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 2 hours ago by MKMoose