iron are brittle because of these impurities and suffer the same issues that bronze does being that they are brittle under stress, prone to breaking instead of bending, and failures are usually catastrophic and cannot be easily repaired and so they are unsuitable for tools of any type. Wrought iron is the best form of iron. The game compresses all types of iron into just iron so the player doesn't have to bother with burning off impurities and adjusting the carbon content in molten iron in a furnace with a lance. We're already hand-waving a lot here, so why add more to hand-wave when the tech tree exists the way it does now?

I'm quite confident I'm not making any mistakes here, because I researched this topic quite extensively whenever I was lambasting the dude who was suggesting a 12 m tall blast furnace. Admittedly, some of that was undeserved, but either way.

Cast iron is for most purposes a completely separate kind of iron, which I'm not really considering in the argument about bronze and early iron, because it inherently cannot function as a "next tier" in progression. That said, it could be introduced as a way to craft some specific tools in high quantities. It's unsuitable for weapons and armor, but very useful for some common tools as well as other stuff like cookware or stoves which could be important progression rewards. It can also be heat treated to improve its properties, though steel or at least wrought iron will naturally always be preferred wherever brittleness is really undesirable.

Pig iron is practically the same as cast iron, but can be cast more quickly and allows more impurities because it's always forged into wrought iron or steel anyways (or technically not always, but either way it's not used directly for any usable items). Its carbon content is deliberately reduced down to the desired level depending on use case as part of the finery forge process. Even when it technically produces wrought iron, the same kind of iron that bloomeries make when considering carbon content, refining pig iron allows better control over the carbon content and more effective removal of impurities, as well as produces more uniform carbon distribution and grain structure, overall resulting in a higher-quality end product in practically all important metrics (which also means that it's better for cementation). Note that steel from the cementation process was also often better than steel obtained directly from the finery forge process due to even further improved control over carbon content.

I'm naturally willing to simplify a lot of details for the sake of making things more straightforward in gameplay, because having some four types of iron and four types of steel is admittedly a bit much, and I'm mostly just roughly describing the most important distinctions that can be easily translated into in-game differences. I think cast iron is kind of nonnegotiable (whether it could be cast directly into tools or have to be wrought is more debatable), but otherwise the rest of the types of iron are not too important.

It would be absolutely acceptable in my eyes to keep just one generalized type of wrought iron as long as the blast furnace is significantly better than the bloomery to the point of fully superseding it on the grounds of scale and efficiency alone for the purposes of ironmaking.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

What I would rather see, aside from keeping ironworking a bit simplified, is a way to smelt it for casting. That way the player can have more late game projects to work on aside from the blast furnace, and keep those old molds useful for longer. Plus I'd wager it will likely be easier to cast iron for train parts, if trains are added, than to have to forge every piece by hand.

A blast furnace is exactly how you smelt iron for casting. At least for most purposes, but I don't think any alternatives are significant enough to ever make it into the game, unless it's just crucible steel, though that's unrelated. It also typically uses sand molds as far as I remember, and either way requires a lot new molds for stuff like fences, cooking pots, maybe rail tracks or minecart/train parts and stuff, so I'm not sure that it would keep the old clay molds useful. I guess it could be acceptable for simplicity's sake, but I think I would personally much prefer a proper pig bed and two-part sand molds for maximum complexity in the endgame.

Edited February 26 by MKMoose

[williams_482]

15 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

This is pretty much exactly correct and would closely reflect the historical benefits of introducing blast furnaces. One potential issue that I would point to is that the bloomery process is already quite efficient in VS and there is very little need for bulk iron in the current state of the game. I guess minecarts and steam engines could increase the demand quite a bit, but I still feel like the blast furnace could easily end up less efficient unless drastically simplified. At that point, I would prefer the bloomery process to be made less efficient than it is now, while making the blast furnace into the massive chemical reactor that it really is, with all the risks and all the benefits.

The current bloomery process might be efficient by some measures, but also I kinda hate it? Bloomeries having to be crafted in two separate parts, individually placed, loaded up five nuggets at a time up to 120, and then broken at the cost of ~25% of materials is just slightly more annoying at every individual stage than it feels like it should be. 

A blast furnace which has a comparable upfront brick cost to a dozen bloomeries plus some iron-requiring components, then can make somewhat more cast iron in one firing than a brick-equivalent number of bloomeries and requires fairly minimal rebuilding between batches? That would be so much nicer to use. You lose the free heat you get with carefully timing the bloomeries so you can break them immediately and get hot iron on the anvil (because presumably the pig iron would have to fully cool and then be broken into ingot-size pieces), but that's a manageable cost which can be made up for elsewhere. 

27 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

A blast furnace is exactly how you smelt iron for casting. At least for most purposes, but I don't think any alternatives are significant enough to ever make it into the game, unless it's just crucible steel, though that's unrelated. It also typically uses sand molds as far as I remember, and either way requires a lot new molds for stuff like fences, cooking pots, maybe rail tracks or minecart/train parts and stuff, so I'm not sure that it would keep the old clay molds useful. I guess it could be acceptable for simplicity's sake, but I think I would personally much prefer a proper pig bed and two-part sand molds for maximum complexity in the endgame.

It's always seemed strange that dirt and sand are not chiselable by default. They could add an earlier, cheaper tool (a trowel?) which can chisel dirt and sand for very early game prettifying, and also be used to carve mold shapes out of sand. Control + right click on a sand block below the output spout of a valid blast furnace or adjacent to an existing valid mold to get the knapping interface, and trowel away from there. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

29 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

It would be absolutely acceptable for me to retain just one generalized type of wrought iron as long as the blast furnace is significantly better than the bloomery to the point of fully superseding it on the grounds of scale and efficiency alone for the purposes of ironmaking.

I could concede this as well. Admittedly I did not consider cast iron for things like cookware and stoves and steam engines, so I can see an immediate use for it even though those things aren't implemented into the game. The 4-way cross member that is required for the water wheels is an example of a part that could benefit greatly from casting vs forging. For these things, I'm willing to walk back my stance on "iron is iron, duuhhhh", and I'm confident that Anego could do a good job of making it balanced as well as making the casting process not another grindy slog that I know some people would want it to be...

32 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I'm quite confident I'm not making any mistakes here, because I researched this topic quite extensively whenever I was lambasting the dude who was suggesting a 12 m tall blast furnace. Admittedly, some of that was undeserved, but either way.

Well it sure seemed like you were. You said:

"the creation of the blast furnace could take place of the primary progression jump in terms of tool quality"

I was thinking cast iron picks and axes which would never work because the toolheads would break the instant you tried to put them through any real, meaningful work. That's my confusion because you said one thing and then walked it back entirely and basically restated what I said but in different words.

[MKMoose]

2 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Well it sure seemed like you were. You said:

"the creation of the blast furnace could take place of the primary progression jump in terms of tool quality"

I was thinking cast iron picks and axes which would never work because the toolheads would break the instant you tried to put them through any real, meaningful work. That's my confusion because you said one thing and then walked it back entirely and basically restated what I said but in different words.

A bit of a mental shortcut, that's on me, I guess. Technically, it would be a multi-step process - the blast furnace unlocking cast iron and pig iron, then the finery forge allowing pig iron refinement and by extension actually forging the better tools. Although it might be acceptable for simplicty to allow processing pig iron directly on a regular forge and anvil, at least in initial implementation, which would mean that the blast furnace could actually be considered as the way to unlock improved iron in the same way that the bloomery unlocks iron even though it outputs blooms that have to be further processed.

 

14 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

The current bloomery process might be efficient by some measures, but also I kinda hate it? Bloomeries having to be crafted in two separate parts, individually placed, loaded up five nuggets at a time up to 120, and then broken at the cost of ~25% of materials is just slightly more annoying at every individual stage than it feels like it should be. 

A blast furnace which has a comparable upfront brick cost to a dozen bloomeries plus some iron-requiring components, then can make somewhat more cast iron in one firing than a brick-equivalent number of bloomeries and requires fairly minimal rebuilding between batches? That would be so much nicer to use.

The blast furnace is a bit of a rabbit hole for me. I have some ideas on how deep I would want it to go in-game, but frankly I have no clue how deep most people would want it to go. The main quirk of it that seemingly very few people know is that a blast furnace is operated continuously, not in batches, and operating it is a whole skill and job in itself. A late-medieval blast furnace would run continuously for months, operated by a whole crew of people, casting something like 150-500 kg of iron at a time in ~8 hr intervals, requiring regularly adding new charge, draining slag, monitoring hearth temperature, adjusting the position of tuyeres that provide constant air input from water-powered bellows, rebuilding the sand bed between each cast. When something goes wrong, the whole hearth can solidify, rendering the furnace completely unusable, and that's just one of the possible failure modes. Furnace startup and shutdown are very delicate multi-step processes as well.

Also, small note: I'm kinda inconsistent in my use of tenses, but blast furnaces have been improving ever since they were first introduced to Europe, so modern blast furnaces work on the same general principle to the medieval ones but are kind of unrecognizable in the specifics.

Naturally, settling for something small and relatively safe would be preferable, which is mostly why I was very critical of the 12 m blast furnace idea, which was similar in size to those used at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, if I recall correctly. It is, of course, entirely possible to implement a simplified design that retains some parts of the realistic complexity while being more approachable and convenient, and a lot just depends on how far the devs would want to take it. Your notes on the bloomery do make me think of some potential improvements to a design I've had in my mind.

[williams_482]

Given the way the steelmaking process allows unrealistic arbitrary pauses when it runs out of fuel for the benefit of players on large servers, I'm sure any blast furnace model would ultimately be similarly permissive. With that said, designing the blast furnace as a way of iteratively casting a huge amount of iron in overlapping batches over a relatively short time, with the idea of producing enough pig iron to be set for years, would be a way to preserve some of those complexities. The player shouldn't be waiting around for IRL hours waiting for the metal to heat up, but have maintenance tasks to do (working the bellows, dealing with slag, replacing the sand molds, etc) over 2-3 in game hours between casts. 

I imagine a model similar to the cementation furnace (set it and forget it except for regular refueling, after a set time the product is complete and good to go even if left untouched for days) would be preferred, but it is hard to square that with casting, instead of a simple heat treatment. It could cast automagically once the requisite time is reached, but that 1) is unrealistic, 2) is more automated than any process currently in the game, and 3) gives opportunities for player confusion if the sand molds are wrong, nothing casts properly, and the whole process fails silently while they were looking the other way. 

[Diregoldleaf]

14 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I suppose I don't need to explain what the primary use of gunmetal was.

You might need to explain it for pizza lady as she finds metal side grades confusing ;D

 

14 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The blast furnace is a bit of a rabbit hole for me. I have some ideas on how deep I would want it to go in-game, but frankly I have no clue how deep most people would want it to go. The main quirk of it that seemingly very few people know is that a blast furnace is operated continuously, not in batches, and operating it is a whole skill and job in itself. A late-medieval blast furnace would run continuously for months, operated by a whole crew of people, casting something like 150-500 kg of iron at a time in ~8 hr intervals, requiring regularly adding new charge, draining slag, monitoring hearth temperature, adjusting the position of tuyeres that provide constant air input from water-powered bellows, rebuilding the sand bed between each cast. When something goes wrong, the whole hearth can solidify, rendering the furnace completely unusable, and that's just one of the possible failure modes. Furnace startup and shutdown are very delicate multi-step processes as well.

I've never understood the complexity argument against making mechanics detailed, intricate, and to some point realistic. Leather making is complex (though not to the point of full realism) and confuses the hell out of players making leather for the first time. Once you understand a complex process, complexity is never a problem.

 

Vintage story has lead me to go down rabbit holes of many irl processes; clay forming, leather making, ore geology, alcohol brewing, cheese making and many more things. That's one of the things I like about Vintage Story, it encourages curiosity

[Teh Pizza Lady]

5 hours ago, Diregoldleaf said:

You might need to explain it for pizza lady as she finds metal side grades confusing ;D

I saw that. >_>

They're not confusing, they just don't make sense in the context of a video game. Niche uses need to have value over "this is one thing we added for use in a single thing that's not even really that great by the time you get the tech to make it". Not that anything you suggested was like that, but I will always vote in favor of simplicity in this case because the game was designed with mods in mind and because of that, expanding the systems too far limits the creativity mod creators can have when working on adding their own content to the game. We don't have firearms in the game (outside of mods) and they're not exactly period appropriate within the context of the game and its lore, although we do have everything in place to make bullets, gunpowder, and the guns themselves. Granted, adding something like gunmetal, for example, means that there is an additional resource that mod creators can use without having to create their own... so its a give and take process. But I still stand firm in that upgrades need to have impact instead of feeling like a side grade.

BTW, can you explain how gunmetal black got its name when gunmetal was typically a gold-colored bronze alloy?

[Diregoldleaf]

3 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I saw that. >_>

They're not confusing, they just don't make sense in the context of a video game. Niche uses need to have value over "this is one thing we added for use in a single thing that's not even really that great by the time you get the tech to make it". Not that anything you suggested was like that, but I will always vote in favor of simplicity in this case because the game was designed with mods in mind and because of that, expanding the systems too far limits the creativity mod creators can have when working on adding their own content to the game. We don't have firearms in the game (outside of mods) and they're not exactly period appropriate within the context of the game and its lore, although we do have everything in place to make bullets, gunpowder, and the guns themselves. Granted, adding something like gunmetal, for example, means that there is an additional resource that mod creators can use without having to create their own... so its a give and take process. But I still stand firm in that upgrades need to have impact instead of feeling like a side grade.

BTW, can you explain how gunmetal black got its name when gunmetal was typically a gold-colored bronze alloy?

Yh I know, I was poking fun

Quote

BTW, can you explain how gunmetal black got its name when gunmetal was typically a gold-colored bronze alloy?

Nope I cannot. I'm sure Moose can

[Ravensblade]

I think the details of the whole steel/iron discussion is not that important for a game, especially since there is no strict definition of what is steel compared to iron.As far i know, historically steel and iron are not that strictly separated, and steel was also produced by bloomeries and crucibles, depending on design etc. Game don't need to limit itself to particular method to achieve steel or explore all of them.

Personally for late game mass steel production i would go with arc furnaces powered by same rare parts and temporary gears. They could produce cast iron and then from them a steel. 

It could also be a way to introduce same alloys. 

 

[MKMoose]

On 2/26/2026 at 11:47 PM, williams_482 said:

Given the way the steelmaking process allows unrealistic arbitrary pauses when it runs out of fuel for the benefit of players on large servers, I'm sure any blast furnace model would ultimately be similarly permissive.

Is cementation being interruptible even unrealistic, though? It would be certainly undesirable due to wasted fuel on subsequent reheating, but it's a long-term diffusion process, so I think that cooling and reheating wouldn't be significantly harmful to steel quality. Extensive information on the topic seems relatively scarce, though, on a quick search at least, possibly just because the process is now obsolete.

For a blast furnace, I think a suitable compromise between realistic risks, intuitive implementation and multiplayer-friendly lenience would mainly involve two factors:

• make the furnace a bit unrealistically fast and make sure to leave enough leeway to avoid the need to respect strict timing - the main problem lies in that it should ideally be fast enough to match the output of multiple bloomeries smelting continuously, but not too fast, so as to leave enough time to pick up the casts once they cool and prepare new molds, while also keeping the amount of material in a single cast reasonably small to avoid the problem of having to make dozens of ingots when the player runs a couple short,
• create an intermediate between a batch and continuous process by adding some initial fuel cost to heat up the furnace before smelting and then some additional fuel cost to minimize damage during shutdown (and otherwise make the process batch-like)  - this would incentivize but not require to cast multiple times in a row, instead of in individual batches.

 

14 hours ago, Ravensblade said:

Personally for late game mass steel production i would go with arc furnaces powered by same rare parts and temporary gears. They could produce cast iron and then from them a steel. 

An electric arc furnace is a 19th-century invention favored mostly for its versatility, not scale. Early blast furnaces are medieval tech in Europe, earlier in China.While something like an EAF could be cool as an endgame Jonas tech gimmick, potentially for quick on-demand small-scale production or for lore and story purposes, I don't think there's much purpose to introducing it as a significant component of the mainline tech progression. Blast furnaces have been the ironmaking tech pretty much since they were invented, and to this day ever larger blast furnaces supply the world with the vast majority of cast iron for direct use and are the primary source of intermediate iron in steelmaking.

Edited February 28 by MKMoose