Large crucible for late game copper processing

[sikoninien]

I think in the later game (iron + steel age), processing larger amounts of copper should be easier and more satisfying. My suggestion would be a large crucible that can be filled with copper nuggets and heated on a forge.

In the later game, copper is still useful and can be used to make lanterns. However, while building a huge cementation furnace to create steel, smelting copper with a crucible in a campfire feels very unsatisfying to me and is very inefficient. While this doesn't matter for processing small amounts of copper, for large quantities (6 ingots), the heating process is very slow and the temperature dynamics between the campfire and the crucible feel very unintuitive as the copper has to stay at high temperature for a pretty long time and all melting progress is near instantly lost the second the copper drops below its melting point.

My suggestion to make copper processing in the later game more attractive would be a large crucible that can be heated in the forge. The forge is well established in the later game and its way of heating metal feels much more intuitive. The large crucible can obviously hold more ingots than its smaller version (maybe 12 or 16). In addition it would be very nice if it were possible to cast copper plates in later game using the large crucible.

 

I might have missed some important information and the campfire heating system is actually super easy and the things I say I feel are obviously subjective. However, I wanted to suggest this for a longer time and wrote this after wasting a lot of charcoal only for the copper to instantly solidify after dropping to 1060° for 5 seconds.

Edited Saturday at 11:20 AM by sikoninien
Phrasing for better readability

[MKMoose]

22 minutes ago, sikoninien said:

The large crucible can obviously hold more ingots than its smaller version (maybe 12 or 16).

Do keep in mind that the current crucible can already hold a somewhat absurd number of up to 25 ingots (a bit less for most alloys, but still I think it was 21+ for everything except black bronze). Size is not the problem here, albeit it could get reduced to make space for another late-game method.

 

29 minutes ago, sikoninien said:

I might have missed some important information and the campfire heating system is actually super easy and the things I say I feel are obviously subjective. However, I wanted to suggest this for a longer time and wrote this after wasting a lot of charcoal only for the copper to instantly solidify after dropping to 1060° for 5 seconds.

Item heating as a whole is overdue for some changes. An overhaul to it was initially mentioned in the "aspirational roadmap" for 1.22 but pushed back. Hopefully it will come in 1.23, but it wouldn't be unheard of to push it back again.

 

55 minutes ago, sikoninien said:

My suggestion to make copper processing in the later game more attractive would be a large crucible that can be heated in the forge.

My own suggestion would be not a crucible, but a ladle for taking liquid metal from a shaft furnace or a blast furnace. We kind of really need a proper blast furnace for cast iron eventually, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to use that chance to allow smelting other metals more quickly or efficiently as well. There's a lot of design questions that could be made here, but broadly either way I think a new furnace type would be much more interesting than just a larger crucible.  

[Mushroomancer]

I honestly don't have too many issues with crucibles themselves, although I think it would be a good quality-of-life change to have either larger ones or more efficient ones. Using the forge for heating seems like the ideal. I also wouldn't mind seeing early game crucibles have their maximum capacity limited to make room for more advanced, faster smelting late game crucibles with more capacity.

The real issue with campfires is flint smelting. Please let us smelt flint a faster way.

[Mac Mcleod]

7 hours ago, Mushroomancer said:

I honestly don't have too many issues with crucibles themselves, although I think it would be a good quality-of-life change to have either larger ones or more efficient ones. Using the forge for heating seems like the ideal. I also wouldn't mind seeing early game crucibles have their maximum capacity limited to make room for more advanced, faster smelting late game crucibles with more capacity.

The real issue with campfires is flint smelting. Please let us smelt flint a faster way.

You can smelt 16 flint in a bloomery now.   10 game minutes, reliable.

[Mushroomancer]

42 minutes ago, Mac Mcleod said:

You can smelt 16 flint in a bloomery now.   10 game minutes, reliable.

I wasn't aware, that's not bad at all! That definitely beats as many fully stocked campfires as I can manage.

[williams_482]

Quicklime is the other one that's a pain to cook over a fire and doesn't give any vanilla alternatives. There are various mods out there that allow custom lime kiln structures, or cooking lime in a bloomery. I use one of the later and am happy with it. Hopefully something along those lines makes it into the base game soon. 

[Mushroomancer]

9 hours ago, williams_482 said:

Quicklime is the other one that's a pain to cook over a fire and doesn't give any vanilla alternatives. There are various mods out there that allow custom lime kiln structures, or cooking lime in a bloomery. I use one of the later and am happy with it. Hopefully something along those lines makes it into the base game soon. 

I definitely know the struggle of quicklime. Was with friends on a server and the goal of building a castle that required a metric desert of limestone that had to be processed. It was very much a whole deal, keeping the lime cooking. 

[SnapJelly]

well the regulat crucible already holds 128 nuggets in each slot doesn't it? That'll be enough for 25 ingots in a single pour, and you can probably heat up a 2nd batch simply in the time it takes for them to cool off

[Zaph42nd]

I wouldn't necessarily be against a larger crucible option, but maybe more once a player is already well into the steel-age imo. As for reheating other items, I sorta feel like beehive kilns could accept more than just pottery for firing, would be a good additional incentive to make one (seeing as by the time I typically build a beehive kiln, I've already got plenty of crucibles and pots, mainly use it for bulk firing shingles lol) especially if there were changes to temperature control/regulation

[Mac Mcleod]

On 9/7/2026 at 1:29 AM, Mushroomancer said:

I definitely know the struggle of quicklime. Was with friends on a server and the goal of building a castle that required a metric desert of limestone that had to be processed. It was very much a whole deal, keeping the lime cooking. 

Just fyi, I have found it is MUCH easier to prepare quicklime in small batches of 8.   The way the math is set up, heating a huge pile of lime is very likely to lead to failure but 8 at a time has a high success rate and is very granular (prepare as much as you can bear and then go play or just prepare 8 more each time you return to base).

[Mushroomancer]

3 minutes ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Just fyi, I have found it is MUCH easier to prepare quicklime in small batches of 8.   The way the math is set up, heating a huge pile of lime is very likely to lead to failure but 8 at a time has a high success rate and is very granular (prepare as much as you can bear and then go play or just prepare 8 more each time you return to base).

I will keep this in mind the next time my architect friend throws me into the lime pits.

[SnapJelly]

22 minutes ago, Mac Mcleod said:

heating a huge pile of lime is very likely to lead to failure

THERE IS A FAILRATE?!?!

[Mac Mcleod]

2 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

THERE IS A FAILRATE?!?!

Not like you are thinking.

1) I get distracted with a phone call... and the entire pile is cold again.
2) I run out of fuel.. and before I can collect more.. the entire pile is cold again.
3) I get booted from the game... and before I get back through the queue.. the entire pile is cold again.

That type of thing.
 

[SnapJelly]

2 hours ago, Mac Mcleod said:

Not like you are thinking.

1) I get distracted with a phone call... and the entire pile is cold again.
2) I run out of fuel.. and before I can collect more.. the entire pile is cold again.
3) I get booted from the game... and before I get back through the queue.. the entire pile is cold again.

That type of thing.

oh oke, phew

[williams_482]

16 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

well the regulat crucible already holds 128 nuggets in each slot doesn't it? That'll be enough for 25 ingots in a single pour, and you can probably heat up a 2nd batch simply in the time it takes for them to cool off

Prior to the accelerated cooling times in the latest update, this was true. In 1.22 though I've noticed that I need to finish cooking copper with something hotter than brown coal just to make sure that it stays pourable long enough to fill 25 ingot moulds. 

[MKMoose]

6 hours ago, williams_482 said:

In 1.22 though I've noticed that I need to finish cooking copper with something hotter than brown coal just to make sure that it stays pourable long enough to fill 25 ingot moulds. 

As far as I can tell this could be also partially caused by an issue where the cooling delay is not reset while the heated item is maintained at the same temperature, if I recall correctly. I'm pretty sure that this currently isn't reported on GitHub, though I think I've seen it on Discord. I'm gonna double-check and report it when I have some time, maybe open a PR if I can find a good fix [reported in #10038, and the fix was literally just changing "<" to "<="].

This means that if you keep the copper at the same temperature for a while - more likely to reach the maximum temperature when using brown coal - and then take it off the heat, you're kind of rolling dice for how long it will stay at this temperature until is starts cooling down. You might get close to the correct time which gives a decent grace period to pour everything, or you might get a short time and see the temperature dropping nearly immediately.

Finishing heating with a hotter fuel is a pretty nice way to counteract this. Besides that, the only practical remedy seems to just be keeping a close eye on the crucible and putting it back in the fire as soon as it can't be poured anymore. Or if you're doing something like heating iron blooms, try to make sure you're taking them off the heat and processing as soon as they reach the maximum temperature instead of keeping them there for a while.

Edited 21 hours ago by MKMoose

[sikoninien]

Based on all the hinting towards the bloomery, I discovered you can smelt copper in a bloomery. While this is not really more efficient (6 coal for 6 ingots), it allows you to get the ingots while they're hot and make plates, which I think is much more convenient.

[River Oak]

This thread prompted me to look try look into copper refining in the middle ages, I ended up downloading a few papers but haven't read them yet. I did though, come across something called the "Saiger Process" as a way to extract trace amounts of silver from copper ore (chalcopyrite, not currently in game but irl can sometimes be found with native copper) and lead ore (galena which can even spawn silver ore in game).

Basically, silver likes to stick to copper and especially lead, and in the 1400s, some smart cookies figured out a way to extract that silver rather than let it stay as a contaminant. What they do is melt copper and lead together and let it cool in cake moulds. The copper and lead will separate and the silver will move from the copper to the lead. The silver+lead is then reheated and oxidised and somehow doing that in a cup made from bone-ash causes the silver to drop out of the lead. ( https://hmsjournal.org/index.php/home/article/view/154 )

I think it would be cool if metallurgy was expanded on and this processes and others like it could be added. I also think it's really cool how I keep seeing and thinking of things that would be cool to add and end up going down a rabbit hole looking into them.

[Andospe]

Interessting point of River Oak.

Essepcially if you look into galenit and its refining process in regions like the hartz mountains in the medieval period.

It would be interesting to process galenit into silver and lead after idk pulverizing it like bauxite and calcinating it like flint to sepaerate the two elements before casting into ingots.