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I would love to have this!

42 (58.3%)

I'd use it, but I use Civilization Forge anyway so I don't need a separate mod

8 (11.1%)

I might try it out

16 (22.2%)

Sounds too complicated, I wouldn't use it

6 (8.3%)

Other

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 72

[Arkenstone]

Oh, I didn't think of that...  But what's really the difference (in amount of work) between soft iron (which I've never heard of before) and wrought iron (which is iron in its simplest useful form)?

I think that the amount of work required for that lowest useful iron should be no more than for bronze (less, if possible).  I'm all for the complex reactions to make the high-end metals, but the low-ends should be easy to make in my opinion. (These are dwarves after all: they've been pounding away on anvils since they were two years old!)  The humans might need a more complex reaction, but the dwarves can pound iron in their sleep! (Which they often do.) *Dwarves don't sleepwalk, they sleepforge!*

And more on the high-end stuff, I like the concept of taking things like cobaltite, cinnibar, aluminum, platinum, and all the underused metals as ingredients for fantasy-metals-that-won't-quite-work-in-real-life-but-are-cool-anyways-and-don't-unbalance-the-game-much.

[Mephansteras]

Well, it's enough extra work that smiths had to go through a lot of effort to make iron that was suitable for blades and chisels and whatnot. As for the extra work to make wrought iron vs steel...well, I doubt most dwarves would actually make wrought iron instead of steel in most cases. Maybe if they had magma but a shortage of wood or coal, but otherwise I see them using steel more. Which is what the Blast Furnace is for, and why only Dwarves get it. Wrought Iron and pattern-welding steel is more for lesser races.

Granted, in vanilla DF no one else gets steel at all, but the differentiation comes out in Civ Forge where I do have other Steel using races. Here it just means that the player gets three different way to make steel depending on what they have available.

As for the other minerals, I have plans for those in Civilization Forge, but nothing that would go into this mod. Mostly involving Alchemy.

[Djohaal]

Of course we are thinking in parameters of 40d. Currently in 31.03 gold weapons seem to pack the biggest punch for swords, lead for warhammers and adamantine only works properly for spears. Steel should be buffed up somehow (in accordance to how the combat system will eventually get balanced out) to compensate for its greater complexity of production.

[Mephansteras]

But most of that doesn't really matter except in the arena (or the odd artifact). You won't get a gold sword otherwise, and I'm ok with a magical sword working differently. So all that matters in most ways is how well the actual armor and weapon metals work together.

I have found that Arrkhal's material rebalances work really well, at least for the primary metals. Bronze beats soft iron and copper, wrought iron as I have it set up has a slight advantage over bronze, and steel tromps both. Crucible steel has a slight advantage over regular steel. It all works pretty well.

[Acanthus117]

Awesome. I am so getting this.

[Mephansteras]

Looks like we have a fair amount of interest.

Next question: What elements do people want included?

Here are the optional things I did for balance in Civilization Forge:

  Charcoal Furnace - A high-quality wood burning furnace used to make charcoal. Produces two charcoal per log.
  Bronze/Brass copper ratios tweaked: Bronze and brass are actually about 90% copper depending on the specific alloy, and never really 50-50 the way they are in DF right now. As a balance point, I use 4/1 as my mix in Civilization Forge
  Bronze Anvils
  Ability to cast Iron and Bronze anvils at the Smelter.
  Ore value adjustments - Ores should never be worth as much as pure metal bars, so things like native gold have their value reduced. Tin and Bronze should also be more expensive, and pure iron worth less due to its reduced capabilities compared to Wrought Iron.

Which ones would people like in the stand-alone mod?

[Djohaal]

I want all of that and some.

For the specialized wood burning furnace what about creating some finished good it demands to be constructed at the forge ("cast wood furnace" for instance) so it has a cost to cover for its better efficiency than the normal furnace.
Another thing would be also adding such an extra step for the crucible and blast furnace ("furnace parts" or "crucible parts")

[Arkenstone]

How is that different from a "tool"?

[Dwarfoloid]

Soft iron is pretty much unusable for weapons, and not that great for armor. You have to work harden it into Wrought Iron for it to be feasible for those uses. Technically, I'm sure you could make a mace out of it and it'd work fine, but since I can't control what gets made out of what down to that level it's easier to just take the tag away and give it to Wrought Iron.


Check out this thread for more information and links on everything.

I'd love to play this mod. 

However, I'd point out that the game's iron isn't actually pure iron, that was just my initial mistake in that thread (which is why there is a suggestion to scroll down in the OP). The iron in game actually uses stats for a certain real life cast iron (pig iron uses the same stats, in fact).

If possible, I'd remove any manufacturing use from the iron and treat it as the slaggy bloom that comes out of bloomery furnace (the basic furnace in game). It would then need to be worked in to wrough iron to be of any use, just as you had planned.

I'd also make note that blast furnace doesn't produce steel directly, but pig iron (and it's the most common ancient way of doing so, though you might get pig iron from bloomery by accident). The pig iron was then decarburized into wrought iron with hearth/finery furnace. And the wrough iron was then carburized by cementation into blister steel (the earlies form of steelmaking in Europe, and was used with bloomery wrought iron as well). Kinda complicated.

[Djohaal]

How is that different from a "tool"?

It would be a one-shot construction element required to make a workshop (like you need an anvil for the forge), not some weird stuff I saw people talking about where to make an object the reaction would take in the raw materials and a tool object, and spew out the finished object and the original tool.

[Arkenstone]

Oh, I'm sorry, I misread what you wrote there...

But most of that doesn't really matter except in the arena (or the odd artifact). You won't get a gold sword otherwise, and I'm ok with a magical sword working differently. So all that matters in most ways is how well the actual armor and weapon metals work together.

That makes sense -in fact, I would (in a personal mod) go so far as to buff the stats of gold, etc.; in my mind, the "stuff should be better just because it's cooler" idea is fine if taken in *very* small doses.

I have found that Arrkhal's material rebalances work really well, at least for the primary metals. Bronze beats soft iron and copper, wrought iron as I have it set up has a slight advantage over bronze, and steel tromps both. Crucible steel has a slight advantage over regular steel. It all works pretty well.

That's good, there needs to be a game balance reason for making iron instead of bronze.  Even if bronze isn't better, though, we should put in "only use bars"; if only because it doesn't make sense otherwise.

I think that it would also be a good idea to give each step in the process its own building, and the concept could be applied to alloys as well: since when has raw ore been smelted and combined in the same place?  I personally think that the vanilla smelter should be relegated to smelting raw ores and melting unwanted items.  Also, the higher level buildings should be at least 5x5, in my opinion 6x7 is the magic size it needs to get to.  The whole smelter area could maybe use a "facelift", and with all these new forge buildings it becomes much easier to capture the charming sprawl and ordered chaos of a real-life industrial complex.

[Arkenstone]

By the way, I just saw a thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=55951.0) that was talking about animal-based charcoal and I thought: wouldn't charcoal burn a lot cooler than coke?  We should make sure that we use the proper amount of the right kind of fuel in this mod.

[Dwarfoloid]

I'm quite sure it does. But on the flip side, all that sulfur and sulfur dioxide from your typical coke certainly isn't making the iron stronger, quite the opposite really. Ditto for magma actually.

Especially as these pre-industrial processes typically had the fuel and ore in direct contact with eachother.

[Mephansteras]

According to the research I did on Chinese blast furnaces, they seem to have sent the liquid iron out into a pooling area where they stirred it with an iron rod to turn it into steel. Seems to be a little bit different from how European furnaces worked later on.

[Djohaal]

The workshop would look interesting, maybe a large pond of molten metal?