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Stonegazer

Regarding the 'The problem of Cassiterite' poll

51 posts in this topic

I would like to suggest an option not presented in the poll: make other metals viable for 1st tier metalworking, namely gold and copper. A quick search on the subject led me to a relevant wikipedia article on metalworking that suggested gold was the first metal to be worked into tools, followed by copper and tin. I propose that gold and copper, especially native gold and native copper, be made into viable alternatives to tin for basic metalworking. I don't suggest making gold any easier to find, but copper in particular strikes me as a good option for primitive metalwork, especially considering its abundance relative to tin (copper: 50 ppm [parts per million], tin: 2 ppm, in Earth's crust). Either way, I'd like to see the focus for early metalwork shift away from hunting granite and smelting cassiterite, and towards finding native metals with relatively low melting points, such as gold, copper, or even silver.

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I wouldn't have a problem with this. Gold has a pretty low durability and this would make gold tools actually useful. Make them mineable with stone picks.

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I don't think you could ever make tools out of gold, they would be way to heavy to swing.

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A solid gold pick or shovel head on the same scale as one made from iron would be an inconvenient and ineffectual luxury indeed. I'm guessing early gold tools were of a smaller, simpler design.

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I don't think you could ever make tools out of gold, they would be way to heavy to swing.

Fun fact is that silver weights more than gold so i do not think that what you just said is actually true..
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Agreed!

MC player -"hey look! The first ore I found was gold!"

TFC friend-" yeah dude it sucks, like Hacking rubber against stone" ^^

Gold is a very bad metal, but early ages was able to extract it so I agree it should be low tier.

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Fun fact is that silver weights more than gold so i do not think that what you just said is actually true..

there are no silver tools in the game either.

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This sounds like a great idea. Gold tools already exist in vanilla and this gives them a place.

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This sounds like a great idea. Gold tools already exist in vanilla and this gives them a place.

Eh kinda, TFC is essentially replacing vanilla so the gold tools wouldn't be there just because they already exist in vanilla. There would have to be a plausible reason to use gold tools to add them to TFC.

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What about the introduction of more Sulphide Ores, the introduction of Stannite would maybe give an alternative route for tin, while also providing copper. We already have Sphalerite, cinnabar and Galena.
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What about the introduction of more Sulphide Ores, the introduction of Stannite would maybe give an alternative route for tin, while also providing copper. We already have Sphalerite, cinnabar and Galena.

Looking at the wiki for Stannite, it seems like a perfect fit. It has a good amount of tin, and it can be found near ores that already exist in TFC (sphalerite, tetrahedrite, cassiterite) that are found in various different rock types. It also has copper, iron, and sulfur (though odd, I just realized I don't think I've seen sulfur since beta 1). It brings a problem with it, however, of how to process it. Typically the multi-metal ores go into the bloomery and you get it out that way, but if you're trying to get tin you are probably still trying to make a chisel to make said bloomery.

If it goes this way I have a suggestion on how to deal with that. When putting Stannite in a firepit, have tin come out as normal. Then make a second "ore" called Tin-less Stannite, and have it appear in the output slot along with the slag. You can then later take this ore and throw it in the bloomery (when you make it thanks to your fancy new tin chisel) and receive the other metals the firepit could not process.

Or you could just make it a tin-only ore. As cool as I think my idea is, it sounds like it might be fairly complicated on the coding side. At the very least Stannite would be ideal because it could appear in a lot of places. Nice find, thekrazyfool!

*Edit: fixed some spelling and poor word choice

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Alternate suggestion:

Make cassiterite ore spawns same size they are currently, put in twice as many, but then increase the amount it requires to get a full ingot. This will make it much easier to find, espescially on granite surface layers. However, the actual amount of tin available will not change, but small amounts would be easier to find thus removing the problem of being "starved" for tin.

Also, I'd like if Bioxx would look into removing the true randomness of ore smelting, and instead introduce a weighted amount. So, your chance of getting what should be the current mean value of ore would actually be, say 70%. In simpler terms, you have a much higher chance of getting an average amount than any of the extremes. It should look something like this.

http://i46.tinypic.com/246n8zp.png

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Also, I'd like if Bioxx would look into removing the true randomness of ore smelting, and instead introduce a weighted amount. So, your chance of getting what should be the current mean value of ore would actually be, say 70%. In simpler terms, you have a much higher chance of getting an average amount than any of the extremes. It should look something like this.

http://i46.tinypic.com/246n8zp.png

Regardless of what is done with the cassiterite/tin situation, I would be interested in this as well.

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Smelting of Stannite would not be different from other ores, Zinc exists in it's Sulphide ore in TFC and it's processed normally, Stannite doesn't NEED to be an exception unless Bioxx wants to add Roasting sulphide ore's into their Oxides ( A good mechanic I might add) then so be it!

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Casserite is nothing short of infuriating.

On single player, I've had to respawn worlds three times to find it.

On multi, I've had to walk to 2000 blocks in either direction. That's 4 million blocks of territory to be walking BTW and the larger the map on multi, the more the lag, so bad things happen.

Out of 23 found biomes over the span of four days of looking, 2 had granite in the top layer. This actually caused an argument between players as casserite is currently stupidly rare and way too easy to monopolize by players 'staking out' territory. I voted for C.

Have granite be the main source of casserite, but give the ability to find a different tin elsewhere so these fights have a lesser chance of happening. There's two different pig irons, why not two different tins?

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I feel this topic has derailed somewhat. What I would like to explore here are alternatives to tin, particularly for that first chisel. I still feel like the coin metals (gold, silver, copper) would be a good fit, since they have fairly low melting points and do occur natively, and native metals are easier to work with than ores. Granted, they wouldn't make particularly durable chisels, but they would only need to last through about half a stack of stone to have served their purpose. Perhaps native metals could even skip the melting step since they are already practically pure and be hammered directly into ingots, requiring less maximum heat to work with than their ore-born counterparts.

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Gold, Silver (Heavy Precious Metals) are far too malleable to be used for such strenuous work. They wouldn't even make a dent, they would just instantly blunt.

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Gold, Silver (Heavy Precious Metals) are far too malleable to be used for such strenuous work. They wouldn't even make a dent, they would just instantly blunt.

Yeah I was thinking of saying the same thing. You make a solid gold chisel and try to use it on a piece of stone, it'd immediately become dull and bend.

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Yeah I was thinking of saying the same thing. You make a solid gold chisel and try to use it on a piece of stone, it'd immediately become dull and bend.

I would love to see someone do that in real life...
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Perhaps Obsidian glass tools could be used in place of tier 1 metals for chisels, with a lower durability of course. The material has been used for tools or millennia.

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How about this: A flint tool may be used on cobblestone to produce a brick block just it may be used on a log to produce a wood plank block? It's been a while since I studied Ancient Egypt, but I seem to recall reading that the way they cut a lot of blocks of stone was by banging a harder kind of stone against them.

So how about you can use a flint tool in place of a chisel, but it consumes the flint tool, and may only be done on "softer" rocks?

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Technically stone is mined with a wedge and a hammer, not a pick axe in any case.. On the other hand with getting flux from Borax and a Stone hammer, you can skip straight to Copper and not have to do Tin/Zinc/Bismuth at all any longer.

So there is actually a solution to hording tin.. All the alloys from here on out require one piece of tin so even a single vein find can last a good long while.

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I think I remember reading, or being told by a professor, that in the ancient Egyptian quarries they used to literally pound rocks into other rocks until they wore them down enough so that they got the shape they wanted, relying on nothing more than brute force and the fact that the rock they were holding was harder than the rock they were using as building material.

I imagine they did use wedges and hammers for the more delicate and/or fine and/or expensive work, but for the vast majority of the stones mined for use in temples and monuments, stone on stone and a large enough labor pool was more than sufficient.

But, yes, now you can go straight to copper, although you still do need tin at some point to get past it. If only there was some alloy that could be made of copper and something other than tin that could be used as an alternative to bronze. My knowledge of metallurgy is insufficient to this task. Maybe later I'll dig out my book on blacksmithing and see what it has to say.

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Technically stone is mined with a wedge and a hammer, not a pick axe in any case.. On the other hand with getting flux from Borax and a Stone hammer, you can skip straight to Copper and not have to do Tin/Zinc/Bismuth at all any longer.

So there is actually a solution to hording tin.. All the alloys from here on out require one piece of tin so even a single vein find can last a good long while.

The problem with that is you have to find Borax, which on the wiki has no hints on where to find it. I personally have not seen it before and I've been playing since Beta v1j

I've been thinking that maybe the problem isn't tin itself, it's the community's focus on tin being the only option for advancement on multiple levels. In the back of everyone's mind they realize there are other options, but tin is the most frequently spoken of.

So after doing my research I would like to ask the community a few questions.

1) If your problem with tin is that you can't make a chisel to progress to the bloomery, did you know you can use Bismuth and Zinc (Bismuthite and Sphalerite) for tools on the same level as tin?

2) If your problem with tin is that you can't progress beyond copper because you can't make bronze without tin, did you know you can make Rose Gold, Black Bronze, or Bismuth Bronze, and their respective anvil types function -exactly- the same as the regular Bronze?

After digging around I feel like for question 1, people are just hearing everyone else say "get tin, it's in granite" and assuming it is the only thing you can do.

For question 2, people are relying heavily on the wiki, which doesn't even say those types of anvils exist.

After discovering this (and I'm not trying to be arrogant about this as I was actually part of the question 2 group a short while ago), I'm personally beginning to think Cassiterite and tin don't need to be altered as desperately as people are clamoring for it. I think the information about alternatives may first just need to be spread among the masses and actually applied in practice.

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