Michael Gates Posted August 10 Report Posted August 10 It appears that when you put an item on a forge, it heats until reaches the forge's max temperature, then starts a grace period of not-cooling, then cools fairly quickly. The trouble with this is, if you leave the item on for a while it's using up that grace period just sitting there. When you pull the item off you have a shortened grace period, or sometimes the item is already significantly cooled. My workflow with forges is such that it's not uncommon for me to pull a part-finished set of shears or iron spearpoint, and find it's already too cold to even put it on the anvil! The grace period should start when you PULL a fully-heated item off the forge, not while it's still sitting in the coals. Stuff gets even weirder when you put multiple ingots on a forge. The forge will say "temp: 750 C," but really one ingot can be fully heated while the other is significantly cooler. The text indicators should not lie to us: either make both ingots be 750 degrees when the forge says so, or make the forge say something like "L: 750 R: 713" when the ingots aren't the same. Ideally the of ingots should re-average their temp when you drop a new one on, just as the game already does when they're stacked on the floor or in inventory. I understand why y'all made cooling faster, how it makes working iron a little more interesting and motivates people to get a bellows set up. It needs to be consistent, though. Pulling a thing off the forge and having, I dunno, 30 seconds to mess with it is bothersome in a game-wants-me-to-suffer way, which is fine; pulling it and having (-5 + 45 * RND(1)) seconds is annoying in a feels-like-broken-software way, not so good.
Rainbow Fresh Posted August 10 Report Posted August 10 If this is actually the case for the forge's current fuel's base temperature then I agree it should be looked at. An item shouldn't start cooling immediately the second you take if off the forge just because it sat there waiting for its turn for a while. However for everything else I don't really agree. 4 hours ago, Michael Gates said: When you pull the item off you have a shortened grace period, or sometimes the item is already significantly cooled. The only way the item is "already significantly cooled" is when you use a bellows to temporarily heat the forge past the fuel's base temperature. So if you put in black coal (for base 700°) and use the bellows to heat it to 800° for iron smithing, it will eventually drop back down to 700° if you do not re-supply the air necessary to boost the coal's temperature. But it will never go below 700° for as long as black coal is still burning. This is intended and everything else would make no sense. If you'd just need a bellows to give it 2 pumps and be done for the remaining 2.5h of fuel there is no point to have reworked the forging system like this in the first place. It is also not how it works IRL, timing balance not accounted for. Maintaining the right heat for smithing is a conscious effort. 4 hours ago, Michael Gates said: The forge will say "temp: 750 C," but really one ingot can be fully heated while the other is significantly cooler. The text indicators should not lie to us: either make both ingots be 750 degrees when the forge says so, or make the forge say something like "L: 750 R: 713" when the ingots aren't the same. Ideally the of ingots should re-average their temp when you drop a new one on, just as the game already does when they're stacked on the floor or in inventory. I don't know if you have a mod that messes with things or I do, but that is how it already work from my experience. Had two iron ingots on the forge simmering in the black coal's 700° base temperature. Put a third, fresh, cold ingot on there as it didn't fit with the original stack of 4. The entire stack on the forge changes color from "glowing hot" to "just an ingot" in an instant as the displayed forge item temperature snaps down do 500 something. Granted, I did not test taking the fresh ingot off again to see if the underlying 2 ingot would snap back to their previous 700° or not, but the overall presentation of the item temperature did adjust for an averaged-out temperature like when stacking items. 4 hours ago, Michael Gates said: I understand why y'all made cooling faster, how it makes working iron a little more interesting and motivates people to get a bellows set up. It needs to be consistent, though. Pulling a thing off the forge and having, I dunno, 30 seconds to mess with it is bothersome in a game-wants-me-to-suffer way, which is fine; pulling it and having (-5 + 45 * RND(1)) seconds is annoying in a feels-like-broken-software way, not so good. Since bellows are already a thing and necessary for iron+ smithing now, broken or not underneath the bellows already fix this issue as well. Just... give the forge another pump before taking off the next work item. Resets the timer guaranteed because temperature is going up again.
Michael Gates Posted August 10 Author Report Posted August 10 8 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said: The only way the item is "already significantly cooled" is when you use a bellows to temporarily heat the forge past the fuel's base temperature. The behavior I'm describing is what the game does using a single forge, with no bellows, fueled by charcoal. Put ingot on the fire, watch it get to 750, wait a minute, pull it off, put it on the anvil and I've seen temperatures around 730. The behavior gets more complicated with two ingots or a work item plus ingot, but that looks like a consequence of the incorrect behavior that appears with one. Fixing the simple case *probably* will take care of everything, but it's best to tell the devs about all the other weird stuff so that they can make sure that goes away too.
Sunny_Sometimes Posted August 10 Report Posted August 10 Can confirm I've definitely had pieces go from 750º in a 750º charcoal forge to 680º in about 10 seconds. Though I suspect there may be a rare bug with it swapping the heat values of the pieces being exchanged (hasn't happened frequently enough to test).
Sunny_Sometimes Posted August 10 Report Posted August 10 From what I know (can't immediately find the relevant posts) cooling rate is currently fixed for a grace period and then artificially accelerated afterwards, to make the current repeated-quenching-and-tempering system less tedious. I'm personally a big fan of MKMoose's proposed system--at least the current edit of it--and the lack of extensive repetition in that process (or something similar) would theoretically allow for that convoluted cooling dynamic to be done away with; no "grace period", but cooling happens much more slowly. Semi-related: It would come into play more so with the helve hammer than with the hand hammer, but it could be neat to see deformation heating (not sure if that's the industry term) represented, which is where the kinetic energy imparted while deforming (squishing) metal increases its temperature. You wouldn't be able to bring a piece up to forging temps that way, but it could slow the cooling rate. That would reward quick, accurate smithing and higher-speed helve hammers with a slight extension to the window of workability in a particular heat.
Rainbow Fresh Posted August 11 Report Posted August 11 11 hours ago, Sunny_Sometimes said: It would come into play more so with the helve hammer than with the hand hammer, but it could be neat to see deformation heating (not sure if that's the industry term) represented, which is where the kinetic energy imparted while deforming (squishing) metal increases its temperature. You wouldn't be able to bring a piece up to forging temps that way, but it could slow the cooling rate. That would reward quick, accurate smithing and higher-speed helve hammers with a slight extension to the window of workability in a particular heat. If I understand this correctly as "while you keep smacking things temperature goes down slower", I'm all for it. How many times did I need to spend a whole additional coal to fire the forge back up and wait for the heating to resume just because I couldn't finish the last 2 or 3 swings in time...
Sunny_Sometimes Posted August 11 Report Posted August 11 12 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said: If I understand this correctly as "while you keep smacking things temperature goes down slower", I'm all for it. How many times did I need to spend a whole additional coal to fire the forge back up and wait for the heating to resume just because I couldn't finish the last 2 or 3 swings in time... Correct. Technically you're adding heat, incrementally, but the net effect is slower cooling. Would presumably be most noticeable with heavy hits and helve hammer hits. And to be clear: this effect only happens when hammering material that's already hot-enough to work, since it's the internal friction from being squashed that generates the heat.
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