anvil progression - limited facing upgrades?

[GopherAtl 22]

Not sure this suggestion will go over well, but it's an idea I keep coming back to. The way anvil/tool progression works feels a bit off to me. It can be incredibly frustrating having to use so much of your first metal in each tier to make an anvil before you can do anything else; an anvil seems like a big thing, not like the first thing you'd ever make with a new metal.

 

So my suggestion is this: allow a form of limited upgrade to anvils in the form of facing it in a higher-tier metal. Real anvils tend to be like this, with a facing of a harder, stronger material than the bulk of the anvil, so it passes a believablity sniff-test.

 

How I picture it: You have a bronze anvil and have just refined your first iron blooms. Rather than gathering 14 iron ingots to make an iron anvil, you can weld your first two into a double ingot and use that to upgrade the face of the bronze anvil, giving you an iron-faced bronze anvil. This anvil would have the same welding properties as a bronze anvil, but the tool-working ability of an iron. So you could make iron tools, but you could not weld steel ingots. Before moving into the steel age, you would still have to make your 7 double iron ingots and make a true solid iron anvil. This upgrade would also be a one-time thing, and limited to a single tier; you could make a bronze-faced copper, or iron-faced bronze, but not an iron-faced copper or steel-faced bronze.

 

There could be other limitations imposed, though they would add complexity to the implementation. Only certain items might be craftable on such an upgraded anvil; using the iron-faced bronze anvil example, you might be able to make tools, like picks and shovels, but not weapons or armor. Perhaps just a restriction on working double ingots in general, or possibly a finer filtering of specific recipes. This way you wouldn't completely eliminate the need for the highest-tier anvils.

 

For those looking to rush through the tiers, the resources spent facing the old anvil would seem like a waste since they're going to have to make a real next-tier anvil anyway. But for players taking a more leisurely trip through the tiers, it would allow them to benefit from their first next-tier ore mines a bit sooner without actually letting them move through the tiers any faster.

 

Anyway, this seems like a change that would have a positive impact to me, just wanted to share and see what other people think of the idea.

 

 

tl;dr summary

craft anvil with next tier double ingot to make partially-upgraded anvil, able to forge only tools of the next tier, not make weapons/armor or weld the tier after that.

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

You can think of the anvil as the price of advancing to the next tier of metal- a price refundable once you've moved beyond it and have a crucible. Given that copper and bronze tools can be cast, I don't think it's necessary to do this. The wrought iron anvil is the first anvil which you'd need to make before making any tools of that metal tier and the player should be sufficiently equipped with bronze tools that this shouldn't be a hindrance- bronze is good just not AS good. If metal casting wasn't implemented, I'd be more inclined to agree that it was unfair to have such a heavy toll just to start working with metals. However given that it does exist, I don't feel anvils are unfairly expensive.

[GopherAtl 22]

yah, I can't honestly call it an objective observation, it's just a minor point of frustration that irritates me a bit every time I'm transitioning between tiers. Would be nice to be able to upgrade a couple of my most heavily-used tools before I really dig in to an anvil upgrade.

 

And of course, it really doesn't bother me at the level of copper->bronze, though tbh I don't think I've ever even made a copper anvil. It's the bronze->iron and iron->steel points where I find myself wishing for the ability to upgrade my pick without making a new anvil first.