MKMoose

While others have replied to this already, I want to mention that, purely in terms of generation parameters pulled from game assets, bronze is significantly more common than iron, even when controlling for durability. Granted, it can be more annoying to obtain due to smaller deposit size and extremely high deposit frequency in righ areas. To some extent, this is already the case, though admittedly it seems like an accidental consequence of the system more than a clear design choice. Bronze finds its use primarily in cases where durability is the only parameter that matters. Tongs, hammer, crowbar, chisel, wrench, as well as anything that is intented to be used for crafting. It's doubly useful for the tools that don't have to be forged, because casting in quantity is easier, faster and cheaper. Personally, I'm not opposed to the idea of bronze being better in some capacity than iron (I've suggested it elsewhere myself), though I think it might be better to achieve a similar effect by adding work hardening and annealing for bronze (and potentially low-carbon wrought iron as well), to provide effects similar to quenching and tempering (but weaker and/or at the cost of some durability), smoothing out the sudden transition to iron. If aiming to separate the Iron Age into two parts, I would personally look into splitting it clearly into "Bloomery Iron Age" and "Cast Iron Age" (not real terms, but illustrative enough). Iron obtained from the bloomery process and wrought by hand would contain uneven grain and more slag inclusions, so generally produce much lower quality results, and realistically it wouldn't be quenchable. Iron produced in a much more complex process using a blast furnace (and ideally processed using a powerful helve in a finery forge) would be a much better product in a whole range of metrics, reflecting the actual way iron quality has progressed from being at best a sidegrade to bronze to eventually well superseding it - through gradually advancing metallurgical knowledge as well as improved smelting and forging processes. And that's not even mentioning the benefit of the blast furnace that lies in cast iron.

Earlier, unrelated post from a whole different thread. I'm talking purely quenching here, so while I like the ideas for bronze, I might reference them in more detail in that other thread.

Once you take a look through the handbook, assets and code, you can find a lot of interesting things. The model for a potato has been in the game for a good while now, though who knows when it may get actually added as a plant. There is a whole bunch of stuff for as of yet incomplete mechanical parts, some barebones code for a blast furnace, and a whole lot of other small breadcrumbs that the devs are working on or have paused work on temporarily or indefinitely. There are textures for a bunch of herbs (including names) already in the game files since at least 1.21. A bunch of code for the berry bushes is already on GitHub since pre.3 released, and you can even place them in creative and see them grow, though I haven't tested whether they can actually produce fruit and generally whether they are mechanically complete. It's worth noting that they use a health/nutrient system of some sort, though I haven't checked whether it's similar to crops.

The current implementation gives the first couple quenchings for nearly free, but then basically gets the player to figure out how much they are willing to slog through for diminishing returns. Choosing whether to temper or not mostly boils down to optimization and not any sort of strategic choice. Whatever you do, you can go further, at the risk of having to do it all over again. I don't personally find much fun in that, and I think that it just doesn't work well even before you start getting into the extremes. You can now make weapons that are by all reasonable metrics outright overpowered (relative to the 1.21 balance, and relative to weapons that can't be quenched), only at the additional expense of a bunch of resources. This also creates a massive jump over bronze and other early-game options - it's easy and still pretty cheap to get an iron spear or falx with some 50% higher damage than a bronze equivalent. I'd argue that adding a stricter ceiling, if done well, would allow to introduce more significant decision-making and more satisfying skill-based mechanics into the process. A highly simplified realistic purpose of quenching and tempering is that ferrous alloys generally start from a soft and often uneven structure, so quenching is done to increase the hardness of the metal as much as possible, which also makes it much more brittle, while tempering is done afterwards (or on its own) to reduce hardness at a benefit to ductility and toughness, which partially reverses the effects of quenching but the benefit is generally much greater than the lost hardness. Right now, quenching has almost no skill expression, odd choice of risks, and only one real benefit. There are a couple quirks of the current implementation I would personally love to see changed: Reduce the repetition. It's tedious and unrealistic. Make the effects of quenching less one-dimensional. Durability buffs and shatter chance go against each other - if the shatter chance is higher than the relative durability increase, then increasing durability is practically worthless, and that threshold currently ends up being crossed very quickly. Consequently, power is the only real use of quenching past a certain point. The easiest way to do amend this would be to just make tempering more realistic by giving it an increase to durability at the cost of power, and throwing the idea of quenching for durability into the trash (quenching an item covered in clay is usually done while only covering part of it, especially the spine of blades, to harden the exposed edge while protecting the spine from becoming brittle, which has almost identical effect on the edge but reduces risk of cracking during quenching as well as preserves durability and flexibility of the spine). Make the risk of shattering during quenching dependent on player skill, knowledge and preparation, and potentially extend that to the beneficial effects of quenching as well. Historically, it was critical to know how to quench while maximizing benefits and minimizing risk of cracking (not outright shattering, though still in many cases rendering the workpiece largely unusable). This incuded normalizing the temperature of the workpiece before final quenching (bringing it up to ~750 C and then cooling in still air), interrupted quenching or appropriate choice of quenching medium (mainly for high-carbon steels), and a couple other things. An additional mechanic could lie in variable effects depending on closeness to "ideal" quenching, which could serve as a way to add a level of uncertainty beyond pure randomness and space for skill expression and mastery of the exact parameters required to achieve the maximum benefits. Whatever is easy enough to implement and fits the game, as long as there are ways to control the effects in some capacity, ideally in a dynamic and engaging way and not just through more complex setup. Tempering doesn't count, at least not in its current implementation, because when power is the only real benefit of quenching then tempering becomes almost exclusively a matter of optimization. Penalize leaving a quenched tool untempered. This is practically never done in real life, because it's where shattering actually happens most easily. Metal which has been quenched but not tempered is brittle and will easily break on strong impact. This could be implemented by adding a shatter chance during usage or just a durability penalty after quenching, which would be removed or heavily reduced with tempering. Make temperature control less forgiving, and especially add a penalty to overheating the workpiece. Heating up the metal up to certain thresholds after quenching or tempering reverses most if not all prior work, and overheating can promote warping as well as increase risk of cracking. While heating above certain temperatures could should only reduce or remove certain effects, heating unnecessarily high could also increase risks during quenching. An extra change which I would love to see would be to remove the exact temperature readouts in the tooltips and require the player to judge the temperature of the workpiece by color, though that would be optional and probably easily circumvented with commands. Try telling me that you wouldn't prefer something in this direction over repetition of the same simplistic process to maximize a single stat against your tolerance for tedium and randomness. Now that I look at it, it's a whole suggestion in itself, so I might end up refining it and posting in a new thread at some point.

There's still the problem of the shatter chance clearly being 10% after the first quenching (and then reduced to 8% when tempering, for more context). I would say that's caused by the default value of the shatterchance attribute being BreakChancePerQuench, that is 0.05 and not 0.

Hasn't this always been the case, though? The information about this explicitly included that this is the usual state of things. Searching for "pre.2" in the News section doesn't return any relevant patch notes. At the same time, rc.1 releases seem to include a summary of changes since pre.1.

What I especially like about this approach is that it could create a much more approachable and interesting puzzle out of the system. In this case, there would be a real high-level choice behind tempering (which would then probably have to get heavily buffed): do you prefer to reduce the risk of shattering at the cost of slightly reducing the maximum achievable power of your weapon, or do you take the resource loss for a small chance at a perfect weapon? Kinda unrelated, but my main gripe with suggestions to return bits or damaged toolheads when a tool breaks is that most of these ideas kind of don't serve a purpose. What's the gameplay reason for it? A tool breaking is ultimately a loss of resources - if some of those resources are given back, then that's still the same kind of loss, just a bit smaller, and you end up having to carry the bits or toolheads back home and repurpose them, which will most likely feel like extra obligation or maintenance. Same, at least when that quenching is done correctly, if they decide to make it a bit more skill-based. Though I still need confirmation on whether there actually is any, because I haven't had anything shatter on the first quench yet.

Why does your shatter chance go up with each additional tempering besides the first one? On top of that, I'm not certain about the first quenching done on a brand new item, but the second quenching will start off at 10%. The first quenching is a little odd, but it seems to have no "shatterChance" attribute at that point, so the default value of 5% would be used. By modifying "quenchIteration", I can get it to show up in the tooltip. But after quenching a couple dozen times I haven't gotten it to trigger, so I'm not certain if it can actually shatter on the first time.

It seems to exactly match the table you titled Q-T22-QUENCH. Tempering 22 times is not exactly practical for most people, and it may get patched out if they end up adjusting the in-game behavior to match the handbook guide, but regardless the graph appears to be correct for that scenario.

Disregarding for now whether the math for a single tool is correct or not, this depends entirely on what you're trying to calculate. If you have a 0.55 chance that the tool head doesn't break, then on average you will get one finished tool after processing 1 / 0.55 = 1.82 tool heads. What you're claiming to be more correct is a fundamentally different calculation, because you're effectively saying how many tool heads you'd need to get at least one finished tool with a certain minimum probability. Processing four tool heads to reach 0.95 confidence will on average give you 0.55 * 4 = 2.2 finished tools. Which of those numbers is more important here depends entirely on how many tools the player needs to use. If they're only ever gonna need one, then the probability of getting at least one tool is important. But if they're gonna burn through many tools, then the average return might be worth paying more attention to. I fail to notice any discrepancies between the code I've pointed to and the OP's data (the raw data at least) except the matter of whether the first quenching can shatter the item (it seems to me like it can based on the code, but it's not communicated in the tooltips and the handbook also seems to imply that it can't). Note that most of the OP's numbers appear to be based on items which are only tempered a number of times after the first quenching, which is why it may seem odd.

It effectively says that you can temper an item as many times as you wish, at any point, as long as that number doesn't exceed the number of times that you've quenched it. It doesn't match the in-game behavior because there's actually just no check comparing the numbers in the code, but it's not locked into a linear process either.

I feel like if the Bronze Age is short, then the Copper Age is a mere moment, because many people will only craft the bare minimum set of three copper tools and then beeline for bronze. One thing that is especially difficult to balance here is the contrast between new and experienced players. Some struggle to find their first copper deposits, and some will easily get to steel before the first winter ends. Any way to extend the early game would likely end up in a similar fashion - a large obstacle for the beginner, but at most an inconvenience for the veteran. I don't think it's worth it to delay or extend progression for the sake of it. Iron is already non-critical, because it's possible to do nearly everything in the game with bronze tools with no issues - the durability is unimpressive but absolutely sufficient for the average player not engaging in some massive projects, and there are very few features which are actually gated behind iron. The main problem here is that even if the player were forced to wait for some long processes or slog through a tedious grind to get to iron, it will still almost always be technically optimal to get the better tools before engaging in the activities which aren't critical to progression, even if the improvement isn't too significant in practice. If the goal is to extend the Bronze Age, then the best way to do it might be to just continue adding various features that don't benefit significantly from having better tools (some of which might be only unlocked at bronze, like the helve or the crate trap). Or generally develop the more primitive parts of the game's progression to be more self-sufficient with more unique unlocks that don't have clear endgame upgrades, so that they're not just stepping stones to iron and steel. Sure, most of it would be optional and many players would skip it, but beyond a couple critical unlocks it seems intentional that going through the material progression isn't strictly required for everything else. As for examples of those optional mechanics - herbalism, mushroom farming and improved animal domestication are on the roadmap, and so are woodworking (ideally including wood and bone carving) as well as weaving, which could be pretty big undertakings but would likely serve well to extend the early game without putting pressure onto the player to advance quickly through the progression. It turns out that earlier I was testing on a world with a lower time speed, so I initially though the difference in cooling rate is lower. It's a bit annoying, frankly, to have to switch back and forth, though I don't think it's too bad. The iron blooms also seem to cool down faster than ingots for seemingly no reason. Though I don't think that this has much influence on making bronze armor. In this specific case, making iron armor more annoying to obtain just makes it more annoying to obtain, but bronze armor is still weak and expensive, and gambeson still exists.

It literally doesn't say this, unless it's grossly mistranslated in whatever language you might be using. They can be found based on the code for the Quenchable behavior, most notably the applyTemperedStats() and applyQuenchedStats() functions. Though those are quite likely to still change if the current balance is deemed unsatisfactory. As I see it, the maximum buffs obtainable through quenching are way too high. It's supposed to improve the tool, but the likes of 50% power gains are borderline absurd. I would much rather take a more skill-based mechanic with a lower but more consistent ceiling.

There is no single clear production method for it, because "Damascus steel" is a marketing term more than an actual type of steel (especially nowadays, but historically to an extent as well). It's generally agreed upon that it is likely named after the city of Damascus, and not necessarily a specific kind of steel. Some blades referred to as Damascene don't have the typical pattern in the steel, and many blades with a similar "watered" pattern aren't Damascene, because similar steelmaking processes have been used in many different places. The majority of Damascus steel was likely wootz steel imported from India, forged into blades by local weaponsmiths. I could see crucible steel or more specifically wootz steel being added to the game, but it wouldn't require any advanced machinery. It would likely be worse than steel from the cementation process for most purposes. Maybe it could be favorable for blades, but it would likely have to be kept broadly weaker and difficult or risky to process, to let the cementation furnace retain most of its incentives. It would likely have to be limited to certain items, and certainly shouldn't have a T5 pickaxe, to avoid short-circuiting endgame progression. I broadly like the idea of crucible steel, but I just don't see a way to implement it in a realistic way without either keeping its use cases extremely limited or taking a wrecking ball to existing endgame progression.

It would be pretty easy to implement and would require no significant changes to the existing windmills or wind, and the underlying code might just require the added possibility of a windmill with a vertical axis of rotation. A very basic panemone could potentially even be crafted without the use of linen, as a rudimentary way to power a quern in the early game. The main balancing issue to solve is how to make them less useful than regular windmills, because just making them produce very little torque would still make it possible to power large machinery with a whole array of them at no detriment. I think the best way to do it would be to have them require stronger winds to produce usable power, indicating that they are less efficient and have to overcome more internal friction.

Fair enough, it can actually be very useful as it allows to see in places which would otherwise be pitch black. It's also really nice in that it doesn't take an item slot to hold it like a torch or lantern. Can be especially useful when using a torch, because a torch can get extinguished in water. What I meant by "not practical" was more that I would never consider it sufficient to be my only light source, unless I was seriously min-maxing.

If you're working with charcoal, the bellows don't really do much at the moment, until you need to go past the default temperature limit for quenching. They slightly increase the rate at which temperature rises and allow you to heat up the item further tobe able to work it for longer before having to put it back in the forge briefly, but both effects are not particularly significant. If you're working with brown or black coal, then the bellows are necessary for ironworking, but still only particularly useful once you need to increase the temperature above the maximum to reach the minimum for ironworking. I tested it recently and wanted to report it, and just as I was about to open my own issue, it was reported in #8365.

Besides allowing to carry a spare temporal gear, its only purpose is to provide a very dim light. Not enough to really be practical, but in an occasional emergency it may be better than nothing.

Something like this has been a known issue for a while now, as seen in #4433 or #7576. Unfortunately, as far as I know the only fix on your side is to spawn the elk back in via creative mode.

Fair enough, it would probably have been better for me to say that bronze could be better than iron for certain applications in terms of the ratio of end result to cost, which would still likely end up worse than iron when comparing the stats in isolation. It could also be better in some regards and worse in others, especially in the form of higher speed but lower durability (largely just for the sake of more interesting gameplay balance). To some extent you can see what that could look like with tin bronze and bismuth bronze, of which the latter has higher durability in everything besides armor, which makes it outright better for tools where speed or damage doesn't matter (though it can be more expensive), while tin bronze tends to be more preferable for pickaxes, falxes, spears and the like. In the current balance the differences tend to be small enough to not matter most of the time, but exaggerating a bit for the sake of gameplay variety might not be a bad idea. Saving iron and continuing to use bronze for certain applications is just not something that I've found useful in my own gameplay, because getting fire clay and iron ore is a progression gate more than it is a significant cost for every iron ingot. Once you have all the resources, then even manually working blooms can often be more worthwhile in terms of the reward to effort ratio than using bronze. That at least goes for the tools that can't be cast directly - maybe bronze could be useful for some things like axes or shovels, though personally I haven't found it really worthwhile regardless due to how scarce the alloying elements for bronze can sometimes be and how large the jump to iron is. The durability is usually roughly doubled, and the improvement to mining speed is typically ~20-35% with the only notable exception being the shovel at ~10% (and that's not counting quenching with 1.22, which done once at no risk gives a nearly free buff on top of this, further widening the gap). At that point, I feel like the only real purpose of bronze once you have iron is for tools that you know you're not gonna use past the durability of a single bronze item anyways, but frankly, that's kind of a lame purpose. Either way, the main idea is to make the transition to the Iron Age more gradual with only inefficient, small-scale production at first, and this is just one small component which could additionally contribute but isn't really integral to it. I don't find this to be the case at all, though we'll see if it changes further before stable. In the current balance, a single risk-free quenching with a fairly small up-front investment into bellows (3x nails and 6x leather for the small ones) should allow to increase the power (i.e. damage and mining speed) of most ferrous tools by 10%, or durability by 20% when covered in clay. If you take out the iron out of the bloomery fast enough then you don't even have to use bellows for at least one or two tools, if going for a power increase (even easier with meteoric iron or repurposed bits since you get ingots directly - I feel like that should be changed eventually). To me, this is just further incentive to make the jump to iron as fast as possible. Maybe I'm optimizing a little too much, but either way it's an added buff on top of everything else, while the baseline time and cost of ironmaking are nearly unaffected.

Doesn't seem to be too many ways to do that, realistically. The simplest solution in cold-working and annealing would probably be a good idea, in line with quenching and tempering for ferrous metals, though it could also end up just being the default for all bronze tools and not a way to extend the Bronze Age. There could be a number of sub-types of bronze alloys (a fourth one made with arsenic may not be a terrible idea, and it may be worth to allow using different ratios), each of which could be better for a different range of applications and potentially similar to iron in certain cases, making it more useful to invest into multiple types of bronze with different alloying elements instead of rushing to iron. It could end up a bit complex, though. As things stand, though, iron unlocks a significant chunk of progression, and developing iron would probably be a more worthwhile idea either way. The argument about the durability and strength of iron is kind of difficult to realize in-game, because almost the entirety of it is reliant on metalworking knowledge and the processing methods used. The only real way to translate that into gameplay would be to introduce a couple types of iron of different quality based on how it's smelted, whether some additional flux is added, and whether it's wrought by hand or using a helve, and I don't know if we want to go that route. It may be a decent idea to introduce bog iron as a source of small quantities of iron for inefficient smelting in bloomeries to reduce the hard gating of progression. At the same time the cost of processing iron blooms into iron could be increased, to drive players to keep using bronze for longer until they progress enough to reduce the workload of iron processing. Also, a significant addition which I would expect to be introduced eventually is cast iron alongside a blast furnace, which would unlock a range of cast iron items, including tools (for certain purposes similar to wrought iron, but very brittle so not useful for many other applications) which could be produced in potentially greater quantity than even bronze, as well as higher-quality wrought iron if that is of interest. It could serve as a second progression milestone related to iron, with a bunch of other unlocks like cast iron stoves and cookware. An extra addition which I would be interested in would be rust, which would degrade power of ferrous tools if not oiled after use and would need to be removed at a cost of durability. Increased need for regular maintenance (though only when putting tools away in this case) could be a neat tradeoff for unrealistically high durability, though admittedly it probably wouldn't be the most popular change. Bronze has much higher Vickers hardness than wrought iron and can be even somewhat higher than some steels, which generally means superior resistance to wear and generally higher durability where the use case favors it (at least over the iron more typical to the Middle Ages - modern iron and steels are much better). I feel like it would be ideal to discard the idea of tiers to some extent, and make bronze outright better than iron for some applications and worse for others. This way, deciding which metal to use would be less about "pick the best tier of metal that you have" and more about "pick the most suitable metal for this specific purpose". Don't wanna make a whole mess of the system, of course, but for example bronze knives and garden tools could be better than iron equivalents (still worse than steel, to be clear).

To some extent that is already the case, since it's easy to feed domesticated animals until they reach good weight, whereas wild animals will generally be at the weight you find them at, which can be especially low in the winter months (or at least it's supposed to). You'd probably have to set up a trough in the wild to somehow feed them, and most people don't bother as far as I can tell. Some changes with generations would make a lot of sense, though, even if only visual - sheep more wooly, boars less hairy and providing more fat (in part to make them stand out from other animals, over which they don't really anything unique), and so on. I personally think animal husbandry could be reworked to require more regular feeding and generally more effort to achieve proper results, which could counterbalance an increase to animal yields. And that might require changes to farming as well. As it stands, animal husbandry largely functions as a nutrition type conversion of sorts, but the costs beyond the initial setup end up being almost irrelevant in many cases due to the abundance of food once a good farm is set up, and for the most part it only takes a whole bunch of waiting. And in the case of chickens you don't even really have to wait particularly long for anything.

Try this command: /giveitem lore-book-aged-orangebrown 1 s[] { category: "jonas" } You can replace "jonas" with "villager", "tobias", "research" and "diaries". Not sure what that is equivalent to in-game. There doesn't seem to be a way to get specific lore, just these five categories.

I stupidly didn't verify the one thing that has changed in the new update, that's on me. The same bug that causes handbook crashes seems to cause affected recipes (including most if not all recipes that use pelts) to not resolve, so that specific recipe for the sling isn't functional.

If I recall correctly, Tyron has said relatively recently that they don't really have any plans for anything beyond steel, and at most they may add some specialized steels for certain narrow use cases. The problem of sorts with all of these materials (stainless steel, specialized alloy steel, a variety of other stuff), is that most of them only became known and used in the late 19th or 20th century, often due to rising need for advanced materials for new machinery functioning in increasingly demanding conditions. That especialy applies to the more modern materials that you've listed here, which are generally used for very specialized purposes, many of which aren't in the game and almost certainly will never be added, except maybe in very limited capacity as part of some Jonas tech shenanigans. This kind of metallurgy is generally a modern thing driven by modern needs, so implementing something like that while at this point we still have almost no signs of the Industrial Revolution in the game would be frankly quite absurd. Granted, there's already a bunch of somewhat anachronistic features like chromium tanning or the cementation furnace, but they're not that modern.