How long is a week, and does it vary with the setting for length of a month?

[coolAlias]

So I just started my journey toward steel on a standard 9 days per month game and, after 2 days of charcoal, it is only 39% complete.

The handbook says it should take a week, but how long many days is that in a 9-day month? Seems to be 5 by my calculation, so just over half the month.

Is this normal? Am I really going to have to destroy an entire forest just to get 16 steel ingots?

The requirement seems ridiculously excessive. Please tell me I am missing something.

[Thorfinn]

A bit hyperbolic, but, yeah, it takes a lot of charcoal. That's why I stick with mostly iron tools. The improvement you get from steel tools is dwarfed by the amount of extra effort it takes to produce them. Coke makes it a lot more practical, assuming you can find the materials for the bombs, but it is still a lot of work to build that many coke ovens.

[coolAlias]

48 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

A bit hyperbolic, but, yeah, it takes a lot of charcoal. That's why I stick with mostly iron tools. The improvement you get from steel tools is dwarfed by the amount of extra effort it takes to produce them. Coke makes it a lot more practical, assuming you can find the materials for the bombs, but it is still a lot of work to build that many coke ovens.

Yeah, apologies, just sick of chopping and cooking wood. 

Hyperbole aside, do you know how long an in-game week is and whether it varies with the length of the month?

[LadyWYT]

39 minutes ago, coolAlias said:

do you know how long an in-game week is and whether it varies with the length of the month?

An in-game week is seven days. An in-game month will vary, and is nine in-game days by default. The processing time for steel will always take about an in-game week, to my knowledge, and does not scale with the month length.

[coolAlias]

3 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

An in-game week is seven days. An in-game month will vary, and is nine in-game days by default. The processing time for steel will always take about an in-game week, to my knowledge, and does not scale with the month length.

Would be nice if it scaled like I believe crops and some other things do.

A week being 7 days out of 9 in a default month is a bit much for my taste.

[LadyWYT]

10 minutes ago, coolAlias said:

Would be nice if it scaled like I believe crops and some other things do.

A week being 7 days out of 9 in a default month is a bit much for my taste.

It's a bit goofy on the scaling, but realistically steel takes quite a bit of effort to process, at least by medieval methods, which the game is trying to reflect. Playing with 30 day months puts the game as a whole on a more realistic time scale, but the drawback there is it's going to take the player a really long time to do things like farming or livestock domestication. Additionally, the seasons will drag on perhaps a little longer than is really interesting.

My strategy for steel-making is to run two refractories at once. Takes quite a bit of effort to set up, to be sure, but the output is going to be 32 ingots per firing rather than just 16. The refractories are also a convenient place to warm up in winter as well. For fuel, I'll often use brown coal, if I have access to it, but usually I'm building a really big charcoal pit(think close to maximum size). Takes a lot of work to fill, but produces around a couple full crates of charcoal per firing, so I don't need to fire it that often.

[coolAlias]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

For fuel, I'll often use brown coal...

We can cook steel with brown coal?!?!? That's everywhere in my world. I thought I had to use charcoal, which is in my opinion a huge pain to make at scale.

Cooking it with brown coal instead will be a game changer, thank you!

[LadyWYT]

4 minutes ago, coolAlias said:

We can cook steel with brown coal?!?!? That's everywhere in my world. I thought I had to use charcoal, which is in my opinion a huge pain to make at scale.

Cooking it with brown coal instead will be a game changer, thank you!

You can! I think it's slightly less efficient than other coal types, but not to the point it's a waste to use it. You will need charcoal or coke for the coffins though, as no other fuel type is appropriately carbonated.

[coolAlias]

Yeah no problem filling the coffin with charcoal, that's no big deal.

But firing the cavity underneath and seeing progress creep along was draining all my motivation to play, perhaps because I incorrectly assumed a week would scale with the month rather than be a fixed 7 day term.

[Thorfinn]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

You can! I think it's slightly less efficient than other coal types

Well, shoot! Not converting it to coke would make it a fair bit easier... Learn something new every day.

[EnbyKaiju]

4 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Well, shoot! Not converting it to coke would make it a fair bit easier... Learn something new every day.

This is something I love about Vintage Story. No matter how long you play it for you're always learning new stuff!

But yeah, by the time I'm up to steel production I'll have marked out a few decent coal mines just for that. It's a heck of a lot of work, but the final product is so worth it. (looks lovingly at my paired gold & silver falxes)