forging Quenching and tempering are overly gamified

[Fogman]

3 hours ago, Erik said:

Gambling isn't inherently fun but it's not inherently unfun or inherently bad either.

It is a bad idea to include gambling because people continue to gamble despite not enjoying it. Something like 96 million people worldwide have a gambling addiction. Out of all of the things you can possibly put in the game, just about the worst thing you can put into it is something that people will continue to do despite not enjoying it, since it makes the game (and, insofar as people's lives are made up of hours that might be spent to play the game), their very lives, unfun. I think this about FOMO with limited-time events, I think this about daily quests in MMOs, I think this about everything that is designed to keep people spending their time or their money despite getting nothing in return. Convincing someone on a visceral, animal, "operant conditioning" level that something good will happen if they continue to sit there and press the button is not good game development, it circumvents the task at hand by baiting and switching the fun people want for the conditioned response that they seek. 

If you look at the current market of what developers have chosen to include mechanics exactly like this, you will find that all of them directly benefit financially from getting their userbases to keep gambling, even if they don't enjoy it, because that's what these sorts of mechanics exist for, even if Tyron himself doesn't recognize that.

[NastyFlytrap]

3 minutes ago, Fogman said:

just about the worst thing you can put into it is something that people will continue to do despite not enjoying it, since it makes the game (and, insofar as people's lives are made up of hours that might be spent to play the game), their very lives, unfun

This. I'm here for a good time. This game shouldnt have mechanics that subconsciously play with the functions of your brain to do something you'd choose to not do if your monkey brain didnt make you do it.

[Erik]

15 minutes ago, Fogman said:

It is a bad idea to include gambling because people continue to gamble despite not enjoying it. Something like 96 million people worldwide have a gambling addiction. Out of all of the things you can possibly put in the game, just about the worst thing you can put into it is something that people will continue to do despite not enjoying it, since it makes the game (and, insofar as people's lives are made up of hours that might be spent to play the game), their very lives, unfun. 

An estimated 209 million people are addicted to alcohol (according to WHO), yet alcohol exists in VS. Nobody will get addicted to alcohol in VS and I think the same is the case for getting addicted to the current quenching implementation. Same as people not getting addicted to skill checks in Baldur's Gate 3.

42 minutes ago, Fogman said:

Convincing someone on a visceral, animal, "operant conditioning" level that something good will happen if they continue to sit there and press the button is not good game development, it circumvents the task at hand by baiting and switching the fun people want for the conditioned response that they seek. 

Repeated quenching has diminishing returns, the power increase gets smaller, the risk of loss greater. That is not at all a mechanic that incentives or conditions people to repeat pressing the quench button endlessly. It's the opposite of dangling a huge (but very unlikely) carrot/jackpot in front of the player.

[Fogman]

It's a complete strawman to compare VS alcohol to VS quenching and you know it, because the character drinks alcohol but the player gambles. Or do you have a hard time telling fantasy from reality? I don't care whether you've ruled that it constitutes an "unlikely jackpot" or whether an "unlikely jackpot" is necessary for something to be gambling (it isn't, by the way) because even a 1% chance where someone could consecutively lose tool heads from quenching would mean that hundreds of people will experience it and even a 90% chance that you will complete one 5-quenched tool in 3 attempts means that hundreds of people will spend hours making and remaking the same tools over and over in an attempt to complete it.

It's unrealistic, but more importantly, it's gambling, and it's garbage game development. And no, your character drinking alcohol in vintage story does not intoxicate the player, in case you really were confused about that one.

[LadyWYT]

On 3/3/2026 at 1:38 PM, MKMoose said:

Skill expression

Tyron has expressed concerns that these mechanics wouldn't be as interesting as the current system and wouldn't offer interesting choices to the player, as well as thought that it seems to "sacrifice gameplay for realism". While I find that debatable and somewhat reductive - I think that just reduced repetition and improved verisimilitude would make it more enjoyable for many people - I want to explicitly point out various additional factors which could make a more realistic system interesting, mainly through making heat treatment into a largely skill-dependent process, requiring experience and knowledge for optimal results:

@MKMoose While I do like the detailed writeup, I'm also going to bug you for a simpler explanation.  I like the current system and find it quite fun and decently balanced, however, I wouldn't mind seeing something more skill-based either. The one modification I would make to the current system, I think, is rather than have work items shatter and vanish into thin air, they should just shatter into nuggets that can be smelted back down(which means that there needs to be a way to smelt steel nuggets back into ingots, but anyway). Doing so would allow the player to fail making the item, but still allow them to keep the material so that they can try again.

Overall the main issue I run into with the writeup presented here, is similar to the one that Tyron seems to have expressed. It's pushing more into the "realism for the sake of realism" territory, rather than staying in the realm of "fun gameplay that is also realistic". Basically what kills the idea for me is there's so much information to process here that it becomes very hard to visualize trying to play something like this in the game itself, alongside all the other gameplay loops, and having fun without getting too frustrated. Or I suppose in other words, I'm not sure how all of the above information could fit into a single handbook entry that can easily be understood with a quick reading or two.

On 3/3/2026 at 1:38 PM, MKMoose said:

Judging temperature by color.

I do want to note that this is already somewhat possible to do in the current game. I wouldn't recommend removing the temperature readout though, aside from an optional "hardcore" setting, since that could potentially cause some issues with colorblindness. 

[MKMoose]

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

While I do like the detailed writeup, I'm also going to bug you for a simpler explanation.

A simpler explanation of the detailed process, or a more simplified process, just to be clear?

 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The one modification I would make to the current system, I think, is rather than have work items shatter and vanish into thin air, they should just shatter into nuggets that can be smelted back down(which means that there needs to be a way to smelt steel nuggets back into ingots, but anyway). Doing so would allow the player to fail making the item, but still allow them to keep the material so that they can try again.

It's a seemingly pretty common suggestion, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to solve except reduce frustration when the workpiece shatters on a very low chance. Iron is extremely plentiful as it is if you know how to find it, and the added cost from shattered tool heads isn't very significant until you start going into extremes. Obtaining an ~37% power buff by quenching 5 times will get you to shatter on average ~1.3 tool heads, and that is roughly the maximum I would consider reasonable for the average player. By removing or heavily reducing the resource cost, you'd be essentially removing a balance lever from quenching with nothing to replace it and leaving time and tedium as almost the only factors keeping the player from outright absurd creations.

I could also see it as a way of being more forgiving for a new player who only has a tiny quantity of iron, though a small problem then appears: resmelting the iron nuggets is done more optimally using a full bloomery with 120 nuggets, so smelting just 20 can be seen as a waste, and if the workpiece returns less than 20, then you wouldn't even be able to resmelt it into a new ingot. Granted, this could be addressed by allowing the bloomery to take multiple inputs, with some caveats.

 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Overall the main issue I run into with the writeup presented here, is similar to the one that Tyron seems to have expressed. It's pushing more into the "realism for the sake of realism" territory, rather than staying in the realm of "fun gameplay that is also realistic". Basically what kills the idea for me is there's so much information to process here that it becomes very hard to visualize trying to play something like this in the game itself, alongside all the other gameplay loops, and having fun without getting too frustrated. Or I suppose in other words, I'm not sure how all of the above information could fit into a single handbook entry that can easily be understood with a quick reading or two.

Okay, this I can work with much better. I'm impressed with how well you put this, honestly.

I don't really have much to say at the moment other than that the basic process is really quite simple on the surface (as described in the "main suggestion" section) and several of the more complex effects are only required under the hood to force this specific order of operations in a controlled way and to achieve a specific balance between all the different parameters. I'll see if I can write something more clear and concise at some point.

Normalization also offers an easy way out with a neat durability buff for anyone not finding themselves ready to take on the more complex process yet.

 

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I do want to note that this is already somewhat possible to do in the current game. I wouldn't recommend removing the temperature readout though, aside from an optional "hardcore" setting, since that could potentially cause some issues with colorblindness. 

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that this was already possible, I would have two nickels. Keep in mind that as long as the temperature readout is perfectly accurate, then the color is mostly just for immersion. You might recall a similar argument from when I was saying that the temporal stability gear in the middle of the screen is too accurate and too reliable and ends up making the player pay too much attention to the UI and not the world, so any diegetic signs of unstable areas wouldn't really be useful anyways unless the gear is changed or removed.

I haven't exactly checked how realistic the current colors are and how practical they would be in gameplay, but I think they would likely require some adjustments to allow actually telling the temperature with good accuracy in the range where it matters most without an excess of guesswork. That this would likely have to be an optional setting I did say myself, but nonetheless I think it would be a really cool one, especially suitable for Homo Sapiens.

Even if not remove the temperature readout, I would like to see it rounded, at the very least to an integer. Optionally to larger steps like 10 C, and maybe even with some random error if we're feeling more adventurous, as a way to require a bit more deliberate temperature evaluation and not a single robotic comparison.

Edited March 22 by MKMoose

[Erik]

12 hours ago, Fogman said:

It's a complete strawman to compare VS alcohol to VS quenching and you know it, because the character drinks alcohol but the player gambles.

The comparison is as much a strawman as it is to compare VS quenching to predatory gambling mechanics ("KRMMO child gambling mechanics").

I think under your provided definition, VS quenching is a gambling mechanic. I however don't think that all things defined as gambling mechanics are harmful and therefore problematic (see my earlier examples). In my view the VS quenching mechanic is not problematic. We seem to disagree here.

13 hours ago, Fogman said:

Or do you have a hard time telling fantasy from reality?

Please refrain from attacking people in arguments.

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

A simpler explanation of the detailed process, or a more simplified process, just to be clear?

Basically I'm struggling to picture how a system like this works in actual gameplay, so something like a handbook entry-style explanation or simplified walkthrough of how the process could unfold in regular gameplay is mostly what I'm looking for. All of the data above is useful for explaining how the process works in real life, but I'm just not sure how it's supposed to really plug into the actual gameplay, is all.

The current process in 1.22 is a little videogamey, but it's also quite easy to read the handbook and tooltips to figure out quenching without fireclay increases the power, while quenching with fireclay increases the durability(and lowers the shatter chance, if I'm not mistaken?).

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

It's a seemingly pretty common suggestion, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to solve except reduce frustration when the workpiece shatters on a very low chance.

Getting pieces back when the workpiece shatters seems like it could encourage players to take a little more risk if they want to try for a super high-quality item. To be fair, I think the workload to obtain such is great enough that most players won't try to push numbers that far since it's not really fun to do that, but as a once in a while thing? Sure.

For my own gameplay I've been trending toward the lower end of the quenching buffs(around 25% power increase or so). It's enough of a boost to make a real difference in combat, without being a lot of risk or requiring a lot of extra forge time.

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I haven't exactly checked how realistic the current colors are and how practical they would be in gameplay, but I think they would likely require some adjustments to allow actually telling the temperature with good accuracy in the range where it matters most without an excess of guesswork. That this would likely have to be an optional setting I did say myself, but nonetheless I think it would be a really cool one, especially suitable for Homo Sapiens.

In my own experience, half the time I'm going off the color of the work item when it comes to forging it. Yellow-orange to yellow is hot enough to turn an iron bloom into an ingot without needing to reheat. Bright orange if a helve hammer is being used. If the item is glowing white it's probably too hot, in reality, but from the gameplay standpoint it just means the player has the maximum amount of time to work on it before it'll need to be reheated.

 

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I don't really have much to say at the moment other than that the basic process is really quite simple on the surface (as described in the "main suggestion" section) and several of the more complex effects are only required under the hood to force this specific order of operations in a controlled way and to achieve a specific balance between all the different parameters. I'll see if I can write something more clear and concise at some point.

The only real thing that's come to mind is that the current system could probably be collapsed from multiple quenchings to boost stats, to just one. Quench without fireclay to boost power, or quench with clay to boost durability, but not both(though one power quench and one durability quench per item could be fine, potentially). Temperature could be refined to make a bigger difference in the stats and break chance during the quench. That is, quenching at the low end of the range could yield a small stat boost without a break chance, but quenching at the higher end will yield better stats at a higher risk of breakage due to the stress on the item. The higher stats could also have a much narrower range of temperature, meaning that the player will need to be careful about exactly when they choose to quench the item. And of course if the item breaks during the quench, the player can simply resmelt the nuggets back into something usable, rather than have it be an all-or-nothing process.

It's still rather videogamey, but I think it removes at least some of the tedium while giving a little more opportunity for some player skill. Of course, maybe all the above has been said before and I just missed it. If ever there are earnable traits in the game, there could probably be one to reduce the shatter risk at quenching after the player has performed enough successful risky quenches or something.

[MKMoose]

On 3/22/2026 at 3:13 PM, LadyWYT said:

Basically I'm struggling to picture how a system like this works in actual gameplay, so something like a handbook entry-style explanation or simplified walkthrough of how the process could unfold in regular gameplay is mostly what I'm looking for. All of the data above is useful for explaining how the process works in real life, but I'm just not sure how it's supposed to really plug into the actual gameplay, is all.

I've got a rough mockup of what a handbook entry for this could look like. To start off, a couple notes:

• I've tried to keep the style similar to the in-game handbook, without the kind of formatting that I would typically use in larger text blocks like that (which, to be honest, the handbook could greatly benefit from in a few places),
• the total length of this mockup is roughly double that of the current handbook entry for quenching and tempering, caused in large part by there just being more individual mechanics to cover,
• I'm not exactly certain on the exact level of complexity the system should have - I decided to include a couple mechanics I've initially noted to be optional, mainly to lean into making temperature management more in-depth, but this is ultimately just a mockup; I've also slightly relaxed some constraints which I felt weren't doing much,
• there's a few underlined words which would likely link to an appropriate handbook page or search, and more information could be found in those separate pages,
• having appropriate tooltips at many stages of the process would help a lot to inform the player what they've just done, what they're about to do, and what they can do, without having to go back to the handbook too many times.

You'll also notice that I've elected to use "annealing" for normalization, with no functional changes, and I've also switched it out in the main post. It seems to be a more historically appropriate term, even if it might be slightly misleading nowadays. As a side note, the roadmap actually says "quenching, tempering, annealing", so including annealing as well seems pretty neat.

 

Heat treatment of ferrous metals

After forging a tool or weapon from a ferrous metal (iron, meteoric iron or steel), heat treatments can be performed to improve its qualities by controlled heating and cooling.

All heat treatment processes start with bringing the metal up to a certain temperature range, which is shown in the tooltip of the worked item for each process. Once the item is heated past the minimum temperature, it should be kept in the desired range for several in-game minutes, which ensures that the metal temperature is uniform and the treatment is more effective. Finally, the workpiece has to be cooled down, depending on the type of treatment either slowly by allowing the item to cool in air, or rapidly by submerging it in a barrel of a quenchant liquid, for example water.

In many cases, annealing alone is sufficient to obtain a high-quality tool. A more advanced process requires performing annealing, quenching and tempering in that order.

 

Annealing

Annealing is used to improve the durability of tools and weapons. It is also useful later as a way of reducing the risks of quenching.

The temperature that the item has to reach for annealing is indicated by the metal turning to a red color. After soaking in that temperature, the item has to be cooled slowly in air.

Annealing can be performed repeatedly, but the relative durability increase provided by subsequent iterations will diminish quickly. In order for repeated annealing to have the appropriate effect, the workpiece has to be kept close to the minimum required temperature, as heating it up excessively will remove the effects of prior heat treatments.

 

Quenching

Quenching can be used to greatly improve the power of tools and weapons, at the cost of making them brittle, which severely reduces their durability, and at the risk of breaking them. In order to amend the durability penalty, the next process of tempering will be necessary afterwards, while the risk of shattering the item can be controlled with several factors during quenching. This process can be especially valuable for weapons, but for some tools power value may provide little to no benefit.

Quenching is a risky process which creates great internal stresses in the metal, which can sometimes cause the workpiece to shatter. An item which has been annealed will have its risk of breaking reduced, and repeated annealing will reduce that risk further.

Similar to annealing, the workpiece needs to be red-hot for quenching, though the temperature should be slightly higher. Quenching from the optimal temperature range will produce slightly improved effects, but excessively high temperatures will increase the risk of shattering as well. The last step for quenching requires the metal to be cooled quickly by using Shift + RMB on a barrel of quenchant liquid like water, while holding the workpiece using tongs.

The effects and risks of quenching can optionally be affected by certain other factors as well, including choice of different quenching medium like oil or brine instead of water, or covering the workpiece in fire clay.

After an item has been quenched, you need to make sure not to heat it up too high above the tempering temperature, as doing so will reverse the effects of prior heat treatments. This means that a quenched item can only be tempered, unless you wish retry annealing and quenching if the first attempt was unsatisfactory.

 

Tempering

For a tool which has been quenched, tempering can be used to restore the durability back up and achieve a more satisfactory balance between durability and power. It will have no effect on unquenched tools, or on tools which have been heated back up too high after quenching.

This process requires much lower temperatures than annealing and tempering, and similar to annealing it requires the workpiece to be cooled slowly in air.

After tempering, the durability of the item will be increased back up, but the power will decrease slightly. More durability will be recovered when tempering at higher temperatures, while tempering at lower temperatures may be more useful when trying to preserve as much power as possible. Tempering can be repeated, albeit with diminishing returns, and durability can even be brought up to on par with an annealed item this way.

[LadyWYT]

7 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I've got a rough mockup of what a handbook entry for this could look like.

Thanks for the writeup! It makes a lot more sense, and is the kind of change I wouldn't mind seeing in the game.  Though it does seem like the kind of change that would go hand-in-hand with a proper rework of the temperature system, so I'm not sure we'll see a change like this in the near future. But I do like it.

[NastyFlytrap]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

I've got a rough mockup of what a handbook entry for this could look like. To start off, a couple notes:

• I've tried to keep the style similar to the in-game handbook, without the kind of formatting that I would typically use in larger text blocks like that (which, to be honest, the handbook could greatly benefit from in a few places),
• the total length of this mockup is roughly double that of the current handbook entry for quenching and tempering, caused in large part by there just being more individual mechanics to cover,
• I'm not exactly certain on the exact level of complexity the system should have - I decided to include a couple mechanics I've initially noted to be optional, mainly to lean into making temperature management more in-depth, but this is ultimately just a mockup; I've also slightly relaxed some constraints which I felt weren't doing much,
• there's a few underlined words which would likely link to an appropriate handbook page or search, and more information could be found in those separate pages,
• having appropriate tooltips at many stages of the process would help a lot to inform the player what they've just done, what they're about to do, and what they can do, without having to go back to the handbook too many times.

You'll also notice that I've elected to use "annealing" for normalization, with no functional changes, and I've also switched it out in the main post. It seems to be a more historically appropriate term, even if it might be slightly misleading nowadays. As a side note, the roadmap actually says "quenching, tempering, annealing", so including annealing as well seems pretty neat.

 

Heat treatment of ferrous metals

After forging a tool or weapon from a ferrous metal (iron, meteoric iron or steel), heat treatments can be performed to improve its qualities by controlled heating and cooling.

All heat treatment processes start with bringing the metal up to a certain temperature range, which is shown in the tooltip of the worked item for each process. Once the item is heated past the minimum temperature, it should be kept in the desired range for several in-game minutes, which ensures that the metal temperature is uniform and the treatment is more effective. Finally, the workpiece has to be cooled down, depending on the type of treatment either slowly by allowing the item to cool in air, or rapidly by submerging it in a barrel of a quenchant liquid, for example water.

In many cases, annealing alone is sufficient to obtain a high-quality tool. A more advanced process requires performing annealing, quenching and tempering in that order.

 

Annealing

Annealing is used to improve the durability of tools and weapons. It is also useful later as a way of reducing the risks of quenching.

The temperature that the item has to reach for annealing is indicated by the metal turning to a red color. After soaking in that temperature, the item has to be cooled slowly in air.

Annealing can be performed repeatedly, but the relative durability increase provided by subsequent iterations will diminish quickly. In order for repeated annealing to have the appropriate effect, the workpiece has to be kept close to the minimum required temperature, as heating it up excessively will remove the effects of prior heat treatments.

 

Quenching

Quenching can be used to greatly improve the power of tools and weapons, at the cost of making them brittle, which severely reduces their durability, and at the risk of breaking them. In order to amend the durability penalty, the next process of tempering will be necessary afterwards, while the risk of shattering the item can be controlled with several factors during quenching. This process can be especially valuable for weapons, but for some tools power value may provide little to no benefit.

Quenching is a risky process which creates great internal stresses in the metal, which can sometimes cause the workpiece to shatter. An item which has been annealed will have its risk of breaking reduced, and repeated annealing will reduce that risk further.

Similar to annealing, the workpiece needs to be red-hot for quenching, though the temperature should be slightly higher. Quenching from the optimal temperature range will produce slightly improved effects, but excessively high temperatures will increase the risk of shattering as well. The last step for quenching requires the metal to be cooled quickly by using Shift + RMB on a barrel of quenchant liquid like water, while holding the workpiece using tongs.

The effects and risks of quenching can optionally be affected by certain other factors as well, including choice of different quenching medium like oil or brine instead of water, or covering the workpiece in fire clay.

After an item has been quenched, you need to make sure not to heat it up too high above the tempering temperature, as doing so will reverse the effects of prior heat treatments. This means that a quenched item can only be tempered, unless you wish retry annealing and quenching if the first attempt was unsatisfactory.

 

Tempering

For a tool which has been quenched, tempering can be used to restore the durability back up and achieve a more satisfactory balance between durability and power. It will have no effect on unquenched tools, or on tools which have been heated back up too high after quenching.

This process requires much lower temperatures than annealing and tempering, and similar to annealing it requires the workpiece to be cooled slowly in air.

After tempering, the durability of the item will be increased back up, but the power will decrease slightly. More durability will be recovered when tempering at higher temperatures, while tempering at lower temperatures may be more useful when trying to preserve as much power as possible. Tempering can be repeated, albeit with diminishing returns, and durability can even be brought up to on par with an annealed item this way.

Honestly, with an analogue system where instead of it being flat bonuses and negatives for doing the steps, it giving more or less benefit depending on how close to the correct temperature zone you were with your process sounds exactly like the semi-realistic mechanics this game is going for. I want this to be the system in the game now.

[skol]

First, I have to admit that this whole discussion is way above my understanding, means I beg pardon if I got things wrong.
Second, even being too late,  this discussion made me very curious. I was waiting for 1.22 stable, but now I will try it out as soon as possible.

Regarding all the good thoughts spent to make the VS world a better place, I hope they will turn into a fruitful and positive dialog with developers and playtesters,
Maybe this will help to achieve this goal:

• Separation of concerns: Having skill-based mechanics to influence the default randomness of a procedural game is a very fundamental feature. It makes everything much more complicated, if this fundamental feature is "mixed" into the "quenching and tempering" discussion.
• Respect for the vision: A new game features is driven by a vision, and  there is often a visionary behind it. For the whole smithing mini-game logic, this was Redram's vision and it unfolded step by step. I assume there is also a responsible person for this feature. It could be helpful to find out which person this is and to start a personal dialog to find out more about the vision and a good way for contributing.
• Turning ideas into specs: The shortened writeup is a good starting point for turning an ideas in to a structured guidance for the development. This is a different viewpoint which is hard to explain to a non-programmer. Maybe this analogy helps: Thinking of a business problem described in words, like this handbook-style paragraphs, a developer needs something to be expressed in numbers and the visionary needs something to be expressed in visuals. So the spec work would be: define some excel-cell operations to shape the business problems with numbers and put some excel-graph on top to visualize the change of numbers. In my analogy, this would be a way to specify the business problem.

Edited April 10 by skol

[MKMoose]

1 hour ago, skol said:

Respect for the vision: A new game features is driven by a vision, and  there is often a visionary behind it. For the whole smithing mini-game logic, this was Redram's vision and it unfolded step by step. I assume there is also a responsible person for this feature. It could be helpful to find out which person this is and to start a personal dialog to find out more about the vision and a good way for contributing.

A bit of a problem here is that, arguably, the stated vision is not even fulfilled in the current state of the mechanic. The developer behind the mechanic seems to be Tyron, based on this message in the Discord:

Quote

I wanted this system to offer a high risk, high reward mechanic. I don't think realism would provide interesting choices to the player here. If a certain sequence of metal processing is always the better option, i worry it becomes tedium, not fun

To which my response at the time was:

Quote

[...] I have to completely disagree with this. The current system has little in the way of risk-reward for the simple reason that failing quenching does not take away any opportunities or reduce the error margin of execution-based mechanics. Shattering just takes away prior time and materials spent, effectively becoming a random-cost optimization game.

Also, in the current system, quenching a couple times (or at least once) is already practically always the better option (especially for weapons, where power is very valuable) due to low risks, and that's what makes the first couple iterations arguably more fun and rewarding due to fairly easy benefits for voluntarily added effort. I believe that tedium generally tends to appear when benefits are clear and desirable, but costs feel disproportionately high or the means are slow and repetitive, which is exactly what currently happens starting from ~25-30%+ power or ~40%+ durability buffs. Having to always treat a tool for the optimal result may have some risks, but the current system does it as well.

I don't quite get the idea that "realism wouldn't provide interesting choices to the player here", because verisimilitude as a goal is in no way exclusive from fun and engaging game mechanics, and in certain regards they easily go in tandem. At the core of realistic heat treatement is balancing out a desirable proportion between the metal's mechanical properties depending on application. The current system only really has a tradeoff between benefit and time or resources, and it's not even worth it to mix power and durability in most cases, which makes the system feel quite one-dimensional. [...]

Whether my suggestion could make a better system, I cannot predict with certainty, but the core issue for me has been from the start that the current system has a bunch of problems and doesn't achieve its own stated goals, which I've tried to achieve better in a more realistic design.

 

1 hour ago, skol said:

Turning ideas into specs: The shortened writeup is a good starting point for turning an ideas in to a structured guidance for the development. This is a different viewpoint which is hard to explain to a non-programmer. Maybe this analogy helps: Thinking of a business problem described in words, like this handbook-style paragraphs, a developer needs something to be expressed in numbers and the visionary needs something to be expressed in visuals. So the spec work would be: define some excel-cell operations to shape the business problems with numbers and put some excel-graph on top to visualize the change of numbers. In my analogy, this would be a way to specify the business problem.

To be honest, I've specifically kind of avoided getting too far into details, and even still had to write the more approachable handbook-style guide at request (which I should have probably done much earlier, to be honest). I don't really have any numbers on hand, because I think that balancing them at the design stage is largely a fool's errand. There's simply too many moving pieces, different ways to apply absolute or relative modifiers, implement limits, weigh benefits with costs and time investment. I've analyzed a couple options and even had some mock numbers somewhere which had a few problems that I was considering how to solve, but any number being balanced is heavily dependent on a set of other numbers.

As things stand, I don't even really know much about what the devs' intention is for quenching, which makes it difficult to propose anything more specific than I've already done. The handbook guide is still inconsistent with in-game behavior, and there are at least two major bugs with the system. In terms of balance, tempering (at least after one or two iterations) and durability quenching (except arguably the first iteration) apply risks and debuffs that outweigh the benefits, while power quenching can get to borderline absurd numbers after a few iterations, even if at steeply rising cost.

Edited April 10 by MKMoose

[ifoz]

I haven't messed around with tempering and quenching that much, but does anyone know if pickaxes no longer being able to have mining speed increased is intended or not? In earlier 1.22 pre's you used to be able to quench a pickaxe to boost the mining speed (though this was bugged back then and actually slowed it down).
In rc-7 though, quenching a pickaxe only improves the hit damage, making it largely useless. You are therefore funnelled into only going for durability rather than power, as from what I can tell power is mostly inconsequential. It removes that element of player choice that the power/durability balance has on other tools.

Edited April 10 by ifoz

[MKMoose]

11 minutes ago, ifoz said:

I haven't messed around with tempering and quenching that much, but does anyone know if pickaxes no longer being able to have mining speed increased is intended or not? In earlier 1.22 pre's you used to be able to quench a pickaxe to boost the mining speed (though this was bugged back then and actually slowed it down).
In rc-7 though, quenching a pickaxe only improves the hit damage, making it largely useless. You are therefore funnelled into only going for durability rather than power, as from what I can tell power is mostly inconsequential. It removes that element of player choice that the power/durability balance has on other tools.

I don't know if it was confirmed by a dev, but it's almost certainly a bug, and I think it started in rc.1. It's part of one of the two major bugs I was mentioning, because you might also notice that the damage buff is actually double that of the power increase from quenching, while it's supposed to be 1:1. The other major bug is that shattering appraently just doesn't happen at all, though I haven't tested that one personally.

Edited April 10 by MKMoose

[ifoz]

1 minute ago, MKMoose said:

The other major bug is that shattering appraently just doesn't happen at all, though I haven't tested that one personally.

Shattering does still happen as far as I am aware, but not if the item is placed on the ground and cooled off with a watering can. This allows you to endlessly stack quenching buffs. I've seen a friend of mine get a falx up to 20+ damage with this method, past 200% shatter chance. 

[NastyFlytrap]

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

A bit of a problem here is that, arguably, the stated vision is not even fulfilled in the current state of the mechanic. The developer behind the mechanic seems to be Tyron, based on this message in the Discord:

To which my response at the time was:

Whether my suggestion could make a better system, I cannot predict with certainty, but the core issue for me has been from the start that the current system has a bunch of problems and doesn't achieve its own stated goals, which I've tried to achieve better in a more realistic design.

 

To be honest, I've specifically kind of avoided getting too far into details, and even still had to write the more approachable handbook-style guide at request (which I should have probably done much earlier, to be honest). I don't really have any numbers on hand, because I think that balancing them at the design stage is largely a fool's errand. There's simply too many moving pieces, different ways to apply absolute or relative modifiers, implement limits, weigh benefits with costs and time investment. I've analyzed a couple options and even had some mock numbers somewhere which had a few problems that I was considering how to solve, but any number being balanced is heavily dependent on a set of other numbers.

As things stand, I don't even really know much about what the devs' intention is for quenching, which makes it difficult to propose anything more specific than I've already done. The handbook guide is still inconsistent with in-game behavior, and there are at least two major bugs with the system. In terms of balance, tempering (at least after one or two iterations) and durability quenching (except arguably the first iteration) apply risks and debuffs that outweigh the benefits, while power quenching can get to borderline absurd numbers after a few iterations, even if at steeply rising cost.

I still stand by the view that the current implementation is not fun and yours would be much better.

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, ifoz said:

I haven't messed around with tempering and quenching that much, but does anyone know if pickaxes no longer being able to have mining speed increased is intended or not? In earlier 1.22 pre's you used to be able to quench a pickaxe to boost the mining speed (though this was bugged back then and actually slowed it down).
In rc-7 though, quenching a pickaxe only improves the hit damage, making it largely useless. You are therefore funnelled into only going for durability rather than power, as from what I can tell power is mostly inconsequential. It removes that element of player choice that the power/durability balance has on other tools.

Echoing what Moose already said, I'm pretty sure it's a bug. If a player quenches a workpiece for both power and durability, only one of the stats actually seems to get applied when the piece is turned into a tool or weapon.

 

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The other major bug is that shattering appraently just doesn't happen at all, though I haven't tested that one personally.

Oh it definitely happens. I snapped a hammer head the other day despite the fact that it had never been quenched and was below quenching temperature. Now I'm not 100% sure that was intended behavior, but I've learned to be a bit more patient as a result.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

To be honest, I've specifically kind of avoided getting too far into details, and even still had to write the more approachable handbook-style guide at request (which I should have probably done much earlier, to be honest). I don't really have any numbers on hand, because I think that balancing them at the design stage is largely a fool's errand. There's simply too many moving pieces, different ways to apply absolute or relative modifiers, implement limits, weigh benefits with costs and time investment. I've analyzed a couple options and even had some mock numbers somewhere which had a few problems that I was considering how to solve, but any number being balanced is heavily dependent on a set of other numbers.

I think it's probably a scenario where a mod could really shine. Such a mod would take a lot of effort to make, to be sure, but then it would offer players an alternative to the more basic vanilla interpretation, as well as act as a valuable test to see which kind of gameplay players actually prefer. If the mod's proof-of-concept proved to be popular enough, then the devs might consider reworking the vanilla system to be more like what you've proposed. Of course it's also possible that players try the mod and decide they prefer the simpler route, but in that case the mod is still there for those who want a more realistic interpretation.

 

4 hours ago, MKMoose said:

As things stand, I don't even really know much about what the devs' intention is for quenching, which makes it difficult to propose anything more specific than I've already done. The handbook guide is still inconsistent with in-game behavior, and there are at least two major bugs with the system. In terms of balance, tempering (at least after one or two iterations) and durability quenching (except arguably the first iteration) apply risks and debuffs that outweigh the benefits, while power quenching can get to borderline absurd numbers after a few iterations, even if at steeply rising cost.

I'm just guessing here, but I think the main idea is to give the players a way to further improve their gear in a way that's at least somewhat realistic, if a bit videogamey. There are some inconsistencies, but that's to be expected from a freshly implemented system that's still being worked on. As for the benefits/drawbacks of tempering and quenching, yes the player can achieve some ridiculous numbers, but I think the question there is...how much time and patience does the player have to achieve those numbers? They could roll the dice and get really lucky, and get a super item without much effort, but I think in most cases getting the crazy numbers will take a lot of time and material due to workpieces getting snapped in the process. In my case, the strategy I roll with is quenching at least once on most items, with a few more quenches sometimes on a weapon to boost the power by around 25%. It's enough of a power boost to make a noticeable different in combat, especially for things that can be sharpened, but not so much of a boost that it's going to be too risky to pull off or too demanding on time. I'm also guessing that most players will probably settle for similar strategies, though I could be wrong.

[williams_482]

As far as popularity is concerned, I don't think it's an accident that the OP of this thread has more positive reacts than any non-Tyron post I've seen on these boards, and over twice as many reacts as the RC1 thread it was linked in. That the post managed to be this compelling and engaging despite a lot of relatively technical language says something, both about the quality of the suggestion in isolation, and the comparison with the current RNG-heavy and not all that much simpler implementation currently out in the RCs. 

I definitely don't want to badmouth the devs, despite the comparison. Even if they were totally bought in on this suggestion (which doesn't seem to be the case, but Tyron was at least interested enough to have a conversation), implementing it in place of the system they had already put together is surely not feasible for this release. But I am very hopeful that a mod along these lines is created soon, and highly skeptical that a straightforward implementation of what's described wouldn't be a significant improvement worthy of the base game. 

[Zx573]

To take something of a middle ground on this idea, I could see a simplified version of OP's idea nicely balancing the gamification, the realism, and the immersion.

Add Annealing, it improves durability by a variable amount, with better gains the closer the player gets to optimal temperature timing.

Then Quenching, improves power and reduces durability according to a similar variation

Then Tempering improves durability and reduces power, once again working better the closer the temperature is to the correct temp.

I don't think that the idea of the buffs being reset completely if the piece is heated up too much seems overly complicated either.

Slap some diminishing returns on there so there is no need to repeat the process to excess in searching for optimal results, and the system itself will enforce player preference use cases. Someone that only cares about durability? Anneal and go. Someone that just wants the boost in power without spending the time to "do it right"? Quench and go. Someone that enjoys the process? Run it through. Someone that loves optimization? Run it through multiple times. Someone that loves skill based applications and optimized equipment? Focus on paying attention to the temperature and getting good at pulling pieces at the right time.

That sounds like a good time to me personally.

 

[Emeal]

I love this as a suggestion, but its a huge system for some subjective values I don't necessarily agree with Tedium is bad, Skill-expression is good, RNG is bad.

I'm pretty fond of Tyron's game design vibe around this game so far and I don't see how that fits into those design cores OP talk about, which is purely subjective and up to us.
I think OP is skilled with language for sure the post is magnificent, but I do find some of the proposals to be easier to claim to be true than actually would be, for instance fun.

OR skill-expression which then suddenly locks you out of options if you cant perform it well. Not a big fan of that. Should we add skill-expression to baking bread?

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think it's probably a scenario where a mod could really shine. Such a mod would take a lot of effort to make, to be sure, but then it would offer players an alternative to the more basic vanilla interpretation, as well as act as a valuable test to see which kind of gameplay players actually prefer. If the mod's proof-of-concept proved to be popular enough, then the devs might consider reworking the vanilla system to be more like what you've proposed. Of course it's also possible that players try the mod and decide they prefer the simpler route, but in that case the mod is still there for those who want a more realistic interpretation.

Aye, I remember making a similar point in a different place entirely. I was actually asked in the Discord whether I would be fine with this post being used as the basis for a mod, though whether anything will come out of it I can't say. It would naturally be quite interesting to see how the mechanics work out in practice - there's nothing quite like having an actual working example to verify whether what I've thought up actually makes sense.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Oh it definitely happens. I snapped a hammer head the other day despite the fact that it had never been quenched and was below quenching temperature. Now I'm not 100% sure that was intended behavior, but I've learned to be a bit more patient as a result.

The mythical 5% shatter chance on first quenching strikes again, it seems. It's not communicated in the tooltip, but that's what it does in the code, and I don't remember whether the devs confirmed what the intention was. As for the shattering bug, I might have just glossed over a mention of the watering can.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm just guessing here, but I think the main idea is to give the players a way to further improve their gear in a way that's at least somewhat realistic, if a bit videogamey. There are some inconsistencies, but that's to be expected from a freshly implemented system that's still being worked on. As for the benefits/drawbacks of tempering and quenching, yes the player can achieve some ridiculous numbers, but I think the question there is...how much time and patience does the player have to achieve those numbers? They could roll the dice and get really lucky, and get a super item without much effort, but I think in most cases getting the crazy numbers will take a lot of time and material due to workpieces getting snapped in the process. In my case, the strategy I roll with is quenching at least once on most items, with a few more quenches sometimes on a weapon to boost the power by around 25%. It's enough of a power boost to make a noticeable different in combat, especially for things that can be sharpened, but not so much of a boost that it's going to be too risky to pull off or too demanding on time. I'm also guessing that most players will probably settle for similar strategies, though I could be wrong.

To hopefully clarify what I mean a bit:

• handbook inconsistency => the handbook states that a piece can only be tempered at most as many times as it has been quenched, but there is simply no such limit in the game,
• debuffs of tempering outweigh its benefits => due to the way it is balanced, the effects of tempering are minimal or even purely detrimental (especially on a piece which has already been quenched a few times due to the reduction to power acting on the cumulative effect of previous quenchings and the reduction to shatter chance acting on the subsequent ones); the math for it is a bit complex and would require proper optimization to find optimal sequences (people have messed with it in this thread), but either way the actual material savings you can get from it are very minuscule, and are also counterweighed by the time and fuel costs - a newer player would probably be better off if tempering just didn't exist in the current balance,
• costs and risks of quenching for durability outweigh its benefits => the first quenching for durability gives 1.2 / 1 * 0.95 - 1 = 14% more expected durability per unit of metal, the second one gives 1.3(6) / 1.2 * 0.9 - 1 = 2.5% more expected durability per unit of metal, then after that it's net negative (especially if you also consider clay, fuel and time costs); tempering trades time and fuel for lower shatter chance but the difference is again minuscule - a player who looks at the math will just realize that it's practically not worth it past the first iteration, but someone will inevitably try going for higher durability and realize too late that they're wasting time and resources.

As for quenching for power giving sometimes absurd results, I do agree that most players will not really be reaching them, but consider this:

• the damage increase from copper to tin bronze for a falx is 4.5 / 3.75 - 1 = 20%,
• the default damage increase from tin bronze to iron for a falx is 5 / 4.5 - 1 = ~11%,
• even a very achievable 25.48% damage buff (quenched three times with no tempering, on average making one piece out of ~1.4 ingots), from tin bronze to quenched iron makes for a (5 * 1.2548) / 4.5 - 1 = ~39% damage increase,
• from iron to meteoric iron or steel (which deal the same damage), it's just 5.25 / 5 = 5%.

One of these is not like the other, so to speak. While I overall do agree that going past 3, maybe 4 quenchings is neither practical nor particularly impactful for the average player, even the 25% buff causes a really drastic jump over bronze, and a very significant balance shift relative to 1.21. Keep in mind as well that the damage bonus currently doesn't work on spears when thrown, and can't be applied at all to arrows, which significantly shifts late-game balance in favor of melee weapons (and that is also on top of sharpening currently only being possible on swords and falxes). Is all of that intentional? Maybe. Quenching gets counterbalanced somewhat by the changes to the forge. It kind of annoys me that we just don't really have any official information on what the long-term goals are here, but that jump over bronze (combined with a durability increase) is really kind of questionable balance-wise, especially given that it currently only affects melee weapons.

The system ultimately isn't as terrible as I might sometimes make it come off as, and the least that I can give to you that it will most likely work fairly well for a more casual player.

 

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

As far as popularity is concerned, I don't think it's an accident that the OP of this thread has more positive reacts than any non-Tyron post I've seen on these boards, and over twice as many reacts as the RC1 thread it was linked in. That the post managed to be this compelling and engaging despite a lot of relatively technical language says something, both about the quality of the suggestion in isolation, and the comparison with the current RNG-heavy and not all that much simpler implementation currently out in the RCs. 

Frankly, linking this suggestion in the RC post and on the Discord (at least three times if you also count when it was brought up by other people without me asking) has got me a number of reactions from people who aren't normally active on these forums, and there's always a chance that a few of these reactions are knee-jerk over the RNG more than supportive of the suggestion, so I prefer to take that number with a grain of salt when compared to posts which get the majority of interactions from people more active in the forums. Still, the amount of positive feedback was genuinely kind of shocking.

Edited April 10 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

6 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

One of these is not like the other, so to speak. While I overall do agree that going past 3, maybe 4 quenchings is neither practical nor particularly impactful for the average player, even the 25% buff causes a really drastic jump over bronze, and a very significant balance shift relative to 1.21. Keep in mind as well that the damage bonus currently doesn't work on spears when thrown, and can't be applied at all to arrows, which significantly shifts late-game balance in favor of melee weapons. Is all of that intentional? Maybe. Quenching gets counterbalanced somewhat by the changes to the forge. It kind of annoys me that we just don't really have any official information on what the long-term goals are here, but that jump over bronze (combined with a durability increase) is really kind of questionable balance-wise, especially given that it currently only affects melee weapons.

The system ultimately isn't as terrible as I might sometimes make it come off as, and the least that I can give to you that it will most likely work fairly well for a more casual player.

Yeah. In fairness, I think in many ways that if players aren't intended to be chasing the super weapons/tools, then putting a hard cap on how many times they can quench a workpiece is a better solution than allowing them to quench as many times as they want, for a really high risk and material cost. The latter isn't exactly the worst thing either, since sometimes you just want to roll the dice and make something super powerful once in a while, even if the cost isn't practical at all. 

As for the power jump from bronze to iron, I still think it's fine. It is a big jump, yes, but so is the jump from copper to bronze and part of the boost from iron equipment relies on the player quenching and sharpening their weapons and tools. When the player first achieves iron, they may not want to jump right into that immediately, since breaking a workpiece is more of a loss at that point and they may not have the setup for running a grindstone without shuffling parts around(which they may or may not want to do). 

Regarding iron vs steel, it's not the power that's the benefit here, as much as it is the durability. Steel tools last around twice as long as iron ones, by default, and I'd imagine the gap only widens with quenching once for durability. Players could still choose to ignore steel, I think, and be fine, but personally I prefer having my stuff last for a long time before needing to replace it.

16 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Aye, I remember making a similar point in a different place entirely. I was actually asked in the Discord whether I would be fine with this post being used as the basis for a mod, though whether anything will come out of it I can't say. It would naturally be quite interesting to see how the mechanics work out in practice - there's nothing quite like having an actual working example to verify whether what I've thought up actually makes sense.

Here's to hoping! I daresay if/when a mod like that turns up on the database, I'll give a try to see how well the system stacks up against vanilla.

[Nuclear_Trinity]

I can't say that I've read the entire thread (It's very long so far), but I have read a good portion of the original post and many of the replies.

 

I agree with OP 100%.  A simplified version of the real-life process makes a lot more sense than being able to repeatedly quench (???) a tool head.  I took a material science course which spent the entire second half of the course focusing on iron & steel properties, including quenching & tempering.  Needless to say, OP is correct about the physics.  To respect realism (as seems to be a big priority for The devs), the current system should at least be reworked to fit OP's idea a bit better (in my opinion).  

[Jacsmac]

I was mulling over this thread and thought of a suggestion:

The heat treatment process should not store Power and Durability bonuses on the work item, rather it should have Brittleness and Hardness. Quenching would increase both, and tempering would decrease both (but decrease the brittleness faster than hardness). The hardness adds power and durability to the tool, but the brittleness subtracts from the durability only.

Since tempering is all about balancing out durability and power bonuses, perhaps it would be more intuitive if the goal was to decrease a visible 'brittleness' quantity while keeping the hardness at an acceptable level. A player could also opt out of tempering to keep the highest DPS/mining speed but with reduced durability, a better trade-off than repeatedly quenching the workpiece and gambling the entire piece of metal.

Perhaps crafting recipes for mechanical parts/gates and doors could also require iron parts with specific hardness/brittleness values, though I imagine this would be too tedious for players.

As an alternative to switching out Power/Durability for Brittleness/Hardness: the workpiece gains Power and Durability when quenching but is inflicted with an effect that reduces the durability which decreases/goes away after adequate tempering (i.e. 'Brittle, -10% durability' on top of 'Quenched, +10% power +20% durability'). This would still require tempering for the optimal durability increase but would not change how the current two-stat system looks.