Is charcoal no longer hot enough to make an iron anvil?

[wintif]

I am playing 1.22 for the first time and after forging my iron anvil pieces, I am unable to actually join them, it saying that the lower anvil piece isnt hot enough (even though it is at the highest temp for charcoal, 750 C)

Wondering if this is just new balancing or a bug

[Nathan Flaminio]

Sounds like a bug, or maybe it's cooling too quickly. 

I usually get the temps up to over 800° to smith (830-850°). 

Just to check something else, you did put Borax on it, right? 

[wintif]

how are you getting those temps in the forge? Charcoal is capping at 750 for me, do I now need a coke oven to reach the required temps?

[MKMoose]

3 minutes ago, wintif said:

how are you getting those temps in the forge?

You can use bellows to raise the temperature of the forge above the default maximum for a given fuel type. Coke has the highest maximum of all fuel types at 800 °C (700 °C is the baseline, and you can see the bonus in the tooltip). Both of them are viable to make an iron anvil which requires at least 800 °C, although bellows will generally be easier to make and more broadly useful than coke.

[wintif]

I totally forgot about those! Thank you so much

1 minute ago, MKMoose said:

You can use bellows to raise the temperature of the forge

 

[Facethief]

17 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Coke has the highest maximum of all fuel types at 800 °C (700 °C is the baseline, and you can see the bonus in the tooltip). Both of them are viable to make an iron anvil which requires at least 800 °C, although bellows will generally be easier to make and more broadly useful than coke.

…Seriously, what is coke even for? It takes fire clay and iron to make, and I’ve never heard of it being used in-game, despite my real-world blacksmithing experience suggesting that it’s like 50% of the solid fuel used for forges (sample size of 2, and in the modern day…).

[MKMoose]

1 hour ago, Facethief said:

…Seriously, what is coke even for? It takes fire clay and iron to make, and I’ve never heard of it being used in-game, despite my real-world blacksmithing experience suggesting that it’s like 50% of the solid fuel used for forges (sample size of 2, and in the modern day…).

The only significant use for it in the game is smelting pentlandite, most notably smelting it into cupronickel, which is otherwise unobtainable without coke and is necessary for Jonas tech. Besides that, coke is currently mostly useless.

 

On a side note, realistically, one of the main drivers of coke use in metallurgy was that heavy labor and rapid deforestation involved with producing charcoal made it actually less practical and economical than coke in many regions. Coke also burns hotter than charcoal, which had significant impact on the development of more advanced blast furnaces in Europe.

The main problem of coke in the game is that it only has one major use and for everything else it's just horribly inefficient, so if the required temperature threshold can be reached with other fuels, then it is virtually always better to use those other fuels and not coke. The exact numbers are very inconsistent and differ depending on whether you're using them in a firepit, forge or as block fuel in a cementation furnace or beehive kiln. I'd have to double-check the forge as that has changed in 1.22, but take the firepit:

• brown coal - 1100 °C, 77 s - can be converted into coke at a 2:1 ratio,
• black coal - 1200 °C, 84 s - can be converted into coke at a 4:3 ratio,
• coke - 1340 °C, 40 s - effectively 3.85x lower duration than brown coal and 2.8x lower duration than black coal - higher temperature really doesn't make up for this in most cases.

The cementation furnace and beehive kiln are actually even more questionable, because there is virtually no difference between a coke block and any other coal block when used as fuel for them, so converting coal to coke before use ends up strictly net negative with absolutely zero benefit.

Edited Wednesday at 03:33 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I'd have to double-check the forge as that has changed in 1.22

At a glance, coke feels like a prime forge material in 1.22, since it burns hotter and seems to burn longer than charcoal. I've not done the math to be certain though. I daresay charcoal will still win in most cases though, since it's so easily obtained and a quality fuel. Black coal is good but can be difficult to find in my experience. Brown coal is easy to find but a poor source of forge fuel as far as I'm concerned.  Brown coal is one that I would definitely be turning into coke before using as a forge fuel.

I definitely want to experiment a little more with coke fuel though. It's probably still going to be a niche fuel for quite a while, but may be more worth investing in if there is lots of coal around.

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The cementation furnace and beehive kiln are actually even more questionable, because there is virtually no difference between a coke block and any other coal block when used as fuel for them, so converting coal to coke before use ends up strictly net negative with absolutely zero benefit.

Beehive kiln I always use peat. The cementation furnace will accept any kind of coal fuel underneath, but for the coffin itself you have to use charcoal or coke. Most players probably use charcoal just because it tends to be cheaper.

[MKMoose]

9 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

At a glance, coke feels like a prime forge material in 1.22, since it burns hotter and seems to burn longer than charcoal. I've not done the math to be certain though. I daresay charcoal will still win in most cases though, since it's so easily obtained and a quality fuel. Black coal is good but can be difficult to find in my experience. Brown coal is easy to find but a poor source of forge fuel as far as I'm concerned.  Brown coal is one that I would definitely be turning into coke before using as a forge fuel.

I definitely want to experiment a little more with coke fuel though. It's probably still going to be a niche fuel for quite a while, but may be more worth investing in if there is lots of coal around.

I've looked at it, and it turns out that the tooltip for the duration bonus is misleading. It has to be treated as a multiplier and not a bonus (which is what it is under the hood, e.g. 150% duration multiplier rather than +150% bonus), or you can just subtract 100% from the value in the tooltip to get the actual bonus (e.g. +50% bonus when the tooltip says +150%). The baseline duration is two in-game hours.

There is also one type of fuel that I'm gonna mention which has the temperature and duration properties for fuel in a forge, but doesn't meet the condition that allows it to actually be used there currently, and that is contaminated coal (found in high quantities in the refinery).

Barring those caveats, it goes as follows:

• contaminated coal - 1.4 h duration, 500 °C - if it was actually usable, it could be used for tin and bismuth bronze even without bellows; also sufficient for forging brass, silver, molybdochalkos and of course all low melting point metals like bismuth,
• lignite - 2.4 h duration, 600 °C - suitable for copper and all types of bronze without bellows; can reach the tempering range without bellows; also sufficient for forging gold, electrum and cupronickel, 
• bituminous coal - 3.0 h duration, 700 °C - highest temperature safe for tempering, i.e. an item left in the forge will not exceed maximum tempering temperature,
• anthracite - 4.0 h duration, 700 °C - honestly quite disappointing, anthracite is much rarer than black coal and has double its duration in the firepit,
• charcoal - 2.0 h duration, 750 °C - the first fuel which can handle iron without bellows (although it's not sufficient for welding an iron anvil),
• coke - 2.0 h duration, 800 °C - the highest temperature, but still doesn't allow quenching without bellows (probably a good design decision, but it certainly devalues coke).

And keep in mind that all types of fuel (even contaminated coal, if it was usable) can actually reach the quenching temperature (albeit for contaminated coal it requires to use bellows a lot), so frankly I don't see much purpose for coke in vanilla forging. If you're curious, if only for the sake of your Improved Quenching mod, brown coal reaches at most 985.7 °C with bellows, whereas black coal and anthracite reach 1150 °C. The general formula is MaxTemperature * 1150 / 700.

Edited Thursday at 07:51 AM by MKMoose

[Professor Dragon]

I've just made my first iron anvil on the current stable release.

That was an experience! I'm pretty sure that I used 12+ iron ingots for the anvil, rather than the 10 (5 top, 5 bottom) the wiki says you need. (Not sure why.)

I ran two forges, one with a bellows, and a "fast enough" helve hammer. 

Apart from the usual difficulty of getting the voxels into the right place, as others have noticed, the bigger the pieces get, the faster they lose heat, which I agree is counter-intuitive.

One last key point is that you really need to heat up the top and bottom pieces before applying the Borax and hammering them together. The "good enough" heat you use to add the iron pieces to the anvil bits is too low to actually do the anvil join. It needs to be 900C or above - I took it to 1000C and that worked. But 750 - 800C was not enough.

Professor Dragon.