forging Quenching and tempering are overly gamified

[Jacsmac]

2 minutes ago, Jacsmac said:

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.

I know this is basically a repeat of the original suggestion, but I can't get this off of my mind after playing the prerelease. The base game implementation just bothers me this much.

[Jacsmac]

5 minutes ago, Jacsmac said:

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.

Also, a strict implementation of this idea would still promote requenching. Obviously heating the metal back up to the quenching temperature should either rapidly undo all heat treatment progress or make the metal ridiculously brittle after requenching to properly convey that this is the wrong way to gain more stats.

[MKMoose]

9 hours ago, Jacsmac said:

The heat treatment process should not store Power and Durability bonuses on the work item, rather it should have Brittleness and Hardness.

Technically, this is what the game kind of already does, because the power and durability effects applied by quenching don't do anything by themselves and are only used to then apply damage and other buffs which actually affect the tool's stats. At a basic level, this change could boil down to just renaming a few things, not necessarily significant changes to the underlying functionality.

"Power" and "durability" have one advantage over "hardness" and "brittleness" or "toughness", and it is that they more directly tell the player what they actually do in-game. That said, even for players completely unfamiliar with material properties, I think it shouldn't be difficult to remember the rough meaning and in-game effects of two or three words, and it might actually be more of a cool learning opportunity of sorts.

 

10 hours ago, Jacsmac said:

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.

One thing I would be careful to avoid is excessive imbalance between the complexity of different areas of gameplay. If crafting with metal is given a bunch of constraints regarding hardness or toughness, then it would seem natural that crafting with wood, bone, stone, sand, leather or other materials should also be given some constraints to prevent the player from using materials which wouldn't realistically be suitable for a given purpose. Certain mechanical parts technically already require harder wood types, but the current implementation doesn't make that requirement very clear.

But that said, I think it would at the very least make a lot of sense to apply the bonuses of heat treatment to anything that can benefit from them. If an item or something crafted from it has durability, then it should likely be possible to increase that durability by increasing toughness. While currently very few items can benefit from this, I think it could be possible to treat plates to craft them into better armor. Item stackability concerns would have to be addressed for this to work well, though.

 

10 hours ago, Jacsmac said:

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.

10 hours ago, Jacsmac said:

'Brittle, -10% durability' on top of 'Quenched, +10% power +20% durability'

Aye, I like both of those. Would help a lot to make the effects clearer and nudge the player towards the optimal treatment order.

[NastyFlytrap]

8 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Technically, this is what the game kind of already does, because the power and durability effects applied by quenching don't do anything by themselves and are only used to then apply damage and other buffs which actually affect the tool's stats. At a basic level, this change could boil down to just renaming a few things, not necessarily significant changes to the underlying functionality.

"Power" and "durability" have one advantage over "hardness" and "brittleness" or "toughness", and it is that they more directly tell the player what they actually do in-game. That said, even for players completely unfamiliar with material properties, I think it shouldn't be difficult to remember the rough meaning and in-game effects of two or three words, and it might actually be more of a cool learning opportunity of sorts.

 

One thing I would be careful to avoid is excessive imbalance between the complexity of different areas of gameplay. If crafting with metal is given a bunch of constraints regarding hardness or toughness, then it would seem natural that crafting with wood, bone, stone, sand, leather or other materials should also be given some constraints to prevent the player from using materials which wouldn't realistically be suitable for a given purpose. Certain mechanical parts technically already require harder wood types, but the current implementation doesn't make that requirement very clear.

But that said, I think it would at the very least make a lot of sense to apply the bonuses of heat treatment to anything that can benefit from them. If an item or something crafted from it has durability, then it should likely be possible to increase that durability by increasing toughness. While currently very few items can benefit from this, I think it could be possible to treat plates to craft them into better armor. Item stackability concerns would have to be addressed for this to work well, though.

 

Aye, I like both of those. Would help a lot to make the effects clearer and nudge the player towards the optimal treatment order.

I dont know. Maybe i'm just misinterpreting what he wrote but this sounds like a 'quench temper then requench retemper' ad infinitum system, until your tool is either broken or you have enough to your liking.

[Jacsmac]

23 minutes ago, NastyFlytrap said:

I dont know. Maybe i'm just misinterpreting what he wrote but this sounds like a 'quench temper then requench retemper' ad infinitum system, until your tool is either broken or you have enough to your liking.

To be clear, I was pointing out a flaw in my suggestion when I quoted myself. Requenching should never be used to gain rewards, only redo the heat treatment process in case of mistakes.

Edited April 16 by Jacsmac

[NastyFlytrap]

2 minutes ago, Jacsmac said:

To be clear, I was pointing out a flaw in my suggestion. Requenching should never be used to gain rewards, only redo the heat treatment process in case of mistakes.

Alright, so, how would the system work exactly? The player gets one quench and temper to get bonuses and thats all? Just one flat bonus at the end of it all? Unless they want to redo it but then it erases everything and starts from scratch so it doesnt really make a difference. I dont know how the actual practical gameplay steps would look like.

[Jacsmac]

 

10 minutes ago, NastyFlytrap said:

The player gets one quench and temper to get bonuses and thats all?

Yes, exactly. I think the original suggestion says something similar to this too. 
A good quench raises a metal to the highest hardness/brittleness that you would want or expect for the heat treating process before you start tempering. The purpose of tempering is to make the metal softer, making it more durable (less brittle) with the trade-off being less hardness (more susceptible to deformation). For example, a pickaxe should be quenched to make it hard enough to mine faster, but tempered so it doesn't operate in bomb mode (shatters too easily) instead of pickaxe mode.

Tempering (metallurgy) - Wikipedia

Edited April 16 by Jacsmac

[NastyFlytrap]

2 minutes ago, Jacsmac said:

 

Yes, exactly. I think the original suggestion says something similar to this too. 
A good quench raises a metal to the highest hardness/brittleness that you would want or expect for the heat treating process before you start tempering. The purpose of tempering is to make the metal softer, making it more durable (less brittle) with the trade-off being less hardness (more susceptible to deformation). For example, a pickaxe should be quenched to make it hard enough to mine faster, but tempered so it doesn't operate in bomb mode (shatters too easily) instead of pickaxe mode.

Tempering (metallurgy) - Wikipedia

I-, well, yeah, as far as i understand the original suggestion said something like this but the original suggestion gave it some depth, like different stats depending on how perfectly you get the temperature and the quenching times right, etc, while to me, yours just sounded like a 'you did quench? Here's a flat bonus', kinda mechanic which is too simplistic. I want it to have depth.

 

I really liked the idea of the player having to estimate the temperature from the colour of it, like a real blacksmith, and depending how close you get to the sweet spot your stats get better or worse.

[Jacsmac]

Okay, I see where you're coming from. I wasn't trying to replace the original suggestion, but rather the Power and Durability terminology with Hardness and Brittleness (and agreeing that requenching should only be done to "redo" the heat treatment process). I think the level of skill expression involved in the original post makes for the best addition to the game.

Edited April 16 by Jacsmac

[NastyFlytrap]

Just now, Jacsmac said:

Okay, I see where you're coming from. I wasn't trying to replace the original suggestion, but rather the Power and Durability terminology with Hardness and Brittleness. I think the level of skill expression involved in the original post makes for the best addition to the game.

Okay, so, in your opinion, what does Hardness and Brittleness mean in terms of game mechanics?

[Jacsmac]

I think that relating Hardness and Brittleness to the heat treatment process rather than just the base stats will help convey why each process is done; the player will know that they should make their tools less brittle intuitively, encouraging them to temper for more durability even at the expense of less power. If the two stats obscure the real stat bonuses too much, I don't think it would be a horrible idea to just list them in the item description like they are now and treat the brittleness/hardness as the addends ('Brittle, -x% durability' 'Hardness xx, +x% power and durability')

In terms of gameplay mechanics, stat bonus optimization would be largely the same as MkMoose's original suggestion (correct temperatures, quenching times, etc.) Rather than just the power and durability being increased perhaps the hardness and brittleness can change by certain amounts based on how well each part of the process goes (better quenching severity could mean less brittleness to start, better tempering could reduce hardness less). 

It's mostly a way to rephrase power and durability in a more concrete terminology to make the end goal more intuitive.
Feel free to let me know where I should elaborate/you have an idea to modify my suggestion (and just to clarify: I 100% agree with the original thread's in-depth heat treatment system suggested by MKMoose).

[NastyFlytrap]

3 minutes ago, Jacsmac said:

Brittle, -x% durability' 'Hardness xx, +x% power and durability

Okay, so its just an opinion on the wording of his mechanics.

Alright, this i like.

 

That being said, as someone who is mostly familiar with metallurgy, the idea of the player intuitively figuring it out would work out for me, but would it go like that for someone who knows nothing about metallic alloys, metalworking, material science, etc?

[Jacsmac]

1 minute ago, NastyFlytrap said:

That being said, as someone who is mostly familiar with metallurgy, the idea of the player intuitively figuring it out would work out for me, but would it go like that for someone who knows nothing about metallic alloys, metalworking, material science, etc?

Well, the player already has to learn where to find reeds, how to dry clay pots and molds, survey for ores, domesticate animals, tan leather, solve puzzles, fight creatures from hell, propagate berry bushes, prevent cave-ins, and rotate crops. I think that real Vintage Story enjoyers are prepared to be patient and learn new things.

It's not out of the question that a mechanic that requires the player to learn something will get added to the game, so I believe gameplay processes should be better at teaching players why things work certain ways in real life while allowing those with existing knowledge to not feel confused by random inaccuracies. 

 

[NastyFlytrap]

1 minute ago, Jacsmac said:

Well, the player already has to learn where to find reeds, how to dry clay pots and molds, survey for ores, domesticate animals, tan leather, solve puzzles, fight creatures from hell, propagate berry bushes, prevent cave-ins, and rotate crops. I think that real Vintage Story enjoyers are prepared to be patient and learn new things.

It's not out of the question that a mechanic that requires the player to learn something will get added to the game, so I believe gameplay processes should be better at teaching players why things work certain ways in real life while allowing those with existing knowledge to not feel confused by random inaccuracies. 

 

Okay but most of those things have nice explanations in the handbook, which this proposed rework sorely needs, otherwise i feel it would make sense only to us, the ones 'in the know', which, yes, most of us, the main community, have a good, wide general knowledge of everything in this world, but there are still people out there who are more mainstream and not that familiar with niche fields like metallurgy.

 

If there was a nice handbook guide for this, then thats good enough. Something to match what we already have.