Drop Forging

[Lava Lamp]

The way this works is by wedging your metal ingot in between two halves of a complete die and hammering it until it takes the desired shape.

This kind of thing would be iron-tier. It would cost lots of iron to make these dies and you would need an iron helve hammer to use them. The benefit would be not having to deal with the hassle of manually forging your iron or steel tools with a regular hammer, instead relying on your helve hammer to get the general shape, and then removing the "flash", which is extra material that gets squeezed out the sides of the die, with an iron chisel in the crafting grid.

[Sunny_Sometimes]

I'd love to see any contrasting historical info, but I'm only familiar with "drop forging" in a heavily-industrialized context. Trip hammers can be surprisingly powerful, but they aren't thousand-tonne-press powerful.

The usage of dies as forging tools is a much more universal practice though, and something I'd love to see incorporated into the game's forging system (could do with some broader reworks as well, imo). Something like iron bars I could see benefiting from them.

If drop forging were to become a thing, I'd expect it to require steel dyes and come with some form of steam power. Also the usage of a grindstone might make more sense than a chisel for flash removal?

[Lava Lamp]

6 hours ago, Sunny_Sometimes said:

Also the usage of a grindstone might make more sense than a chisel for flash removal?

You make a good point. I forgot the grindstone was in the game.