metalworking Remake of early metalurgy

[AdrianNumbers]

Inspired by bonfire (by David Stark) sugestion .

An alternative way to get copper nugets from ore chunks :

1. Heat them up in fire.

2. Toss them into water.

In this seting water couses stone to crack with thermal shock revealing metal nugets hidden inside.

With this we get an option to start using metal tools with only 100 units of copper.

Since this one in inspired by another sugestion i will quote it here:

 

Bonfires are large fires constructed by placing 16 sticks followed by 32 logs. When lit, they produce a large flame and smoke plume and burn for two days. They cannot be used for cooking. Like pit kilns, they set nearby things on fire, including any flammable items several blocks up, due to the tall flames. Once they have burned out, any immediately adjacent rock blocks become "brittle", allowing them to be broken by hand, yielding the usual stone and ore pieces.

Why?

1. They look really cool in your village center, wintry mead hall, great festival, or doom fortress.
2. They provide a very slow and expensive way to mine ores without having unlocked the tools for them. This is how ores were actually mined in the copper age, by setting up large fires against ore faces. (If being able to mine any ores is OP, restrict this to working with softer ores that would be mineable with copper tools.

Overal with bonfires we could remodel early metalurgy and make it bit more compicated and most important more time and resource consuming thus pushing it away in time from starting the world. Whole process of optaining copper tools would look something like this:

1. Find stones on the surface with traces of copper in them ( thats what i wrote in my comment on bonfire sugestion, basicly remade surface stones to contain only traces of metal making them unusable for smelting only acting as markers).

2. Dig out area of soil that will let you get to stone layer and make bonfire there.

3. Gather wood and sticks for bonfire , build it , fire it , wait (however long we make bonfire last for).

4. Bonfire makes all stone blocks that touches it brittle. Now those blocks can be harvested with any flint (or above ;D ) tools or just a stick. Since stone is cracked you would actually only need some sort of lever to dislocate chunks of it and pick them up. From stone blocks we get stones and from ores ore chunks.

5. After you obtined ore chunks heat them up again in fire and after they heat up toss them into water to crack them again and obtain nugets.

6. Rest of the process stays the same (for now XD )

If you want to make it more compicated and kind of force to even further away in time we could make stone cracking with bonfire 2n+1 steps process that needs temperature below 0*C.

3 steps would look like this : 

1. Make bonfire let it burn out.

2. Pour water on all stones affected by bonfire and let it freze cracking stone even further (frozen water expands in cracks). Thats why low temperatures are needed and thats what pushes obtaining copper further away in time.

3. Make bonfire again to remove water.

Steps 2 and 3 can be reapeted indefinitely (well i wouldnt set it to more than 3 times so 7 steps should be max) number of steps could depend on type of stone as well , more heat resistant or harder stones would require more steps.

To sum up everything here this sugestion makes obtaining your first copper tools much more time consuming (if part with water is used even impossible before winter) and resource heavy. In my opinion it would shift player focus in first game year to securing things needed for survival like shelter , farm , animals and collecting resources for winter. It would also make crude/primitive blocks/tools more relevant and would make it logical for new players to better familiarise themselves with knapping and clay working (since clay storage vessel is best for storage before you get saw, my small one #3 would work nice here). This slower progression thats more focused on above surface resources feels more natural and kind of forces players to secure good survival foundation first before moving up on tech tree. 

I love slow progression that lets you get familliar with each thing or mechanic on every tier and leaves some time to side track and have some fun building but at the same time i hate grind i hate it when game forces me to do something a lot of times just for the sake if it. In my opinion its much better to extend stages in gama via logical choices of action or environmental variables than grind or dumb luck aka. RNG.

Btw since this one is inspired by and i used your sugestion here David im curious about your opinion.

[Game Nerd]

I don't like the grind of having to find 40 coper bits on the surface, or go panning. We need to find an alternate way, this one seems good.

[Silent Shadow]

I see a flaw. You cannot pour water without a bucket, and you cannot have buckets in this game without metal. Maybe add a clay pot?

[Maelstrom]

2 hours ago, Silent Shadow said:

I see a flaw. You cannot pour water without a bucket, and you cannot have buckets in this game without metal. Maybe add a clay pot?

or clay and reed.

[AdrianNumbers]

On 8/10/2021 at 7:19 PM, Silent Shadow said:

I see a flaw. You cannot pour water without a bucket, and you cannot have buckets in this game without metal. Maybe add a clay pot?

Well actually i left that out cuz i wana make another sugestion in that topic

 

[LuuBluum]

At least from what I gather having done some quick Wikipedia summarizing is that the only thing the water did was cool it off faster.