nineof36

So I just reached the steel age and found using the blast furnace to be somewhat confusing. I waited until the furnace stopped heating, then started pumping the bellows. The temperature went up to white, but it took quite a while and a good bit of pumping before any pig iron came out. Once it started coming out, it came much more quickly than the initial heating. Am I doing it wrong, or do I actually need to hold the temperature at the max for that long? I found that, to keep the temperature above the 2nd to highest bar, I needed to pump the bellows every 4-6 seconds. Do I need to keep it above that bar, or is yellow-white ok for processing (I.e., pumping less often).

I always assumed that requiring the knife to split food had to do with making recipes unique (although in retrospect, that doesn't make sense). Needing a knife to split an apple makes sense, but I've always assumed most foods are already bundles of pieces (I seem to remember reading somewhere that combining food items makes a bundle of the pieces, rather than smooshing them together int a super food). Assuming needing a knife to split food, how about using a ceramic vessel as a measuring cup, by crafting together a knife, a vessel with at least one empty slot (or even make it have to be completely empty if that's possible), and a piece of food, and getting out a ceramic vessel with one (or more) of its slots as full as possible? Or, just get out piles of food that are at most 80oz (really just using the vessel as a measuring cup) and then I can put it in through the normal interface. Actually, I guess I just really want a measure cup.

I totally get this, which is why I said I wouldn't mind having another type of vessel with 2 slots that could hold full stacks of food. Of course, that seems like a rather silly addition. Maybe a way to cut food more easily? I have no idea how hard this would be, but perhaps trying to place a stack of food that is too large into a vessel would put just the 80oz that fit, and leave the rest in your cursor, much like trying to put a stack of items into a slot that can only hold one will work, but only take one? Or how shift clicking something at the forge auto-splits your stuff for optimal filling?

First of all, tfcraft is an amazing mod, and the fact that we are even talking about such small points just goes to show how much has gone into it. I personally would like to see expiration dates, just because of the group I play with (80% of the play time is me, but 20% is my 4 room mates who aren't nearly as into the minutia such as preserving food as I am, meaning they keep our house loaded but don't manage food). Honestly, the first sounds totally fair. It makes sense that if you mix and old cheese with a new cheese, you're going to get bacteria from whatever state the old one was in into the new one. You aren't requiring tons of storage space, you're giving the player a choice, which is totally believable (save storage space, or don't mix food, and eat your older food first). I also wish I could put a full 160oz of food in a slot in a ceramic vessel, because dividing a pile of grain in half (with a knife, no less) in order to fit both halves of the pile into the vessel isn't very believable. The worst is when I have 90oz of grain and have to eat/feed the rest or get creative with my knife (although maybe I should just install the scales mod). I do find this irritating enough that I wouldn't mind having to make a separate type of vessel to store two slots of small (medium?) items in order to get the preservation bonus. That being said I'm just saying how I feel; I don't expect the modders to make any of these changes, especially since they've already given me the tools to approximate what I want; I plan on simply setting the decay rate of top-tier preservation methods (dried/pickled) to 0 or near 0.