Smelting

[Rithiel]

Not technically blacksmithing, but oh well.

I have some (slight) changes to smelting ready to roll out, but I wanted to give people a little warning, first.

First of all - weights will no longer be restricted to being integers (whole numbers). This is particularly important for smelting alloys, as combining something like 3 lbs of copper with 1.1 lbs of something else would not be the same as combining it with 1.0 lbs of something else. Because standard bars are 4 lbs, when you cut them, things stay integers. Yay! But if you combine something with, say, a 1 pound bar, you could run into difficulties if you cut that and try to smelt it.

Secondly - you will no longer (magically?) get separate bars from each chunk of ore that you put in the furnace, or each bar of an alloy. Each ore will still be worth 4 lbs, and if you put in four chunks of ore, you'll get the same amount of metal as before, but it'll be in one big bar. Enjoy cutting stuff.

3) Alloys that required a ratio of metals don't actually require weights that are multiples of those numbers any more (calling it a ratio before was generous)! So you could make a 3:1 ratio using 1.5 lbs of one thing and half a pound of the other! (Let the rejoicing begin?)

And finally - Upon researching this, the first sentence I came across (from the exalted wikipedia) was "Smelting is more than just melting metal out of ore" (I may or may not have paraphrased), so expect changes (and steps, oh my!) in the future. I also plan on releasing some more alloys, most of which won't be based on real things.

Almost forgot - adjectives got changed! Small and heavy don't exactly strike me as describing the same thing, so the heavy adjective went away. They are now:
Tiny <= 1
1 < Small <= 2
2 < Standard <= 4
4 < Medium <= 8
8 < Hefty <= 16
16 < Large <= 24
Very large > 24

These changes will go live by Friday (I'll post here when it happens).

[faylen]

With the necessity to be more careful about weights with bars now, would it be possible for forge rooms to have some kind of scale to get more precise weights? As I understand it, the weigh command is very imprecise, so it seems like there should be some way for blacksmiths or anyone messing with metals to know if they've got the proportions they want before melting things together.

[Rithiel]

These smelting changes are live.

As for the scales - not right now, no.

People really shouldn't be worrying about cutting stuff and risking off-weights if they're going to make alloys.

[clayton]

Hey Rithiel.
We're going to have to really work on the weights for the various bars, because since the 'weigh' command is inaccurate most of the time, there's no way to tell if a bar of whatever size, i.e. tiny, small, standard, medium, large ... is the weight it's suppose to be.
This makes it very hard to fulfill guild tasks for traders, since the market will only accept bars of precise weight.
This could also pose a big big problem with making alloys, since it seems like the alloy parts depends on weight of each element.

Clayton seems to be the only active and dependable trader currently playing, so if he's going to be required to make weapons and armor for the players who request it, smelting has just potentially become very time consuming.

Let me just show an example of a recent task Clayton received.

He was instructed to make 14 zinc bars, and sell it to Mistral Lake market.
Now, those bars have to be precise, no matter what size bar they were. With the new smelting system, he has to either smelt 14 individual chunks of zinc to get the 14 standard bars of precisely four pounds, or he has to gather enough zinc to make 14 large bars, so the weight is precise for the market to accept it, or he has to spend loads of extra time smelting, cutting, re-smelting, to get the weights right for the market to accept the bars requested.
This will probably have a big impact on smelting alloys, since weights have to be precise, and as I said earlier, the 'weigh' command is far from precise... in fact, it's inaccurate most of the time.

In conclusion ... can we please have some kind of work-around until scales are put in for preceise weighing, so that the market is a bit more flexible in terms of the bars it will be accepted? after all, the buyer in the market place doesn't have a scale to measure the bar you're selling, so they don't know you're selling them a four-pound bar, or a five-pound bar.

[Jaster]

Do they not accept 1 pound bars then? If they do, you could have cut 4 standard bars and ended up with 16 tiny bars all weighing precisely 1 pound. I know nothing of trader tasks, but I'm assuming it would be possible since you said they would accept 14 standard or 14 large bars as long as they have precise weight. Why not tiny bars?

[Rias]

How about ingot molds for various standard sizes? Smelt without, you just get a big old chunk of metal. But use the molds and you can pour a portion of the molten metal into the mold for standardized ingot sizes of precise weights.

[xavier]

I really like the idea of the weight molds, as I've encountered minor issues dealing with tiny bars as they don't all seem to weigh one pound

[Gad]

"Secondly - you will no longer (magically?) get separate bars from each chunk of ore that you put in the furnace, or each bar of an alloy. Each ore will still be worth 4 lbs, and if you put in four chunks of ore, you'll get the same amount of metal as before, but it'll be in one big bar. Enjoy cutting stuff."

Not necessarily any "magic" happening there. That depends on the type of furnace you use. There are furnaces where you can set up mulitple crucibles for seperate bars. So, with CLOK's case it still could be assumed that is what we are doing when putting chunks of ore into the furnace. Could that be something changed back to the original setup or allow us an option to make either multiple bars or one large bar? Instead of taking away how about offering options?

[Drayla]

In all honestly, the "furnaces" for smelting don't make much sense. We should have smelters instead, as they are designed specifically for melting down ore into pure metal. It could also be used for smelting different alloys. The way these are designed, they have a place where the molten metal is collected, and can then be poored into a mold of a bar or ingot. The way I could see this working, you could add ore to the smelter, pull some kind of handle to deposit the ore into the hotter area of the smelter, and after some time the collection basin would fill with liquid metal, which could be poured into a standard bar mold (or any other sized mold, which can either be bought or stay with the smelter. over and over until it is empty. Something similar, but smaller, could be used for the jewelry molds, since that would make more sense than putting the bar in the mold itself and heating it all up. Just my two cents on the issue.
(P.S. As per the change to smelting, I'm not really that fond of it, but it is a bit more realistic than getting a number of standard bars)

[Rias]

In all honestly, the "furnaces" for smelting don't make much sense.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace

A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical furnace used for smelting to produce industrial metals, generally iron, but also others such as lead or copper.

That's what I was looking at when I started working on smelting (HISTORY TRIVIA: the first crafting-related code in CLOK was smelting!). I never got around to expanding it, and agree that "put ore in furnace, pull bellows" could use some signifcant expanding. It's one of the many processes in the early stage that was basically "Cool, that works for now, I'll get back to it later." How much later was never specified!