Blast Furnace

[ChunkHunter 73]

From the wiki trivia:
 

• A minimum size blast furnace requires 30 Clay, 30 Kaolinite, 30 Graphite, and 5,600 units of wrought iron (224 regular iron-bearing ore) to create, including the crucible used in the crafting recipe as well as the one placed under the working blast furnace.
• Each additional layer of the blast furnace requires 20 Clay, 20 Kaolinite, 20 Graphite, and 2,400 units of wrought iron (96 regular iron-bearing ore) to create.

 

This doesn't take into acount the 1400 units (56 regular iron-bearing ore) of wrought iron required to make the anvil...

 

So - for a minimum blast furnace you'll need to have mined 280 iron ore blocks.  I know it's not supposed to be easy, but isn't this a bit OTT?

[Omicron 62]

I've never managed to exhaust a single iron vein... as such, I wouldn't say that that amount is hard to come by. It just takes a bit of time to collect.

 

Besides, you cannot just roll the cost of the anvil into the cost of the blast furnace. The anvil is an independent piece, and you only ever need one, while you might eventually build multiple blast furnaces. Adding the cost of the furnace and the anvil together is the cost of setting up in the steel age for a newly ascended player, not the cost of a blast furnace in any possible situation.

[Huruki 4]

The devs have stated so a while that they are balancing for SMP, and these requirements perfectly accurate if you can expect that several people are working on resource gathering at once. You can still do it on your own, though the time it takes is greatly extended. Even if you aren't working directly with other players their presence allows you to trade for resources you might otherwise spend hours searching for. And in the time you save you can mine more iron.

[Terex 108]

Resource gathering is not time consuming with respect to the building of the blast furnace even in single player. Ok it helps to be in a igneous (intrusive) terrain, but iron is quite easy to come by. It's the actual making of the wrought iron sheets that takes forever... but i did it at last after playing a week in real life (i play 2 hours every night). In SMP you would need multiple bloomeries, anvils and forges i imagine, to streamline the workload in parallel. 

[theubie 19]

Took me a total of about 30 hours playing (spread over a couple of days) to go from stone age to a full height blast furnace on a multiplayer server playing as a hermit.  I traded for the graphite I needed...and then literally fell into a ravine with a vein of it.  Otherwise, everything was all my own work.  

 

It's doable solo easily enough.

[Namuras 2]

From the wiki trivia:

 

• A minimum size blast furnace requires 30 Clay, 30 Kaolinite, 30 Graphite, and 5,600 units of wrought iron (224 regular iron-bearing ore) to create, including the crucible used in the crafting recipe as well as the one placed under the working blast furnace.
• Each additional layer of the blast furnace requires 20 Clay, 20 Kaolinite, 20 Graphite, and 2,400 units of wrought iron (96 regular iron-bearing ore) to create.

 

This doesn't take into acount the 1400 units (56 regular iron-bearing ore) of wrought iron required to make the anvil...

 

So - for a minimum blast furnace you'll need to have mined 280 iron ore blocks.  I know it's not supposed to be easy, but isn't this a bit OTT?

 

Chunks!

 

Get online and use the BF i made earlier... 

[mrmorse 3]

Having recently completed my first SSP blast furnace (oh yeah!), I was pretty bummed to realize how much babysitting it took to make a single ingot. I just finished the second tier of firebricks because working the bellows for a few minutes for one ingot was maddening. It's completely reasonable from a believability standpoint: one person working a small blast furnace is not going to be cranking out steel at the rate of a factory. But I was a little disheartened. This is when the little voice in my head was saying "we'll just put a little wind/water mill in here to crank the bellows, and then we'll be set..." 

 

I'm now working my single bloomery overtime to make the sheets necessary to extend the furnace and up my production to something reasonable for single player

[Terex 108]

I built the biggest blast furnace possible right from the get go. It's all or nothing baby!