Smithed Knives and Scythe Blades coming in pairs

[Karel Vranovský]

A minor tweak suggestion: Knife blades and scythe blades should come in pairs when made on the anvil. 

It not only does not make sense from a common sense perspective that you would use an entire ingot (enough material to make a sword for heaven's sake) to make a paper-thin scythe blade or a small knife one. Creating these items automatically in pairs would also make sense from a gameplay perspective: Generally, it is these two types of items that get the most wear-and-tear in my experience. I burn through my scythes and knives two or three times faster than any other item (safe for maybe pickaxes during heavy mining operations, but there it makes sense). Collecting reeds and grasses takes up a lot of actions, thus making these items wear down very fast.

Just spawning two blades for these two specific items per each ingot would be a small but significant improvement in my opinion. The save-up on material should not be major enough to dramatically affect the game's challenge of the game, while user comfort would increase a lot. 

The game already recognizes that knives should take less material than other tools (both logically, and due to the speed they wear down) in the kipping stage. This would just be a logical extension of the same idea.

 

[Han_Salo]

One good mod already fix this, but you right

https://mods.vintagestory.at/advancedsmithing

Edited January 31, 2022 by HanSalo

[Philtre]

A real-world scythe doesn't use significantly less metal than a light sword; definitely more than a hammer does. Similarly, a hefty knife might use about as much metal as a light hammer. I think that the smithing mechanism in the game, while cool, leads players to think about material consumption in terms of the voxel dimension of the model, which isn't how it's designed in practice.

[Irulana]

Scythe is big but VS knifes small so making two at once sounds good, like when you do flint knives, you get two.

[Karel Vranovský]

Hans: Thanks for the suggestion. I feel like the mod goes overboard and makes many other items cheaper too, which I think could mess up with the ballance, but still thank you for the reply.

Philtre: Without wanting to be confrontational... You have never actually held a scythe in your hand, have you? 

A scythe may seem like a relatively large blade due to it's surface. But in reality, it's made out of INCREDIBLY thin sheet of metal, between one to two milimeters thick, usually. Several times thinner than a knife blade or even a sicle.

The surface may seem large, but the actual amount of metal used is miniscule compared to anything like a short sword. It's also why it gets dull and wears down very fast - in the game and in real life. 

[Philtre]

6 hours ago, Karel Vranovský said:

A scythe may seem like a relatively large blade due to it's surface. But in reality, it's made out of INCREDIBLY thin sheet of metal, between one to two milimeters thick, usually. Several times thinner than a knife blade or even a sicle.

We're talking about a medieval-era hand-hammered scythe; it wouldn't be nearly as light and thin as a modern tempered steel scythe. In addition, the back edge was often built up extra thick to help support the blade and keep it from bending. In the real world, it would have been made out of iron; however, if you were trying to make a scythe out of a soft metal like copper, it would have to be relatively thick to keep it from bending too much in use. So still on par with a hammer or axe, which also cost one ingot.

[Karel Vranovský]

Quote

We're talking about a medieval-era hand-hammered scythe; it wouldn't be nearly as light and thin as a modern tempered steel scythe. In addition, the back edge was often built up extra thick to help support the blade and keep it from bending. In the real world, it would have been made out of iron; however, if you were trying to make a scythe out of a soft metal like copper, it would have to be relatively thick to keep it from bending too much in use. So still on par with a hammer or axe, which also cost one ingot.

 

Actually, I'm very much talking about simple iron scythes that were used in my country's countryside until very recently, as I used to use those a lot in my life. And you are right, they were made out of hammered iron. Cold hammered iron sheets as thin as possible, to be precise. That does not change the fact that they were made out of incredibly thin material. Hammering was also how they were kept sharp. When I used to use a scythe, I would spend more time sharpening it than actually using it (they dull incredibly fast). This is done by technique known in my country as "tapping". You would simply take a hammer a lightly tap along the edge of the blade, simply flatting the already thin material to a point where it would act as a sharp blade. 

This is how scythes were made and maintained since very much early middle ages. The metal goes progressively thicker towards the end to ensure stability, but "thicker" here means two or three milimeters tops usually less. And as the blade wears down, you flatten the "thicker" parts (just by light tapping) to produce a new edge - wearing the scythe out from the inner sade to the outter one. The whole point of a scythe is that it's not a damn blade, it's just a thin sheet of iron that cuts by the virtue of it's low thickness. Nobody actually sharpens a scythe with something like a whetstone, it's too flimsy for that. You just flatten the edge a little more than it is and you are done. 

This is also why scythes actually made for really crappy weapons, as was discovered during various peasant uprisings. And yeah: you can ruin the blade if a minor pebble gets in the way. Or even some more durable plants, like thristle. I've screwed up a scythe blade that way more than once, and had to spend hours hammering it back to usable shape. But again, the metal is thin enough to be hammered cold, so it's simple, just boring.

I have actually never seen or heard of anyone using a STEEL Scythe in my life. It's pointless to waste steel on something that is by it's core function, flimsy and largely disposable. 

I think you are still imagining a scythe as something comparable to sicle, but it's not. Sicle was thick, and relied on the weight of the blade (and it's curvature) to cut. Scythe has to be as light as humanly possible, as it relies on the sheet being so thin it cuts just by it's own thickness, basically.

[Philtre]

On 2/2/2022 at 1:00 PM, Karel Vranovský said:

I have actually never seen or heard of anyone using a STEEL Scythe in my life. It's pointless to waste steel on something that is by it's core function, flimsy and largely disposable.

Over the last 200 or so years, American scythes have typically been made of milled steel with a whetstone-ground (not hammered) edge (and a different blade and handle shape compared to traditional European scythes, see 2nd pic here for comparison: https://extension.psu.edu/mowing-with-a-scythe ). Modern scythes using the American design can potentially be very thin tempered steel with minimal reinforcement along the back edge, because of the inherent strength and flexibility of the material. That's what I was assuming you were using as a reference, since I didn't know where you were from. (Although some American styles are quite hefty, to allow for cutting tougher plants and for repeated sharpening.)

While a medieval scythe would be overall a lot more similar to the ones you have used, you were still most probably using an industrially-produced product rather than a hand-made piece made with the comparatively impure wrought iron that would be typically available to the average agricultural community around the 1300's. Surviving scythes from around that time (which are admittedly few) are heftier and have thicker ridges at the back than the styles you see from the 1800's or even the mid-1700's, which are about the oldest items you are likely to find still in use nowadays. Also, NOTHING made of metal was disposable in the medieval era; mining and working metal was extremely labor- and time-intensive, and you used as little metal as you could get away with and made it last as long as possible.

In any case, the game does not base material costs for smithed items on realism or on the voxel volume of the model; I don't see anyone asking for longblades to use four ingots' worth of metal. I think this whole issue is a side-effect of the way the smithing minigame is designed; it makes you focus on the voxel volume of the model, even though that is irrelevant. Thus things like the "metal recovery" mod. If the game used a basic grid crafting system for creating metal tools rather than the smithing minigame, I doubt anyone would have come up with the OP's suggestion....

[Karel Vranovský]

4 hours ago, Philtre said:

That's what I was assuming you were using as a reference

Well, my name should give away that I'm not American. Central Europe. And the Scythe I used to use is virtually identical to the ones that were used in the region for at least four centuries - I do happen to know that because that instrument has a certain symbolic significance in my country, and thus happens to be frenquently on display in historical documents, museums etc....

As for the your other point: well, I honestly feel like a sword maybe SHOULD cost more than one ingot. But if you go back to my original post, you'll notice realism isn't my main argument (if I REALLY insisted on realism, I would first of all suggest scythes were limited to iron age tech, because you can't make one from bronze or copper - bronze age cultures used sicles instead, as bronze is still to soft - but I don't think that would be a meaningful gameplay alteration). The core of my argument really was related to the relative speed with which these two items (scythes AND knives) wear down relative to other equipment.

Creating these items in pairs from one ingot would keep balance between relative realism, and the solution to the mechanical issue here. Of course the other alternative is to just increase the durability of these items (that would achieve the same result) but it would skew the "realism" even further away - since yes: Scythes in particular do get worn down very fast in real life, that is not something that needs to be changed.
Just the gameplay balance of how much material / time you need to keep them in repair compared to other items. That is what really needs to be addressed.

[Philtre]

16 hours ago, Karel Vranovský said:

Well, my name should give away that I'm not American. Central Europe.

[...]
Just the gameplay balance of how much material / time you need to keep them in repair compared to other items. That is what really needs to be addressed.

When not playing games I hang out on boards where a lot of people name themselves after fictional characters, and Karel is a character from an old SF novel by Jack Vance, so it didn't really occur to me that it was geographically meaningful, I apologize.

I kind of suspect that scythes in particular are *supposed* to be relatively expensive in materials cost, since they're essentially a convenience item. You are trading the time spent on mining and processing metals for less time spent gathering grass or harvesting crops, or whatever.