MKMoose

A bit of a mental shortcut, that's on me, I guess. Technically, it would be a multi-step process - the blast furnace unlocking cast iron and pig iron, then the finery forge allowing pig iron refinement and by extension actually forging the better tools. Although it might be acceptable for simplicty to allow processing pig iron directly on a regular forge and anvil, at least in initial implementation, which would mean that the blast furnace could actually be considered as the way to unlock improved iron in the same way that the bloomery unlocks iron even though it outputs blooms that have to be further processed. The blast furnace is a bit of a rabbit hole for me. I have some ideas on how deep I would want it to go in-game, but frankly I have no clue how deep most people would want it to go. The main quirk of it that seemingly very few people know is that a blast furnace is operated continuously, not in batches, and operating it is a whole skill and job in itself. A late-medieval blast furnace would run continuously for months, operated by a whole crew of people, casting something like 150-500 kg of iron at a time in ~8 hr intervals, requiring regularly adding new charge, draining slag, monitoring hearth temperature, adjusting the position of tuyeres that provide constant air input from water-powered bellows, rebuilding the sand bed between each cast. When something goes wrong, the whole hearth can solidify, rendering the furnace completely unusable, and that's just one of the possible failure modes. Furnace startup and shutdown are very delicate multi-step processes as well. Also, small note: I'm kinda inconsistent in my use of tenses, but blast furnaces have been improving ever since they were first introduced to Europe, so modern blast furnaces work on the same general principle to the medieval ones but are kind of unrecognizable in the specifics. Naturally, settling for something small and relatively safe would be preferable, which is mostly why I was very critical of the 12 m blast furnace idea, which was similar in size to those used at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, if I recall correctly. It is, of course, entirely possible to implement a simplified design that retains some parts of the realistic complexity while being more approachable and convenient, and a lot just depends on how far the devs would want to take it. Your notes on the bloomery do make me think of some potential improvements to a design I've had in my mind.

Not possible as far as I know. A much more useful command for that purpose is often /db prune, though I'm not certain about the details of its usage. The command handbook (accessible from the pause menu in creative mode) may be of use, if you're ever wondering about what a command does and what arguments it takes. Strongly recommend to make a backup before you try it and carefully check whether you're satisfied with the results afterwards.

Death is probably the most difficult compenent of the system to balance appropriately. Dying can already be beneficial in certain contexts, at least in the early game. At the same time, applying penalties after death would not be met with applause. Some games like Project Zomboid fix it by giving the player a single life, and only allowing to respawn in the same world as a completely fresh character with no accumulated skills (or at least with partial skill loss), but that is completely inapplicable to VS with the current mechanics and lore.

If we were to make it really realistic, then quenching bloomery iron should indeed be less effective, and ideally it should actually be completely ineffective until the wrought iron is case-hardened first (which effectively transforms the surface layer of the workpiece into steel). Quenching requires high enough carbon content, which wrought iron normally doesn't have. This also applies to wrought iron produced from pig iron, though pig iron may allow it to retain slightly more carbon or be directly forged into steel without the cementation process. I'm not sure if that's what you're talking about, but there's a kind of alloy referred to as gunmetal or red brass, which is slightly different from typical tin bronze mainly due to the addition of zinc, though is generally still considered a type of bronze. I suppose I don't need to explain what the primary use of gunmetal was. Leaded bronze and phosphor bronze (both including tin) have also seen notable use into the Middle Ages and beyond, mainly due to relatively high corrosion and wear resistance, in-game potentially useful in some mechanical parts. Leaded bronze is also much more castable, but mostly unusable for typical tools. Also, bell bronze could be cool for musical instruments. The most notable takeaway here, to me, is that once iron smelting took off, bronze was mainly used for specific applications where it had other strengths over iron, and I think that this is a useful direction to consider. Instead of focusing too much on power and durability, let bronze be similar to early bloomery iron or just weaker than generalized iron, but provide additional uses for which it is deliberately better than iron or outright the only viable metal. In this way, bronze could become highly useful all the way into the endgame, yet without messing too much with the mainline tool material progression. This is pretty much exactly correct and would closely reflect the historical benefits of introducing blast furnaces. One potential issue that I would point to is that the bloomery process is already quite efficient in VS and there is very little need for bulk iron in the current state of the game. I guess minecarts and steam engines could increase the demand quite a bit, but I still feel like the blast furnace could easily end up less efficient unless drastically simplified. At that point, I would prefer the bloomery process to be made less efficient than it is now, while making the blast furnace into the massive chemical reactor that it really is, with all the risks and all the benefits. While as a general rule I absolutely agree with what you're saying (maybe with a couple small caveats), I don't really see how making iron slightly weaker or more difficult to produce in the bloomery process would cause any significant issues in that category. Not even counting quenching, just reducing damage and speed of early iron tools to be more similar to bronze would still make them better than bronze due to increased durability, whereas making early iron more difficult to process would let it retain the power advantage but be less worthwhile for anything besides a couple of the main tools. Still a quite meaningful milestone, especially if you count all the things that are gated behind iron, more of which are likely to come as the late game becomes more fleshed out. It doesn't seem to me like there's a lot of added complexity and confusion, because the relationship is simple - bloomery iron is relatively weak, wrought iron from pig iron is better. You still have clear progreassion tiers, and one of the tiers just isn't as significant as adjacent tiers in terms of tool power gains. I don't want to paint early iron being similar to bronze as any sort of necessity, because the game would be quite fine without it, under the condition that bloomeries are fully superseded by the blast furnace for the purposes of ironmaking - I think the player shouldn't be incentivized to use the more crude and inefficient process for any reason. I think the best solution could be to add work hardening and annealing to bronze (basically improved power at the cost of some durability), and making iron equivalent in terms of power to probably black bronze (maybe even tin bronze), and leaving durability untouched. As long as quenching and tempering provide a greater power boost to iron than work hardening and annealing does to bronze, iron would be better once the player learns to process it well, but at the same time unquenched iron wouldn't be a strict power downgrade. I'm quite confident I'm not making any mistakes here, because I researched this topic quite extensively whenever I was lambasting the dude who was suggesting a 12 m tall blast furnace. Admittedly, some of that was undeserved, but either way. Cast iron is for most purposes a completely separate kind of iron, which I'm not really considering in the argument about bronze and early iron, because it inherently cannot function as a "next tier" in progression. That said, it could be introduced as a way to craft some specific tools in high quantities. It's unsuitable for weapons and armor, but very useful for some common tools as well as other stuff like cookware or stoves which could be important progression rewards. It can also be heat treated to improve its properties, though steel or at least wrought iron will naturally always be preferred wherever brittleness is really undesirable. Pig iron is practically the same as cast iron, but can be cast more quickly and allows more impurities because it's always forged into wrought iron or steel anyways (or technically not always, but either way it's not used directly for any usable items). Its carbon content is deliberately reduced down to the desired level depending on use case as part of the finery forge process. Even when it technically produces wrought iron, the same kind of iron that bloomeries make when considering carbon content, refining pig iron allows better control over the carbon content and more effective removal of impurities, as well as produces more uniform carbon distribution and grain structure, overall resulting in a higher-quality end product in practically all important metrics (which also means that it's better for cementation). Note that steel from the cementation process was also often better than steel obtained directly from the finery forge process due to even further improved control over carbon content. I'm naturally willing to simplify a lot of details for the sake of making things more straightforward in gameplay, because having some four types of iron and four types of steel is admittedly a bit much, and I'm mostly just roughly describing the most important distinctions that can be easily translated into in-game differences. I think cast iron is kind of nonnegotiable (whether it could be cast directly into tools or have to be wrought is more debatable), but otherwise the rest of the types of iron are not too important. It would be absolutely acceptable in my eyes to keep just one generalized type of wrought iron as long as the blast furnace is significantly better than the bloomery to the point of fully superseding it on the grounds of scale and efficiency alone for the purposes of ironmaking. A blast furnace is exactly how you smelt iron for casting. At least for most purposes, but I don't think any alternatives are significant enough to ever make it into the game, unless it's just crucible steel, though that's unrelated. It also typically uses sand molds as far as I remember, and either way requires a lot new molds for stuff like fences, cooking pots, maybe rail tracks or minecart/train parts and stuff, so I'm not sure that it would keep the old clay molds useful. I guess it could be acceptable for simplicity's sake, but I think I would personally much prefer a proper pig bed and two-part sand molds for maximum complexity in the endgame.

Maximum FPS can be set using Settings > Graphics > Max FPS (hidden by default until you press the "show all available settings" button). An FPS counter, as far as I know, is only possible using Alt + F3, though it also adds a graph which may be too disruptive during regular gameplay. You can probably also use some third-party software, though the only option I know here is launching the game through Steam and enabling an FPS counter there.

Why should iron be a clear and immediate advancement over bronze, though? In-game it's especially drastic now with quenching in the picture, which makes the jump in effectiveness actually quite massive and very desirable in spite of the increased cost over bronze. While simplifying progression to a neat staircase can be beneficial in certain cases, especially in the early game, it is by no means necessary. There's practically no game which doesn't utilize some manner of nonlinearity and nuance within their progression with various alternatives, specializations, tradeoffs and sidegrades, and I think that this is a case where VS could very feasibly implement a distinction between wrought iron made from the bloomery process and made from pig iron. I don't really get the argument regarding the tech tree being "forced to expand", both because I don't see a reason why it would be forced to expand, and because even it it's forced to expand then it doesn't seem to me that it's necessarily undesirable. Bloomery iron, even if weakened enough to be only a sidegrade to bronze (which could be done and to a large extent is already done through more difficult processing), would still serve as a progression gate for all the things that require iron, while the creation of the blast furnace could take place of the primary progression jump in terms of tool quality. A blast furnace could, of course, be a progression milestone even without any added changes to wrought iron, but then it could end up being difficult to make it worthwhile for anything besides cast iron, and endgame progression could end up even more compressed than it is now.

I don't personally think that's an issue. Everything depends on exact implementation, of course, so it could end up being an issue, but the main way to make hunting more difficult and satisfying is not to make animals less common, but to make them better at evading and escaping the player. Making animals less common could actually make hunting less satisfying, because too much focus would be placed on searching and not enough on actually hunting, making the whole process more tedious and boring as well as forcing the hunting itself to be easier. If animals had increased awareness to make them bolt from upwards of 50 m away when they hear the seraph, as well as improved pathfinding if only to avoid jumping into pits, then an unskilled hunter would struggle to kill anything even if the world was absolutely filled with animals. In this case, even a skilled hunter would need to go through the process of finding an animal, approaching it quietly, hitting it, and then following the blood trail - a much more time-consuming process than we have now, serving to balance hunting independently of animal frequency, and also creating plenty of incentive for livestock which can provide more continuous products (milk and eggs), or be killed quickly and easily on the spot for meat. I personally take that as a given whenever a status effect system gets implemented, and it seems to have been mentioned by the OP, though I cannot guess how the devs will go about it. Bleeding and injuries are a very intuitive way to increase lethality of combat both ways without an excess of annoying, unsalvageable one-taps. Moment-to-moment combat would still lilkely end up easier, but having a supply of bandages and other healing items would be much more critical for survival than it is now.

Some of this is being being adjusted in 1.22 (but more changes are likely to come before it hits stable): spear damage when thrown has been reduced quite significantly, spear windup time has been increased twice, and the time to achieve full accuracy increased thrice, ferrous spears have been adde added, the health of several small animals has been reduced (foxes and raccoons from 6 to 5, rabbits from 5 to 3, chickens from 3 to 2.5), quenching is being added, but arrowheads currently can't be quenched and so don't get free buffs - whether that's an oversight or a deliberate choice remains to be seen. These are the changes to spear damage, to be specific: damageByType: { "*-granite": 2.5 (4 on the current stable), // only one-taps chickens and small fish "*-flint": 3.25 (5), // one-taps hares "*-copper": 4.25 (5.75), // one-taps some medium fish "*-tinbronze": 5.25 (7.5), // one-taps foxes and raccoons, 3-taps pigs and wolves "*-iron": 6 (8.25), // one-taps pudu deer and some medium-large fish "*-meteoriciron": 6.1, // two-taps T0 drifters "*-steel": 6.2 // no notable breakpoints }, Do keep in mind that modern compound bows are leagues ahead of anything that we have available in the game. It is extremely unlikely that a deer will just "fall down" after getting hit. One-tapping a deer is something I would like to see as well, but if that's the case, then I expect to also have to (in most cases) follow the blood trail from the hit location to the body, in many cases 50+ m away. And that's primarily for arrows that hit the heart or lungs. Instant collapse is technically possible, especially on a hit to the brain or spinal cord, but it's rare in practice. Overall, hunting broadly encompasses a bunch of older, low-level mechanics in the game, which have seen a lot of improvement over the years, but regardles I think they seem to be in the recent months receiving increasing attention as deserving of an overhaul. I'm not sure whether there are any good consolidated threads on any of it, and everything is kind of scattered all over. Hunting itself basically just gets a range of the same ideas thrown at it semi-regularly : improved hitboxes, ideally with localized hit detection for vital organs, improved awareness mechanics for animals (line of sight, hearing, potentially smell), improved animal pathfinding and behavior, bleeding and various kinds of injuries (presumably implemented through a status effect system; the Blood Trail mod is frequently brought up at this point) - the primary way to increase lethality across the board without an excess of immediate one-tap kills, under which your suggestion would fall in quite neatly; this is also probably the most likely to get implemented in the relatively short term, deeper, more mechanically involved aiming system. To avoid excessive reiterating of the same topics and to avoid making this into a whole essay, I'm gonna just point to another thread where similar issues have been discussed (there's also this, you've probably read a couple of them), as well as plug my own suggestions to implement butchering (this could also serve as a balance lever for livestock against hunting) and improve ranged weapons (mainly focusing on aiming) which I feel would be greatly beneficial for the game. Unfortunately, most of those don't seem to be a significant priority and it's very unlikely that anything in this category beyond the spear rebalance will be squeezed into 1.22.

That kind of how the system works, though. An area with high readings indicates an area with high deposit frequency. It can go somewhat out of whack for iron which has a very low number of deposits per chunk, but it's still generally true on average. While I'm not confident that I like your exact suggestion, I would love to see deposit generation even more geologically accurate than it is now (which already is much better than similar games, frankly). Ore genesis is a whole topic of its own, but in-game it only really translates to a couple fairly simple generation parameters and allowed host rock types. Realistically, even some "small" veins can be hundreds of meters across, and there's some stuff like banded iron formations which can span dozens or even hundreds of kilometers. At least for certain ores this would have very similar effects to your idea here. While I wouldn't want to neglect practicality in gameplay, I think it would generally be quite fun if ore was relatively easy to find in very large deposits, but more difficult and dangerous to actually mine (probably with more developed instability mechanics), to create proper incentive for long-term mining operations and by extension minecarts.

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. Just to add context to this, here's quick comparison to a torch in a random cave (at 250 gamma):