Is charcoal making balanced?

[Gekkey Mathews 33]

I'm not so sure that the current failure rate for wood turning into charcoal is completely balanced. You have to cut down a chunk of trees to make enough charcoal to get about 8 ingots. Then another chunk to warm them enough to form them into shape. It takes about 5 chunks of trees to make a set of armor then multiply that by a few people and you've deforested a continent.

[flamestrider 35]

This is when you start a tree farm, preferrably with willows as they provide the most logs per sapling. Although I'm curious as to your choice of the words "current failure rate" as I'm not quite sure what you refer to.

Another way to conserve fuel is to shape the metals directly after making them into ingots.

Later on when you have found fosil coal, either bituminous coal or lignite, you can use that in the forge to heat up the metals instead of using charcoal for everything.

[ruhl4 24]

It may be unbalanced ingame, but sadly it is the same in real life.

[Gekkey Mathews 33]

Right now only about 25% of the logs you put into the charcoal pit actually come out as charcoal. the rest fail and burn up.

I am aware it is possible to use less to no charcoal. I was doubtful that only getting so little per tree was balanced.

[flamestrider 35]

actually, the amount of charcoal, being about 1/4th, is actually based of how much you can expect from a real-world pyrolytic conversion from wood to charcoal... there is the big reason we moved away from powering trains with coal and nowadays use more efficient fuel methods.

Think of the process like so: you condense the heating matter in the wood, removing the huge amount of water that is in the wood, thus when later using it you get a higher burn temperature. Basically making wood into charcoal doesn't add to the energy in the wood itself, it transforms it so that it's warmer, and thus have a shorter lifespan, hence the 1/4th amount.

[GismoT 50]

charcoal was never used for trains, stonecoal and coke were used for trains, we switched not of their ineffecientcy ( steamenines have a effeciency of up to 96%) steam engines for traines were abondond due to the need to prefire them up to 3 hours before use, and the cost to produce good locomotives,

a diesel engine+generator on a train chassy is much cheaper, wich replaced the steam engine

you also dont get rid of the water, you "burn" the wood without a sufficent oxygen, this leads to that most of the non C atoms get cut of the former cellulose

so you basicly create almost pure carbon, wich has a higher burntemp and a longer burn time then most wood

what i dont get is, that all the trees have the same charcoal ratio, since willow grows so fast because most of its structure uses water to stabilize the cellstructre (big cells), and wood like oak, hickory (small cells, less water) has the same ratio,

[flamestrider 35]

charcoal was never used for trains, stonecoal and coke were used for trains, we switched not of their ineffecientcy ( steamenines have a effeciency of up to 96%) steam engines for traines were abondond due to the need to prefire them up to 3 hours before use, and the cost to produce good locomotives,

a diesel engine+generator on a train chassy is much cheaper, wich replaced the steam engine

you also dont get rid of the water, you "burn" the wood without a sufficent oxygen, this leads to that most of the non C atoms get cut of the former cellulose

so you basicly create almost pure carbon, wich has a higher burntemp and a longer burn time then most wood

what i dont get is, that all the trees have the same charcoal ratio, since willow grows so fast because most of its structure uses water to stabilize the cellstructre (big cells), and wood like oak, hickory (small cells, less water) has the same ratio,

schooled but tbh I was trying to not be too geeky and just cover a few basics instead of telling him what a pyrolytic process does. And I'm guessing he uses only the amount of logs in a pile, rather than looking at what type and such, partly because it's a game, and partly to reduce the amount of stuff that needs to be processed when the pit finishes, the max-size pit is having enough difficulties as it is...

[GismoT 50]

-snip-

you can crash a server with 2.5 ghz and 3 gb ram with a charcoal pit with around 2400 logs so you are probably right