1/4 Column Blocks

[Pallanza]

It would be nice to have some 1/4 column blocks for cobblestone/planks/stone that could fill in corner gaps for 1/2 slab walls or act as pillars positioned in the corners of a standard single block area, as opposed to having to use full sized blocks that can feel excessively large at times for builds, or fence posts that sit right in the center of a block and leave gaps on sides with blocks they won't connect to/sit awkwardly on top of 1/2 slabs. The positioning cursor logic could be the same as 1/2 slabs, and they could be divided up into vertical 1/4 columns and horizontal 1/4 columns to make the logic easier.

[Davis]

I agree! 

Any columns would be great because I wouldn't have to chisel things to make them look more like columns, or use stairs at the base!

 

[Philtre]

You can chisel most blocks into pretty much any shape, so you could place a full block or slab and then chisel away all but a slim pillar in the corner.

[Pallanza]

11 hours ago, Philtre said:

You can chisel most blocks into pretty much any shape, so you could place a full block or slab and then chisel away all but a slim pillar in the corner.

Which gatekeeps a simplistic, undetailed block (literally just a rectangle, fenceposts and 1/2 slabs are already in the game as a base block and just as simple) behind the intensive material cost of an anvil to forge the chisel needed to shape custom blocks. And god forbid you can't find any casseritite deposits anywhere  like in my situation, because that means you'll have to waste 900 units of copper ore on a copper anvil that will be completely useless once you want to move on past the bronze age and breaking it apart into ingots only returns a partial amount of that initial investment...

[Philtre]

Just now, Philip Abellanosa said:

Which gatekeeps a simplistic, undetailed block (literally just a rectangle, fenceposts and 1/2 slabs are already in the game as a base block and just as simple) behind the intensive material cost of an anvil to forge the chisel needed to shape custom blocks. And god forbid you can't find any casseritite deposits anywhere  like in my situation, because that means you'll have to waste 900 units of copper ore on a copper anvil that will be completely useless once you want to move on past the bronze age and breaking it apart into ingots only returns a partial amount of that initial investment...

The point was that you can currently get the desired effect, even it's a bit more of a pain than making a fencepost or slab.

And I don't think making a copper anvil is a big investment; you don't need a bronze anvil until you're ready to move to iron, and by then another ingot or two of copper isn't a big deal unless you turned ore spawns down or something. And for me at least, I want a saw as fast as possible, and I'm not waiting for tin to get one....

[Pallanza]

Fair enough, although that brings up the question of why should 1/4 slabs be restricted to the chisel, and not stone fences or 1/2 slabs. The bringing up of anvils though did give me some time to ponder progression and historical accuracy in that matter. I think I have a suggestion regarding that as well.

So, from my research, copper anvils are more of a "relatively recent" item than in antiquity, being mainly a decorative item or trophy rather than an actual tool. This idea of the smith using a copper anvil is more a result of various games such as Terraria or TerraFirmaCraft pushing it as a low-tier equivalent to the standard iron anvil. Bronze anvils, however, did exist and were regularly used during the Bronze age as the go-to smithing platform of choice for metalworkers. The true predecessor to the bronze anvil was not one of copper, but rather a simplistic surface made of hard stone. I feel like the copper anvil should be replaced as the tier 1 anvil in the game by a primitive stone anvil that can produce only basic copper tools/weapons instead, allowing those early-game players who have yet to find sufficient amounts of surface copper deposits to cast one and lack the weapons/armor needed to delve into caves the ability to create copper tools and primitive weapons. The balancing would work like this:

Primitive Anvil:

Requires: 2 hard stone blocks (any type of stone not described as too soft to knap in-game; the requirement for these to be full blocks instead of cobblestone means the player still needs to put in time and effort to produce a pickaxe mold, a crucible, and find/pan enough copper nuggets to cast the pickaxe, lacking only the anvil mold and sheer amount of time and luck to either pan enough copper or stumble over it on the surface compared to the current tier 1 copper anvil)

Crafting Recipe: One block stacked on top of the other vertically in the crafting grid

Can Forge: Chisel, Hammer head, Hoe head, Knife blade, Pickaxe head, Prospecting pick, Saw blade, Scythe blade, Shovel head, Spear head

Can't Forge: Chute section, Cleaver, Longblade head, Chain, Plate, Scales, Padlock, Pounder cap, Shears

Restricted To: Copper

With this, the Tin Bronze anvil will still be a clear upgrade necessary to get access to swords, advanced armors, lanterns, mechanized industry, quick killing of domesticated animals (which they shouldn't have any of yet during their Copper age anyways), more efficient branch processing, and obviously anything made of a material better than copper. I've attached a picture of what a genuine stone anvil looks like, for visualization purposes.

 

[Maelstrom]

I expect that copper is too soft of a material to use as an anvil. 

[Pallanza]

55 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

I expect that copper is too soft of a material to use as an anvil. 

That seems to be the case based on what research articles I can pull up on the matter. There's a jump from stone anvils straight to bronze ones, without any copper ones being unearthed, and it seems early in the Bronze age, stone anvils were still being used alongside bronze ones until they were eventually replaced due to wear and tear with their metal successors.

[Philtre]

2 hours ago, Philip Abellanosa said:

 and find/pan enough copper nuggets to cast the pickaxe, lacking only the anvil mold and sheer amount of time and luck to either pan enough copper or stumble over it on the surface compared to the current tier 1 copper anvil)

You already need to find several surface deposits to get enough nuggets to make the pickaxe and hammer, so just go back to each of those locations with your new pickaxe and dig them up. (There is always an ore deposit beneath locations with surface nuggets - this is true for for all of the ore types that can produce surface nuggets, in fact, so mark any nuggets you find.) So far I've never not had enough copper to make an anvil after digging up the surface deposits I got my first 40 nuggets from.

I'm not terribly disturbed by the idea that copper is too soft to make an anvil with; it's too soft to make good tools in general, so as long as we're OK with copper pickaxes etc we should be able to accept copper anvils.

[Pallanza]

4 hours ago, Philtre said:

You already need to find several surface deposits to get enough nuggets to make the pickaxe and hammer, so just go back to each of those locations with your new pickaxe and dig them up.

I'm well aware of the existence of the deposits under the nuggets, and from my 50 hours of gametime I have found they never exceed more than a couple dozens worth of copper, barely a drop towards the 900 needed to make an anvil. Ultimately, when I get enough to cast a copper anvil late into the first year, I don't experience any sense of jubilation or achievement like I do when I make my first copper tool in a playthrough, or when I make a bronze anvil, I just feel "Well, that took a lot of time and investment, and it'll just be gone when I need to move up to iron. I can't even work iron tools on it like I could with a bronze one as a secondary station in a remote base. What a disappointment." It doesn't even have the benefit of having some form of historical accuracy to its labor demand like other in-game factors such as stone knapping or shaping clay which I don't mind due to said accuracy. Ultimately, I find it offers nothing to the flow of gameplay, hence my suggestion for the primitive stone anvil which still acts as a "checkpoint" in progression but without as much needless burden in my eyes.

 

4 hours ago, Philtre said:

I'm not terribly disturbed by the idea that copper is too soft to make an anvil with; it's too soft to make good tools in general, so as long as we're OK with copper pickaxes etc we should be able to accept copper anvils.

Copper tools are still the worst metal tools available, would be less prone to flaking than stone tools, and did have a history of actually existing based on archeological finds, so I don't mind where they are in the game at all. Nobody has dug up a copper anvil from Chaldean, Egyptian or Sumerian sites yet, where they have plenty of finds such as copper chisels and knifes.

Edit: Worst metal tools excluding blatantly fantastic concepts like the gold and silver pickaxes. I have no clue why they even exist in game, unless it's just meant to be a display piece sort of thing. Copper tools are still noticeably worse than bronze, and incomparable to iron or steel.

Edited December 2, 2021 by Philip Abellanosa

[junawood]

6 hours ago, Pallanza said:

barely a drop towards the 900 needed to make an anvil

You need 900 units for an anvil, that's just 180 nuggets. Like @Philtre already said, that's an amount you can easily get from those surface deposits, and some panning, if you want to.

[AdrianNumbers]

Adresing the original sugestion in this post first, i think we can safely say that basic or simple shapes like 1/4x1x1 column or step (depending on orientation), 1/4x1/4x1/4 corrner (or any other ratio) and all kinds of slopes, would be great for speed building for those that want just a little more detail than full blocks if possible to craft. They could be either gated by chisel/saw or had to be made in some sort of special way like placing in world and then "morphing" into desired shape with chisel/saw using selection menu, or stright up some sort of crafting/work table. They wouldnt be hard to implement in "problem solving" sense (at least apart from slopes), it would be just a lot of manual labor to do so since we would just need to use slabs as basis and change some numbers pretty much, the assets system helps a lot in this regard. On the other hand i still hope we will get upgrades to chiseling like some sort of design system and or other shapes we can remove/add from/to blocks we edit like plane, line, or drag box. Once something like this is added simple shapes would be easy enought to make with chisel so you wouldnt really need them predefined. 

As for stone anvil i wholeheartedly agree with you @Pallanza that it would be much more immersive than the copper one, also it would introduce a practical aplication for whole "relieving stone blocks" machanic in game, But i think there is better way to ballance it than restricting item type (that said restriction to only copper is fine by me) that can be forged, just make it break after few times it was used like 10 or 15 for example, since restricting item types is taking out of immersion which was your goal with this in the first place i assume.

Anyway i think you should make separate sugestion with this one as to divide those two topics.

[Philtre]

8 hours ago, Pallanza said:

I'm well aware of the existence of the deposits under the nuggets, and from my 50 hours of gametime I have found they never exceed more than a couple dozens worth of copper, barely a drop towards the 900 needed to make an anvil.

Each surface deposit yields around 15-25 ore chunks, each of which yields 3-5 nuggets after processing (depending on the quality of the ore), and each nugget is 5 units of metal. So you only need to mine at most 4-5 surface deposits to make the anvil, even if every single one gives poor-quality ore. You will probably have already found enough deposits by the time you have enough free nuggets to make the starting pickaxe and hammer. If the first deposit you hit up is rich-quality and large-ish in size, you can potentially make the anvil after mining just one.

And like I said, by the time you are ready to move on to iron tools and need to upgrade the anvil, the loss of the one ingot-worth of copper necessary to recycle it into nuggets will be barely worth thinking about.

So I think the stone anvil idea is interesting, but the copper anvil is not much of a bottleneck (getting the free nuggets to make the initial tools is a much bigger hurdle). The real killer is tin.....

[Hal13]

On 12/2/2021 at 12:54 AM, Maelstrom said:

I expect that copper is too soft of a material to use as an anvil. 

same goes for pickaxes, prospecting pick, saw, ... though, early "pickaxes" were stone hammers, there aren't many stones you could break with copper, most are just to hard. the pick would deform quickly becoming a hammer or a piece of modern art... Which is the reason that stone anvil actually wouldn't need a durability as long as you only work copper on it it'll be fine forever; as long as it isn't weak and brittle like slate, sandstone, chalk (and about any other sedimentary rocktype),..

On 12/2/2021 at 7:09 AM, Pallanza said:

and did have a history of actually existing based on archeological finds

that depends strongly on the tool though, i'm not aware of copper picks being found nor saws either... copper axes look a bit like pickaxes though (but copper is to weak to break most stones as mentioned, these axes kinda were used like pickaxes but against wood not stone), if i'm not mistaken real saws only came after iron smithing. But gatekeeping boards and anything made from them that long wouldn't make for an enjoyable game.

On 12/2/2021 at 7:09 AM, Pallanza said:

Ultimately, when I get enough to cast a copper anvil late into the first year,

I usually start smithing somewhere in the first summer, at latest, if i'm really lucky like in my current world i jump from molds directly to bronze anvil (just needs to cool down a few more hours). of course i usually increase surface copper and surface tin by one step each, hence my experience might be not quite representative, though from what i've seen first fall/winter (late in the year) for starting smithing is kinda really late.

 

 

BUT the crafting grid isn't there to stay forever, neither a new recipe for 1/4 blocks nor the suggested recipe for the stone anvil really makes sense to be implemented as long as the intention is going away from any form of crafting grid.

a compromise might be to implement a vanilla chisel mold, chisels don't really have to be smithed, you might want to sharpen them, but basically they are just a short rod of metal (or stone). or to expand the usability of tools... as said the old copper axes looked more like pickaxes and would be used more like a pickaxe/chisel for wood... same goes for bronze axes actually (but with these you could break stones too)...

Edited December 4, 2021 by Hal13