rbdyck

Ok, back to fun stuff. In the US, average yield of wheat is 2.2435 tonnes per hectare. Barley grown in Manitoba produces 3 tonnes per hectare. Potatoes in the US yield 17.4 tonnes per hectare. So if the goal is to maximize booze per hectare, potatoes provide more. Should we claim that Klingon Blood Wine is made from a potato-like root vegetable? I'm trying to figure out how to add Blood Wine to my mod. Is raw pork chop close enough to targ pancreas? One friend suggested rotting meat, but that's from a zombie. Rotting meat sound foul, it would spoil. Besides, zombies spread to villagers. Do you want a beverage that carries the disease?

Greed Yea. I thought of going into business making a custom gas chromatograph. This would be optimized to measure only alcohol. If there's methanol in it, a solenoid valve would route the alcohol to a vessel for disposal. If it's pure ethanol, route it to your booze bottle. Methanol is toxic, and can be a product if you don't distil right. This equipment would make it safe. A fancier gas chromatograph could produce a print-out of exactly what's in your booze. So the simple one would be used for home distilling. And it doesn't have to measure everything, just ethanol vs methanol. Cost should be reduced if that's all it can measure. The fancy one that could produce a graph and printed report from a personal computer would cost more, sold to home brew stores so customers can pay them to analyze their booze. But I could only sell them if home distilling is legal.

Ok, if you like the idea that Blood Wine is targ pancreas whiskey, then I could add more detail. Let's make it more efficient that human whiskey. Start by taking barley, don't sprout, instead crush and boil to kill any organisms on it. Then cool, but not to room temperature, just to pig body temperature. Take the pancreas of a pig from a butcher shop, puree raw in a food processor, add lukewarm water and soak for a couple hours. Then filter through a permanent coffee filter. Not cheesecloth, that isn't fine enough. And a paper filter would remove too much. The resulting liquid will then be added to the grain stuff. Enzymes work best at a specific temperature, pig enzymes work best at pig body temperature. Then filter with a lauter tun. Remember that's a barrel or bucket with a sieve on the bottom. The idea is to keep the liquid, but remove grain husks. Then add yeast. I make beer with 1 week of primary fermentation in a food grade plastic bucket, covered with a plastic sheet held with string and a blue elastic band to hold the string tight. Then finish fermentation in a carboy with fermentation lock. After you make the beer, distil it. A few years ago a co-worker invited me to a gun show where he showed off his guns. Guns are not my thing, but I went to establish a good relationship with this co-worker. To my surprise someone at the show was selling laboratory glassware. He said he got it from an employee surplus sale from the local distillery, that's where Crown Royal rye whiskey is made. One piece looked expensive, but had a $5 price sticker. I called my friend who has a chemistry degree. He said the one piece I described cost $110 new. So I went back and asked how much for the lot. He asked $50, and that was 5 full boxes (2 cubic feet each). Ok, so I took the lot. I now have laboratory glassware. No beakers or test tubes, but lots of glass flasks and distilling things. Officials in my province claim it's not legal to distil at home. I checked the law, you require all sorts of permits and licenses etc. to make alcohol for sale, but there's nothing stopping anyone from distilling at home for personal consumption. Prohibition existed in this province from 1916 to 1921, just 5 years. It was repealed in 1921, but the government owned liquor store has somehow convinced the police that it's still illegal. I'm told they convinced the police to charge anyone who home distils a fine equal to what the government owned corporation would have gotten in profit. Uh huh, profit. It's a monopoly. But I don't want to cross the police. I make beer and wine at home. In fact I grow grapes in my back yard for wine. I'll just drink it as wine. So I'm not going to try this recipe. Still, it's interesting to research this stuff.

Star Trek - The Next Generation and Star Trek - Deep Space Nine, both had a Klingon beverage called Blood Wine. It was supposed to taste bad (to humans) but twice as strong as whiskey. Let's see, whiskey available in liquor stores today is 80 proof (40% alcohol). That means Blood Wine is 160 proof (80% alcohol). Everclear is 190 proof (95% alcohol), and the maximum you can concentrate ethanol (drinkable alcohol) is 97.5%. To get more concentrated than that requires adding something to displace the water, and that something is always toxic. But 80% alcohol is definitely possible. So the next question: "What is it?" Yeast "eats" sugar and produces alcohol. In fact, to make beer there are several steps to break up starch in grain to make sugar: sprout, roast, boil. That boiling step dissolves oil from hops, but it also helps break up starch. There isn't much sugar in blood, so why is it called "Blood Wine?" Is it something else used to make wine? To make cheese, you add rennet to milk. That's an enzyme from the 4th stomach of calves, an enzyme to digest milk. This enzyme causes milk to curdle, separating curds from whey. Is it possible Klingons use something from an animal to make wine? Do they also start with grain, but instead break up that starch with an animal something? The pancreas of mammals produces an enzyme called amylase to break starch into malt. One show depicted a Klingon ship with a pair of dog-like animals with bad teeth called a "targ", kept in a room off the kitchen. The implication was they were for meat. So is Blood Wine a type of beer (distilled = whiskey), made with amylase taken from the pancreas of a targ? Pepsin is also produced by the pancreas; it breaks protein into amino acids. To make rennet for cheese the stomach is cleaned, salted, dried, cut into small pieces, and soaked in cold water. Doing the same with a pancreas would release all its enzymes. Or is Blood Wine just a beverage with a red colour? Red currants grow wild where I live; they're a berry with sugar like any other. They're bright red and very tart! Is Blood Wine just red currant wine? ::Edit:: Found an image of the targs. There were 3, not just 2. And these look like boars (wild pigs), not dogs.

Reading through this thread: pine need vodka? How about something more mundane: potato vodka. In real life that has lots of uses. You soak vanilla bean in it to make vanilla extract (the real stuff, artificial is completely different). Or soak seeds from a plant called fenugreek in vodka for a couple months, then add vanilla extract to make imitation maple extract. Can anyone say "pancake syrup"? I knew you could. But in MInecraft, why not just make real maple syrup? Anyway, vodka would be another alcoholic beverage. I should have the first version of my mod up later tonight. stringburka: since your mod is for TFC, our mods are not competing. How about collaborating? I haven't figured out how to make a custom potion. That means my beer and wine bottles are just objects, you can't drink them. To drink, it has to be a potion. How do I add a custom potion? And I want to add a blood alcohol meter. When you drink, the meter goes up. Over time it goes down. When you sleep, it goes to zero, but you get a hangover. If blood alcohol gets above a certain level, then "drunk" effects begin. At first you get random messages such as "Strength +1!" "Dexterity +1!" or "Speed +1!" or activate the "level up" sound effect without causing a level up. Or similar messages that indicate greatly improved abilities. But they're just messages, they don't give you anything at all. This simulates the false confidence that getting mildly drunk gives you. If you drink more, you move randomly a little in any direction: north/east/south/west. If you drink too much then the "confusion" potion effect gets triggered. That effect already exists, it's easy to trigger. It's the effect when you go through a nether portal: the world swirls before your eyes. If you continue to drink anyway, then projectile vomiting: spew on whatever is in front of you. If you're in a multiplayer game and facing a friend, you spew onto his face. Won't cause any damage, but just disgusting. Somehow I see some people doing this to their friends on purpose. But since the "confusion" potion effect will be active, aiming will be difficult. Vomiting will drop your blood alcohol level a little. If your blood alcohol level was high when you went to sleep, when you wake up you'll be sober but hung-over. Hangover effects include video brightness randomly flashing to max, and sound volume randomly spiking to max. And render distance to tiny, and view bobbing on. Sleeping another night clears a hang-over.

Interesting. I suggested beer and wine last summer. On a suggestion forum for Advanced Cooking. That forum has been taken down, and the team disbanded. Key developers went back to school in September. So I've been working on it myself. This mod is for vanilla Minecraft, not TFC, but "Booze" is almost finished. This introduces a few new crops: grape vines, hop vines, and heather. And equipment: barrel, carboy, and brew pot. You can make yeast from fruit and water (either apple or grape). Cheesecloth is necessary to rack wine from the barrel to carboy; we don't have cotton so my mod has to make cheesecloth from wool. Let's just ignore the oils in wool. This mod goes through the entire process of making beer from grain. Minecraft doesn't have barley, but barley started from a wild tall grass at the same time and area where wheat was first developed. So I just use wheat. No sense in having two varieties of wheat-like crops. The barrel is used to soak grain prior to sprouting. As the primary fermenter to turn grapes and water into wine. As the "mashing ton" to soak malted grain. And rather than a separate "lauter tun" that has a sieve in the bottom, you just use cheesecloth to transfer to the brew pot. That means consuming a piece of cheesecloth with each batch, but it means I don't need another piece of equipment. If people want a lauter tun, I could add one later. I coded 4 varieties of beer: the first is what was made prior to the 11th century, using dandelion (yellow flower) instead of hops. That's called ale. Yes, modern ale is made with hops, but it wasn't before a formal study of bittering agents done in Bavaria in the 11th century. They discovered hops. The second is beer, made with hops. You'll have to do some exploring to find a hop vine, then you can farm it. If you double roast sprouts, you get dark malted grain. Use that with hops and you get Irish stout. And the last is Scotch beer, regular malted grain but made with heather instead of hops or dandelion. Heather will generate in extreme hills biome only. http://www.minecraft...0-rbdycks-mods/ Future additions to this mod: distillery, to convert beer and ale into whiskey, scotch beer into scotch whiskey (scotch), and wine into brandy. There will also be a procedure to brew sugar into rum.

I like the idea, but wonder about your alloys. In real life, "black steel" means just steel directly from the forge. After it has been hot worked, it's black. That's due to a patina of iron oxide that doesn't have any moisture. Iron oxide with moisture is rust. "Blue steel" is just steel with a protective coating. You can read about that in Wikipedia: Bluing (steel) And why alloy steel with precious metals? That just produces a soft, weak alloy. Real steel is iron carbon alloy. Mild steel has low carbon content, resulting in a tough but soft alloy. High carbon steel is hard, good at retaining a cutting edge or preventing bending/denting from use. However that hardness comes at a price: it's brittle, easy to break. Highest quality swords blend the two, use high carbon steel for the cutting edge and mild steel for the blade core. There are various patterns to combining the two metals: Japanese katana, Norse herringbone, Arab Damascus, and others. The point is strength vs hardness. Temper is another way to balance these two: annealing will soften steel, quenching will harden it, tempering uses both techniques to achieve the desired degree of hardness. Impurities weaken steel. Even small quantities of sulphur will weaken steel. Modern steel is very pure. Silicon is the primary element of rock so is usually seen as an impurity, but small quantities can toughen steel. Fine sand is often used as flux when forge welding. Wrought iron is made by forge welding iron, using flux to lower melting temperature on their surface. I notice your list of flux is the old forms, containing compounds that can remove some impurities while working. Modern alloys add interesting properties. For example, adding both nickel and chrome will make it stainless. Although it takes a minimum of 10.5% chrome and about 0.5% nickel to do so. Better quality stainless has more. Molybdenum adds greatly to both toughness and hardness.Vanadium retards grain growth, producing fine grained steel. Vanadium steel absorbs shock better.Tungsten (Latin name Wolfram) also produces tight grain structure, and keen cutting edge when used in small quantities. It increases a tool's ability to retain hardness at higher temperatures, but that also makes it harder to temper.Nickel increases strength and toughness, but not hardness.Chromium increases depth of hardening, use only 0.5 to 1.5% chrome when not making stainless steel.Manganese is a deoxidizer, adds strength and response to heat treatment, usually only 0.5 to 2.0%.I have a book about bladesmithing. It lists several real alloys you can use for blades. It includes how to make a Viking broadsword, Japanese katana, and many others. Concentrations of metals are listed for alloys, as well as their properties.

I copied the code for water flow, just reversed the sign so it flows up instead of down. That means it will only flow 8 blocks horizontally.

Nothing.The gas doesn't back up. The rule is when the furnace starts smelting, if the block immediately above it is air, then the block is replaced by flowing gas. Then fluid flow expands from there. If the chimney is blocked, then gas just doesn't expand further.

Since no one would take my ideas seriously, I implemented them myself. I have the first mod ready. It isn't nearly as extensive as TerraFirmaCraft. My intention with Mithril is to fill the gap between iron and diamond, and do so with something that's fun and exists in reality. But most importantly I want to respond to the claim "it's very hard to code". My first mod already has gas. So to quote Sheldon Cooper from the show "Big Bang Theory": Neener neener! Or to quote my friend's young children: "Nana nana boo boo!" http://www.minecraft...0-rbdycks-mods/ Check my forum. More mods to come.

Why don't you actually read this discussion. Read post #3 on the first page. That describes arsenical bronze. It's the one with pictures.

Vanadium is required for vasco steel anyway. Vanadium occurs in some deposits of magnetite, a common iron ore. Processing pig iron to make steel will produce slag. If the original deposit of magnetite contained vanadium, then the slag will contain upto 25% vanadium. But that is by smelting while blowing oxygen in. The game calls for working pig iron on an anvil to make wrought iron, then forge welding that with pig iron to make steel. Technically that would be pattern welded steel, but that's the good stuff anyway. Since the only smelting process in game produces pig iron, I would say if you use a bellows with a bloomery, and only with a bellows, then there's a random chance the slag will contain vanadium. Slag with vanadium would be dark red. This vanadium slag is next mixed with sodium chloride (table salt) at 850°C. The result is soaked in water, a glass potion bottle would do nicely. Vanadium salt will dissolve while regular slag is left at the bottom. Pour off the liquid into an empty potion bottle, leaving the slag in the first. Add hyrochloric acid to the solution, then boil dry leaving "red cake". Should that be done in a firepit, or brewing stand? We are talking about a potion bottle. In real life that red cake is then combined with calcium metal to produce vanadium metal and salt. That salt will be a mixture of sodium chloride (table salt) and calcium chloride (road salt). But then how do you make sodium metal without electricity? Could we "cheat" and just say the red cake can be alloyed with steel directly?

I'm going to go ahead with more detail. Next is sulphuric acid. As mentioned, this is necessary to make hydrogen chloride, which is necessary to refine nickel. That's why this is in an alloy discussion. First history. The basic method is to produce sulphur oxide somehow, then pass that through water to form sulphuric acid. Pure yellow mineral sulphur is the best source, but baking coal will convert it into coke and also generate yellow smoke. That smoke is sulphur dioxide gas. To produce concentrated sulphuric acid, you need vanadium dioxide as a catalyst. SO2 combines with air to form SO3, which mixes with water to make acid. You can combine SO2 directly with hydrogen peroxide, but that wasn't available in period. Other methods of making sulphuric acid require modern stuff (1700s or later).

In real life, you can't use coal in a bloomary. You can't use coal directly in a forge either. It took a while for ancient people to figure out how. Even a small quantity of sulphur weakens steel, and all coal has sulphur. In a real forge, you start by building a fire over the tuyere, that's where air comes out of the bellows into the coal. Then pile a ring of coal around the fire. The ring is about 8 inches diameter, and in direct contact with burning coal. Heat from burning coal causes sulphur in the coal in the ring to burn off. This produces yellow smoke; that's sulphur dioxide gas. When the yellow smoke stops, you will find coal in that ring has turn into a light spongy substance that's still as black as coal. That's called coke. Coke is coal with all the sulphur removed. When you're done you should have burnt off all sulphur in the burning coal as well. Make sure all the coal in your forge is converted to coke before starting to work steel. If any coal remains, you will dramatically weaken your iron or steel. If you don't know how to do this, then you have to use charcoal.

Thanks! That means the final colours I recommended remain the same. Please don't make this a negative thing. This whole category of topics is for suggestions. I started by wanting to recommend mithril. When reading about the ancient form of bronze used in the middle and late bronze age, I realized it perfectly matched the description of mithril from "Lord of the Rings". The fact that mithril isn't fictional is something people don't know. This is a simple alloy that could be easily added to the game and people would want. Then I read about your black/blue/red steel. Umm, the rest of TFC is just so wonderful, but these fictional alloys spoil it for me. Please don't get defensive.

While I wait for more people to answer my question, I have another conversion to game terms. I gave temperatures in degrees. My bladesmith book has temperature for metal colours while working steel on an anvil. It's in fahrenheit, so I have to do a couple conversions. The chart is for the anvil, not smelting, so it only goes to yellow-white. There's a couple warnings: when working tool steel never get it hotter than orange. Above that the carbon starts to burn. That causes the metal to spit like a firework sparkler, and carbon content drops. It says never heat 440C stainless steel above 2100°F (yellow) for the same reason. Oh, I also have a coal forge and anvil at home. I tried forging myself. Got a couple lessons by a master blacksmith. I did once leave a piece of metal in the forge too long. It came out shorter, so the end completely melted off, and the end did spit. Good thing I practiced with scrap metal. Judging colour is tricky, the master smith promised to take me on as a student. I offered to pay him. Each time I talk to him he says he will, but still hasn't. A number of years ago I met another individual, a master bladesmith. He gave me a tour of his shop and sold me a video of him making a pattern welded sword. Yup, hand made with coal forge and anvil. Anyway, back to game stuff. 1200°F = 649°C = dull red 1400°F = 760°C = red 1500°F = 816°C = cherry red 1600°F = 871°C = full cherry red 1800°F = 982°C = orange 1900°F = 1038°C = orange yellow 2000°F = 1093°C = yellow 2200°F = 1204°C = full yellow 2400°F = 1316°C = light yellow Ok, that has more graduations than the game. I interpret that last one as "yellow-white". Smelting nepouite ore is off the scale, so let's interpolate: 1453°C = 2647.4°F, and the jump from red to orange is 400°F, and from orange to full-yellow is another 400°F, so this looks like white. But cassiterite requires one notch above brilliant-white, so let's go with that. That means smelting nepouite requires the same temperature as cassiterite, pretty simple. Refining matte to make unshaped nickel does not require as much heat. It should drop at orange. And reacting salt with sulphuric acid to make hydrogen chloride only requires 200°C. That isn't even a colour, that's just "hot" on the firepit scale.

Ok, started producing a proposed alloy matrix. Now I have some questions. First what I got... Bronze: Introduce mithril ore. It would be an ore block with 2 streaks: blue and green. Smelt in fire pit or bloomery to produce mithril metal bars. Only spawns when both lava and water are nearby.Alternative: tennantite and tetrahedrite ore. They spawn in the same area, and only spawn when both lava and water are nearby. Tennantite ore smelts to form unshaped arsenical bronze. This can be shaped like any other metal into an ingot. The ingot can be made into tools. Properties of arsenical bronze are the same as bronze.Tetrahedrite ore smelts to form unshaped antimonal bronze. This can also be shaped like any other metal into an ingot, and then made into tools. Antimonal bronze is as hard as iron so tools are just as effective, but durability is as bad as copper.Unshaped arsenical bronze and antimonal bronze can be combined at the metallurgy table to form mithril. More durable than steel.Note: This replaces current tetrahedrite. The real mineral is copper with antimony, not copper with silver.The more research I do, the more I'm impressed by TerraFirmaCraft. The technology involved in the bloomery is impressive. I could argue that an historic bloomery produced sponge iron rather than pig iron, which wasn't as good quality. But addition of a bellows turns it into a Catalan forge or stückofen. That's an improved bloomery, the first blast furnace. It can produce pig iron. Ok, so leave that as is. I stumbled upon some ancient alloys, things that people didn't realize at the time. Paktong white copper was made in China between 1700 BC and 1400 BC. Modern analysis discovered it's actually an alloy of copper and nickel. In medieval Germany a copper mine found a red ore mixed with their copper ore. When smelted it wouldn't produce copper, so they named it for a mischievous sprite of German miner's mythology, Nickel (similar to Old Nick). They called the ore "Kupfernickel", German for "copper nickel". We now know it as nickeline or niccolite, which is primarily nickel arsenic with small quantities of sulphur, iron, and cobalt. In some ore the arsenic is partially or mostly replaced by antimony. The ore is actually pale copper red (looks like copper metal), which is why the miners mistook it for copper. Nickel antimony ore is orange-brown. This raises my big question. Smelting nickel requires a lot. You can start with ore that doesn't include other metal, nepouite. That occurs with serpentine or kaolinite. Smelting requires 1453°C, produces something called matte plus slag. Matte can be refined by combining liquid (unshaped) matte with "calcine agglomerate" and hydrogen chloride at 850°C to 950°C. That sounds like another bloomery operation. As far as I can see, "calcine agglomerate" means gravel that's been baked. This requires hydrogen chloride, which is dry hydrochloric acid. Making hydrogen chloride with electricity is easy, it requires electrolysis and burning. You can make it without electricity, but it requires salt and dry sulphuric acid, and has to be baked at 200°C. This is getting into chemistry, and I haven't looked up smelting for the other alloying metals yet. The question is do we want a chemistry lab in the game?

Point well taken. Sorry for not looking that up. My SCA helm did not provide adequate ventilation. I regretted going with a closed face helm instead of an open face helm with bars. I found I started panting as soon as I put the helmet on. But that was the last piece of armour I put on, and my metabolism is slightly high. In high school biology class we measured heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, etc. Mine was the second highest in the class. Pardon me for talking from first hand experience.

I used to be part of the SCA, a medieval recreation society. They fought in real steel armour, and used wooden swords and foam rubber axes. Actually the swords were ratan wrapped in duct tape. It looked sort of metal, and had the same weight and balance as a real medieval broadsword. They fought full speed and full force. Trust me, you want padding in your helmet. Mine was a medieval helm (full head coverage), not a helmet (partial head coverage). When someone trained in martial arts hits you in the head as hard as he can swing it, you want padding. My helm had two layers of 3/8" closed cell foam around the crown of my head and the top, around my face and back of my head was a single layer. Inside that I had one layer of 2" open cell foam. My helm got dents from the hits. I haven't participated in a few years, after getting a bruise on my thigh that went from hip to knee I decided I'm too old for this sort of thing. In period, medieval warriors used simpler padding inside their helm. Either a cloth cap filled with wool or cotton batting, or just straw. I can't imaging going into combat with just straw padding inside my helm, but they did. Since this game is based on old stuff, here are a couple helmets from history. . . . . . . . . . The first is Corrinthian, named for the Greek city. It was used throughout ancient Greece, and many other cultures after. The second is Roman. Then Trojan. The next is Norman. The big one is a medieval barrel helm, from the cruisades, the one that my SCA helm was based upon. Then a German Sallet, and the last is assyrian. Notice all but the cruisader helm and Sallet did not cover the eyes, they ensured clear vission. You need to see your opponent in combat. And even the Sallet did not cover the mouth, you need to breathe. The barrel helm was used from 1220 to 1540, the Sallet was used in the 15th century. Others are older. In fact the Minecraft "silly hat" provides more coverage over the back of the head than a Norman helmet. If you want to see, padding worn under a medieval barrel helm looked like this: You do have to keep the game simplified to make it playable. TerraFirmaCraft is much more detailed than vanilla Minecraft, but how detailed do you want? I would argue that helmet detail is just a "skin" or texture pack.

I came here when someone claimed my post about mithril was too complex. He said the level of realism and complexity that I talked about belongs in TerraFirmaCraft. And I recommended just a single ore for mithril, just a single block with two colour streaks: blue and green. The only real complexity was where to find the ore, and the fact it produces a toxic vapour while smelting.The point of mithril is to fill the gap between iron and diamond. As the author of the metallurgy mod said, that's one hell of a gap. But I argue that normal tin/copper bronze should be less strong and less durable than iron. Mithril is more, but significantly less than diamond. My recommendation for fancy and real steel alloys is an alternative to the fictional black, blue or red steel. I haven't played TerraFirmaCraft yet, so I don't know their durability. I can look up real metals, and help translate that into game terms. Besides, have you read the list of trees? And you claim what I wrote about metals is too complex!

My point was something like Vasco Wear steel is very advanced. Very tough and highly wear resistant. Abrasives barely cut it, once the edge is put on a blade it simply does not get dull. It's easy to force, the difficulty comes after hardening. At this point vasco becomes super hard, tough, and difficult to work. carbon: 1.12% chromium: 7.75% manganese: 0.30% molybdenum: 1.60% silicon: 1.2% tungsten: 1.10% vanadium: 2.4% wear resistance: highest toughness: high red hardness: medium distortion in heat-treating: low forging: 1,800 to 1,900°F austentite forging: yes hardening: 1,550 to 1,600°F quench: oil tempering: 300 to 500°F Rc hardness: 62 to 58 The fact this alloy requires a number of metals, each with a different ore, and quenching is done in oil instead of water, adds enough for advanced players. Adding silicon requires using sand as flux.

So mithril isn't really fictional.

I'm also intrested in the form of bronze used in the Early and Middle Bronze Age. The highest quality of this form of bronze is "mithril". I posted about this on another forum, I'll repost here: The book "Lord of the Rings" introduced mithril, written by J R R Tolkein. He was a linguist and historian, obsessed with history and how culture and language intertwined. His world was based on late bronze age England, when iron was first being introduced. At that time there were stories of a legendary metal, difficult to make and knowledge lost to time. You see, during the middle bronze age they didn't make bronze with copper and tin. They used copper arsenic alloy. And the best bronze was copper arsenic and antimony. This stuff just doesn't ever corrode. Archaeologists have found knives and spear points made of this stuff, one knife has low concentration of arsenic/antimony in the core of the blade, and high concentration on its outer skin. That's because bronze with low alloying metal is durable, but with high alloying metal it's hard and retains a sharp edge. The best steel blades of the medieval age and the Japanese katana use this idea, but they mix low carbon with high carbon steel. But this bronze knife is almost 6,000 years old! And it's still good today, because arsenical bronze just doesn't corrode. That's it's technical name: copper arsenic alloy = arsenical bronze. But I believe mithril is arsenical bronze. There's a maximum amount of arsenic that will dissolve in molten copper, but much more antimony will dissolve. With over 10% arsenic and antimony the metal gains a silvery sheen, with 20% alloy it turns completely silver in colour. Based on this I believe the "mithril silver" described in "Lord of the Rings" is actually this arsenical bronze with antimony. It's 30% harder and stronger than copper. Ore is weathered tetrahedrite with tennantite, the first is copper antimony with sulphur, the second is copper arsenic with sulphur. Smelting gets rid of the sulphur. Tennantite ore is green, like corroded copper statues. However, pure tetrahedrite is bright blue. So I would colour the minecraft ore with both green and blue streaks. Give the metal a silver hue with slight bronze tint. One of the nice features of any bronze, including arsenical bronze, is work hardening. That means beating on it just makes it harder. So chopping with a bronze axe or mining with a bronze pickaxe just makes it harder. Ancient people changed to modern bronze (copper tin) because of problems working with it. Arsenical bronze just lasts forever, but molten arsenic produces arsenic oxide vapour. Breathing that gives you arsenic poisoning. The ancient Greek god of the forge was Hephaestus, he was supposed to be lame (walk with a limp). This is a known symptom of arsenic poisoning. It takes years for this arsenic poisoning to build up, and it's only from smelting it in a furnace, so I wouldn't include that in the game. After all, arsenical bronze was used from 3,200BC to about 1,200BC. And antimony bronze is much harder than tin bronze, which means much less likely to be bent by use, and a cutting edge can withstand much more wear. Here are a couple images. The first is the copper antimony ore that I talked about, called tetrahedrite. The white stuff is quartz. The next is tennantite, which is copper arsenic ore. The green streaks are the stuff, the grey junk is rock. There's also a form of tetrahedrite that is contaminated with iron, it actually forms gold coloured crystals. They look pretty, but that's not what you want. You can't just smelt in a furnace to separate iron from copper or arsenic, and it isn't as light as copper arsenic antimony alloy. So the gold stuff is a cheaper grade of mithril, it isn't "mithril silver". The description of mithril given by Gandalf while passing through the deep mine called Khazad-dûm: "Mithril! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim." tetrahedrite and tennantite occur in hydrothermal vents. For the game that means they will occur where both lava and water are present. Not right in the lava, but in the area. And if you want to be really picky, have a furnace that smelts this ore produce a toxic gas. If it's contained, you get poisoned like cave spider poison. If it's outdoors or a well ventilated area, have the gas dissipate. Hmm, how would you do that? Have the gas flow with similar physics as water, but just up-side-down? Arsenic gas flows up, but if there's an obstacle it pools under the ceiling? As soon as the furnace is no longer smelting mithril, the gas source stops? Could be done, but not sure how to program it. Is that too much detail? In game, cave spider venom can be cured by drinking milk. In real life arsenic oxide poisoning is slowly removed by the body, expelling it in urine. But eating garlic can increase the rate of expelling arsenic by 45%. Medical doctors think it's due to sulphur compounds binding to arsenic. Since bone meal doesn't cause trees and mushrooms to just grow more quickly, the game causes them to instantly mature, similarly you could have garlic cure arsenic poisoning.