Stone Anvils

[Sda215]

Hello there! Let me preface this by saying that I have not played Vintage Story at the time of this post - only watched let's plays of it on YouTube. I do plan on purchasing the game when I have the chance, as I think this game does have the potential to be a worthy competitor to Minecraft, and I loved the TerraFirmaCraft mod for said game.

Alright, I'm not totally certain if this has been ever discussed on the forums before (I've used the search feature and nothing that is of any certain relevance to this thread's title showed up, and my look into the wiki did not yield any useful result either), but in my let's play viewings I've noticed there's a distinct lack of a stone anvil. TerraFirmaCraft required the player to acquire a stone anvil of a particular type (last I remember the stone type had to be igneous, subtype didn't matter) and this anvil was required if the player wanted to progress beyond the copper era. Now here in Vintage Story, it seems that one can craft an anvil mold and cast a metal one instead, thereby bypassing the need for a stone anvil entirely.

I was wondering if you, the developers, had considered adding in a stone anvil. Now I'm not quite sure if tiered anvils exist in Vintage Story a la TerraFirmaCraft's system - and I don't want to write up any further details concerning potential balance issues with the existence of a stone anvil in-game relative to the metal anvils because I don't know enough about Vintage Story's smithing system - but at the very least, having the option to use certain stone types as makeshift anvils would be nice. There does seem to be historical precedent for this in the real world, so for authenticity's sake at least, without knowing why stone anvils aren't in the game at the time of this post (if there is precedent for this), I think stone anvils would be a fine addition to Vintage Story.

That being said, I would like to hear your thoughts on the hypothetical addition of a stone anvil in the game and if it is viable.

Thank you for reading this post,

-Sda.

[redram]

FYI, currently you can smith a given metal on an anvil of it's own tier or 1 lower.  So you can smith iron tools on a bronze anvil, for instance.  From a player perspective, it's unclear if this is the long-term plan, or just a current stopgap.   It is a needed stopgap because iron cannot be melted in the crucible, so there's no way to get liquid iron to pour an iron anvil right now.  There will eventually be, presumably.  Just not right now, as it's kind of a next tier of tech.   So once we have that next tier, it will remain to be seen if the tier structure gets tightened up.  I think it either should be, or anvils should have durability, and smithing a higher tier metal on a lower tier anvil should damage the anvil at an accelerated rate.

As for stone anvil, I always felt it was just the required starting step for TFC, because TFC only allowed same-tier smithing.  You had to start somewhere, so bioxx allowed a stone anvil.  Whose only purpose was making the copper anvil, iirc.  Honestly seems like a waste of code to me.   Also, getting a raw igneous block is trivial currently.   Every area is underlaid with igneous stone, and quite often the surface is igneous.  Compare this to the anvil mold, which requires I think half a stack of clay, plus quite a bit of time building the mold.   It seems to me like more of an accomplishment than mining six blocks from around a seventh. 

I do think that at some point (maybe the next quickie update) the anvil mold should break after one use, every time.  Right now after you've made it once, it's a non-event to make more anvils.  It's logical because the form of that mold would never allow the anvil to be extracted and leave the mold intact.   I think it would also be good to make tool molds have a chance to break.  Perhaps ones made from fire clay have a reduced chance.

[Exscorbizorb]

If stone anvils were added I think it would make sense to add durability as well.  Giving stone anvils extremely low durability would push players towards upgrading to a copper one.

I agree that the anvil mold should break.  It would make moving to the next metal tier more climactic.  The fact that they survive the removal of the anvil is very strange.  I found it a little jarring when I first saw it.

[Stroam]

On 10/31/2018 at 4:20 PM, Exscorbizorb said:

I agree that the anvil mold should break.

My opinion is all molds should break after adding a sand mold that allows you to press items into it to quickly form a mold of the item. 

[Sda215]

On 10/31/2018 at 1:10 PM, redram said:

"...Also, getting a raw igneous block is trivial currently.   Every area is underlaid with igneous stone, and quite often the surface is igneous.  Compare this to the anvil mold, which requires I think half a stack of clay, plus quite a bit of time building the mold.   It seems to me like more of an accomplishment than mining six blocks from around a seventh."

6

I don't know about that particular sentiment. In order to mine those six stone blocks to separate the seventh you would need a copper pick, and in order to acquire one you would have to scour the land for any surface copper nuggets, as well as clay deposits to extract for the molds necessary to cast a copper pick, and you would probably need charcoal in order to heat up the copper nuggets to the temperatures necessary to smelt them in a crucible over a firepit; this series of tasks is virtually identical to the ones required to acquire a copper anvil―the only real differences are that you need a lot more copper nuggets to smelt in the anvil mold, and the copper pick (in the case of the copper anvil) is no longer necessary for creating the anvil insomuch as it'll simply expedite the process faster because now you're not limited to hunting for surface nuggets. Put it another way, without playing the game for myself, it seems that there would only be a marginal amount of effort between acquiring a stone anvil and a copper one, assuming stone anvils were implemented into this game with virtually identical mechanics to TerraFirmaCraft 's stone anvils.

A system where anvils have durability and is changed based on the tier of the metal that's being worked on it relative to said anvil's own tier is something that crossed my mind while I was writing up the OP, actually. I think that would be a viable idea in concept, if only to encourage the player to advance towards metal anvils and not have them always rely on stone ones. Perhaps, to further encourage this, metal anvils can have additional benefits that stone anvils―which should be easily found in bulk, if what you say about igneous stones being abundant is true―wouldn't be able to provide, apart from durability―though what would those additional benefits be I don't know yet.

[Exscorbizorb]

I think the difference in the difficulty of acquiring the anvils would amount to the difficulty of mining.  It seems unlikely to me that a player would search far and wide for enough surface nuggets to make an anvil, especially considering that where there are surface nuggets there is generally ore nearby.  Mining copper would actually be easier than searching for that many nuggets.  It would still be notably more difficult than finding igneous stone though.

Now that I think about it, I would personally never bother with a copper anvil if I could get by with a stone one.  It just wouldn't be worth the material cost.  You can make a lot of tools with the amount of metal it takes to make one.  Even if I had to burn through fifteen stone anvils while on my way to bronze it would be totally worth it.  For me there would have to be some very serious benefits to getting a copper anvil to make it worthwhile.