Iron sand

[Samoja]

In certain parts of Asia good quality iron ore was not really available. What they had to use instead was iron extracted from sand. It had way more impurities than regular Iron, so had to be folded to get them out, the process also stripped out the carbon, making for a softer iron, so it was usually forge welded with better quality steel, soft iron making the core.

I think it would be cool to recreate this process, especially if you could get small ammounts of steel from traders. You would be able to extract iron from certain kinds of sand, but it would be a special kind of iron not suitable to making tools and weapons, and would require a lot more hammering to get the slag out of it(with initial bloom having a lot of hidden slag voxels you would need to dig out), but adding a few chunks of steel to it would make a cheap, if not as durable, alternative to steel.

[Facethief]

How would it spawn? I feel like it would be fitting to see in basalt or other mafic rock types.

I do like the idea of having poor-quality iron. However, I’m not sure how this could be best executed outside of requiring multiple blooms for one ingot, as you seemed to suggest.

[LadyWYT]

21 minutes ago, Facethief said:

I do like the idea of having poor-quality iron. However, I’m not sure how this could be best executed outside of requiring multiple blooms for one ingot, as you seemed to suggest.

I'm not opposed to having a poor-quality iron source, but I doubt many players would be thrilled about needing multiple blooms to make a single ingot.

 

1 hour ago, Samoja said:

but adding a few chunks of steel to it would make a cheap, if not as durable, alternative to steel.

The problem here is that the player needs steel to make this work, and if they have steel then they not only have iron, but a better material than plain iron to boot. I don't really see how this is a good alternative to iron or steel.

[Samoja]

18 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm not opposed to having a poor-quality iron source, but I doubt many players would be thrilled about needing multiple blooms to make a single ingot.

 

The problem here is that the player needs steel to make this work, and if they have steel then they not only have iron, but a better material than plain iron to boot. I don't really see how this is a good alternative to iron or steel.

Like, what if you could buy steel nuggest from merchants, so this would basically work like an alloy. Now in the past VS devs have shown they care more about accuracy than simplicity, so I didn't want to go into too much detail. The most realistic way would be to make a basic shape out of this poor quality iron, and then add steel chunks one at a time at the cutting edge. This way you could potentially make a bladed weapon with as few as 4 steel chunks, 1/5th of the price of a steel weapon, which would have same cutting power, but less durability.

[LadyWYT]

26 minutes ago, Samoja said:

Like, what if you could buy steel nuggest from merchants, so this would basically work like an alloy. Now in the past VS devs have shown they care more about accuracy than simplicity, so I didn't want to go into too much detail. The most realistic way would be to make a basic shape out of this poor quality iron, and then add steel chunks one at a time at the cutting edge. This way you could potentially make a bladed weapon with as few as 4 steel chunks, 1/5th of the price of a steel weapon, which would have same cutting power, but less durability.

From a lore standpoint, steel is practically a lost art, with ironworking itself being a niche, sought-after skill and the majority of people having bronze gear, at best.

Spoiler

If you talk to the smith at Nadiya, she makes it pretty clear that iron equipment is the main trade of the settlement, and highly sought after since working that material is a bit of a lost art.

But from a practical standpoint, why would I want to buy steel, which is expensive, and then make an item that is worse than steel, rather than just making the steel weapon itself and having something that will last longer? If the steel is cheap to purchase, or only a nugget or two is required to make a "steel" item, and the durability is only a little worse(which can be easily mitigated by quenching for durability), then it might feel worth it for the player to craft, but introduces a bigger problem: now steel isn't going to feel like it's worth the effort, since it's a more labor-intensive process for the same results. Some players will already ignore steel because they don't feel it's worth the labor involved, so I don't think it's ideal to encourage even more players to skip steel by offering a cheap way to get the same stats but with less effort.

Also worth noting that meteoric iron already fills this niche too. It's better than iron and takes less effort to refine than either iron or steel, with less durability and slightly less attack than steel equipment. What keeps it balanced is that the player has to find and mine meteors for it, so supply is very limited and the player will need to seek out new sources when they run low. In contrast, trader goods are infinite--there's only so much that can be purchased at a time, yes, but the trader will refresh their stock periodically and the player can farm gears easily enough.

[Samoja]

4 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

From a lore standpoint, steel is practically a lost art, with ironworking itself being a niche, sought-after skill and the majority of people having bronze gear, at best.

  Reveal hidden contents

If you talk to the smith at Nadiya, she makes it pretty clear that iron equipment is the main trade of the settlement, and highly sought after since working that material is a bit of a lost art.

But from a practical standpoint, why would I want to buy steel, which is expensive, and then make an item that is worse than steel, rather than just making the steel weapon itself and having something that will last longer? If the steel is cheap to purchase, or only a nugget or two is required to make a "steel" item, and the durability is only a little worse(which can be easily mitigated by quenching for durability), then it might feel worth it for the player to craft, but introduces a bigger problem: now steel isn't going to feel like it's worth the effort, since it's a more labor-intensive process for the same results. Some players will already ignore steel because they don't feel it's worth the labor involved, so I don't think it's ideal to encourage even more players to skip steel by offering a cheap way to get the same stats but with less effort.

Also worth noting that meteoric iron already fills this niche too. It's better than iron and takes less effort to refine than either iron or steel, with less durability and slightly less attack than steel equipment. What keeps it balanced is that the player has to find and mine meteors for it, so supply is very limited and the player will need to seek out new sources when they run low. In contrast, trader goods are infinite--there's only so much that can be purchased at a time, yes, but the trader will refresh their stock periodically and the player can farm gears easily enough.

It's not an upgrade on steel, it's more of a sidegrade. You need only a few chunks of steel to make it, but it requires way more processing to make the iron. The benefit would be that you don't need to mine at all. So you can potentially get this material earlier in the game, perhaps even earlier than Iron itself. The downside is that it costs you gears, because as you stated, once you get steelmaking capability it's no longer worth it.

I think it's different enough to be worth implementing, and historically that's what people did so it clearly was worth it to them.

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, Samoja said:

It's not an upgrade on steel, it's more of a sidegrade. You need only a few chunks of steel to make it, but it requires way more processing to make the iron. The benefit would be that you don't need to mine at all. So you can potentially get this material earlier in the game, perhaps even earlier than Iron itself. The downside is that it costs you gears, because as you stated, once you get steelmaking capability it's no longer worth it.

I'm not sure how one is supposed to acquire and use this material before they get iron, since I mean...it requires iron to produce. 

Sidegrades aren't necessarily bad, but when they're easier to obtain or obviously more cost-effective than the general intended method of progression, I wouldn't really call them the best addition. Lore aside, if steel nuggets could be purchased from traders and worked into iron to get a material that's on the same level as steel...I'm probably not going to bother with steel anymore unless I absolutely have to, since there's no real point. If it remained a tier 3 material, then it obviously falls behind steel since it won't be able to mine/process ores like chromite and ilmenite and won't hold up to nightmare+ enemies. In this case, I can't say that I'd bother with the material at all, since iron would be cheaper, if not faster, to produce and meteoric iron is just a better version of plain iron.

I think a better solution would probably be to tweak meteoric iron to allow it to be worked on a bronze anvil instead. That way, the player can access iron earlier, in more limited quantities, while they work on locating a proper iron deposit or securing a source of bauxite and borax for steel production. I would even say that borax should be a resource sold by traders, since it's a multi-purpose material and not something typically needed in large quantities.

[Thorfinn]

My guess is the way to implement it is to put a low probability of an iron nugget into panning drops.

[Samoja]

25 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm not sure how one is supposed to acquire and use this material before they get iron, since I mean...it requires iron to produce. 

Sidegrades aren't necessarily bad, but when they're easier to obtain or obviously more cost-effective than the general intended method of progression, I wouldn't really call them the best addition. Lore aside, if steel nuggets could be purchased from traders and worked into iron to get a material that's on the same level as steel...I'm probably not going to bother with steel anymore unless I absolutely have to, since there's no real point. If it remained a tier 3 material, then it obviously falls behind steel since it won't be able to mine/process ores like chromite and ilmenite and won't hold up to nightmare+ enemies. In this case, I can't say that I'd bother with the material at all, since iron would be cheaper, if not faster, to produce and meteoric iron is just a better version of plain iron.

I think a better solution would probably be to tweak meteoric iron to allow it to be worked on a bronze anvil instead. That way, the player can access iron earlier, in more limited quantities, while they work on locating a proper iron deposit or securing a source of bauxite and borax for steel production. I would even say that borax should be a resource sold by traders, since it's a multi-purpose material and not something typically needed in large quantities.

Well, not any iron, it would just be this type of iron that you could do it. That would prevent people just using this as a cheat to make steel early. It's not as strange as it may sound, since this type of iron is softer than regular iron, that's the whole point. In order to make regular iron useful in the same way you would need to "ruin" it.

I also think this material shouldn't be able to be quenched multiple times, IDK if that's the case for real life material, but I do know the reason why Japanese swords are curved for example, is that two different types of iron bend differently, so quenching it over and over would likely introduce unecessary shearing force. So there, another tradeoff for this material.

There are ways to make it happen, and again, it existed historically, which in my book is good enough reason to try and implement it. 

[Samoja]

18 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

My guess is the way to implement it is to put a low probability of an iron nugget into panning drops.

I don't think that would mimic the way iron sands work at all TBH, iron sands are basically tiny bits of iron mixed with typical sand like silica and such, they require a lot more processing to extract, and produce soft iron because carbon is removed along with other impurities. This idea depicts none of this.

[Thorfinn]

No, it wouldn't. I was just suggesting something that would give roughly the same result, but not require sacrifice of steel, nor use a bunch of too-valuable fire clay.

[EDIT]

Glass does not currently use sand, but I could see something similar in a bloom which, for the right kind of sand, also gave a percentage chance of dropping an iron bit.

Edited May 5 by Thorfinn

[Samoja]

2 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

No, it wouldn't. I was just suggesting something that would give roughly the same result, but not require sacrifice of steel, nor use a bunch of too-valuable fire clay.

Well, that's not how VS usually does things in my experience, realism tends to come over simplicity. Also IDK what you mean by fire clay.

[Thorfinn]

You need fire clay to make fire bricks to make bloomeries.

You would be surprised at the corners cut. Glass, for instance, requires soda ash, yet not in-game. Additionally, all silicates could be used, including sandstone and chert, yet presumably for balance reasons, it's quartz chunks only.

[EDIT]

But knock yourself out. Sounds like an easy enough mod, though presumably you want to add an iron sands block. Still fairly easy, but a little more involved.

Edited May 5 by Thorfinn

[Samoja]

53 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

You need fire clay to make fire bricks to make bloomeries.

You would be surprised at the corners cut. Glass, for instance, requires soda ash, yet not in-game. Additionally, all silicates could be used, including sandstone and chert, yet presumably for balance reasons, it's quartz chunks only.

[EDIT]

But knock yourself out. Sounds like an easy enough mod, though presumably you want to add an iron sands block. Still fairly easy, but a little more involved.

Well, I don't know exactly how you would do it, I would need to do more research, but I'm pretty sure processing of Iron sands is simper on that front, you don't need as high a temperature for it.

[Thorfinn]

Sure, but to fold it into steel, if you wanted to remain consistent with vanilla, you need an iron anvil. Once you find iron, you find so much that the only people who would make an inferior version (presumably) of a steel weapon is someone who was hardcore into the roleplay aspect.

If you are allowing it to be done on a bronze anvil, the only thing that makes practical sense to me, then you would probably need to add iron sand as a valid input to the forge, then come up with a recipe similar to the iron bloom, striking off "slag", and resulting in an iron sand billet. Then use a smithing recipe to merge a few into a "core", a recipe to flatten a steel pillow, and a recipe to fold the steel around the core. Repeatedly, presumably, since the same culture gives us the multiply-folded blades.

Wouldn't be too terribly hard to do, but unless you allow forging on a bronze anvil, I suspect it would be one of the least used mechanics in the game.

[cjameshuff]

Flint and clay are not hard to find, so fire clay is only scarce until you build your first bloomery for efficiently calcining flint.

A special type of iron that's only useful for extending steel in a particular type of laminated blade doesn't make much sense, especially when the fact that you have steel means you have a way of adding the carbon needed to turn it into steel. Wouldn't the fact that it's scarcer/more labor intensive make it even more desirable to carburize it to maximize the return on investment?

Another early iron source would be bog iron. And meteoric iron, if the requirement for an iron anvil is removed (which really doesn't make sense anyway).