Multi-Player suggestions; Metal's Industry

[ludgarthewarwolf 7]

So I've already posted a post here about "small" changes I though TFC could use, but this post is planned to be a much more larger and encompassing.So I've had a ball playing TFC multiplayer, but I've also noticed some...lacking in how TFC works for a multiplayer community; in this post metalworking. With a town's worth of players prospecting and mining, the default blast furnace seems a bit...small. I believe, if only for balance reasons or aesthetics, that there not only needs to be another tier between the bloomery and the blast furnace, that there needs to be an overhaul of how both work. Bloomery:How the bloomery works now is nice, a much need improvement for realism. But its mechanics are off. Speaking from personal experience and research, common bloomeries need a constant supply or air and charcoal to smelt Iron. The older TFC bloomery was more like RW bloomeries in that regard, but I prefer the simple addition of an air-supply necessity to the bloomeries. Blast Furnace:My one complaint with the blast furnace is its size. Blast furnaces, even primitive medieval ones, had to be much larger to maintain the heat and reducing atmosphere needed for Iron smelting. I propose the addition of tiers to the blast furnace; 1x1, 2x2, and 3x3. As the size increases, so does the output and efficiency, but also the material cost. It would be balanced so that only the largest towns could afford a 3x3 blast furnace. (Previous posts about mechanized air supplies would work here) Catalan Forge:This would be the middle man. Catalan forges were medieval Spanish forges that used highly pressurized air supplied not by bellows, but by a Trompe, a medieval air compressor. These forges would allow solo players to still to produce high quantities of iron without a blast furnace.Additional Ideas would be the implementation of forge welding to create steel from blooms, along with different quality steel for different tools, but those are for another day.

 

I hope you find these suggestions interesting and agreeable-

Ludgar

[corki99 23]

I do think this "Catalan forge" sounds nice

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Just want to make sure that you do know that there are already different sizes (heights) of bloomeries and blast furnaces in game. The bloomery with a 3 block high chimney (instead of 1) can smelt 16 ores at once, the equivalent of 4 ingots. The blast furnace can have up to a 4 block high chimney (instead of 1), and is actually a re-design of the old bloomery, in that you do have to regularly throw more charcoal into the chimney as its processing.

 

Edit: It appears that Blast Furnaces are buggy in 77.22, if they were working correctly they would only be working with a chimney that is 4 blocks tall and can smelt a maximum of 16 ore at a time.