Another thing i've noticed is that you can only smelt down vanilla armor, stuff like chain stockings, mittens and such cant be melted down, which kinda sucks.
Will add that into the update.
I've been playing the mod quite a bit recently and even though i love it, there are some outstanding issues.
Crafting takes way more resources than in the vanilla. Because of the way crafting works, a single sword can take 3 units of metal, but if you melt it down you only get one unit of metal, and this applies to some of the armor too. This also comes into play when it comes to tanning, you only get one piece of leather per animal, i know there's a chance to get more but it's so low that it really doesn't change anything, an entire elephant doesn't give enough leather to make a single backpack i personally think there's an issue, i changed the value myself to 4 so you at least get a reasonable amount of leather per skin.
Tediousness. I understand the purpose of this mod is to give a realistic crafting system that's immersive, but i feel like it goes a bit too far. To an extent i feel like you realised this, as with the chainmail stuff, there's a 3 step process to making a single pile of chains, which you require two of to make a chain shirt, but then with scalemail you can just straight up make the scales with no extra steps. Also there's a step in making the chains that if you aren't careful will eat your tools, which is annoying. The amount of tools you need to make stuff is also insane, i get the reason behind requiring tools, but it's not like they're hard to make or make any sort of difference if you have high quality tools (As far as i could tell) and all this does is make it so you have a massive pile of tools that are annoying to make. A good example of this is woodworking, to make a wooden shield you need planks, to make planks you need a maul, to make a maul you need sticks and blocks, to make blocks you need a saw, to make the easiest saw you need stones. The crafting menu isn't fun to use in adventure mode, the fact that every time you craft something it throws you back to the game makes it even more tedious when you have single items that require 5+ steps to make. I get the purpose of the mod but i do feel like it goes too far with the amount of requirements to make stuff, all the different tools could just be grouped up into "blacksmiths tools" or "woodworking tools", rather than having a pile of a bunch of different items that are hard to track.
Speaking of hard to track, the last issue i have is waste products, goddamn does this shit make your inventory a pain to manage, the best example of this is wood shavings and stone shards. Why do they exist? all they do is clog up your inventory, and it seems like wood shavings have the powder tag, as sometimes they'll cause tiles to have a coating of wood shavings that you cant easily get rid of. And then you have stone shards, so far i haven't found a use for them, maybe there is but i dont know, but when you need to make smelters and you have to pray to the RNG that mining rocks will give you large block to make them with, goddamn is it a pain. I normally end up mining like 30 rocks, do you know how much stuff you end up in your inventory after mining this many rocks? This requires me to either keep it in my hands, craft the smelters and then drop everything off somewhere (Which takes ages mind you), but then if i say, want to keep the gems, i have to sort through multiple pages picking them out, not fun.
Sorry for the wall of text rant, i really do love this mod but it is a massive pain in the ass sometimes, i personally dont find using the reaction menu fun and this mod requires you to use it a hell of a lot and to also track what items you have because of the amount of resources it can take to make a single item, this normally just means i end up having a single tile in my base with everything on.
Also question, what's the difference between rivets and a batch of rivets?