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Bioxx

Metal Tiers

62 posts in this topic

Yes there is still variety and actually there was a 6th type removed, and a new one added that I forgot about, Blueschist. You'd have to check the commit log on github to see which ones that I ditched because I really can't remember anymore. But now we're getting offtopic.

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I was hopping for a more multiplayer oriented class system.

One where it was not expected that each player had to developed all skills.

Where as in most multiplayer adventure games we would have players with different characteristics,

I did not see the smith to also be the Alchemist.

Not saying it should be impossible, for the sake of single players, just impractical.

Actually maybe is time for the mod to have an option for single or multiplayer. I would be fine with the mod to be totally oriented for Multiplayer.

In tfc one we had the best metallurgic mod, and I was hopping for tfc2 to have the same level of attention and detail to other areas and aspects of ancient civilizations. 

When creating a town or just a party to adventure through the world I wanted people to have different roles.

So instead of magic or alchemy being a continuation of metallurgy I wanted to be a parallel line.

Even though I am able to be a good smith for a town, usually I work better as a miner/procurer I consider myself good with the prospector pick and finding ores. Off course many times I would call the other players to help dig out the ore once found. But I think specialization should be the way to go.

As a last resource the game could be in such a way that if a player want to do everything by himself, even if possible it should take an unbelievable amount of time.  

 

 Sorry to resurrect this but i agree with this statement from the first page. I was just thinking the same thing. I love the advancements in TFC1 with the skill system. but i feel that the original idea people put in my head of TFC being a more "hardcore Survival" doesn't hold up. as i said to my friend just now it feels more like a "try not to die smithing mod" And i agree i would love to see the level of detail in other aspects of the game. with it being ancient and medieval based, i feel metalurgy and smithing should have a more spotlight. this changes if magic is added. regardless some more detail in other areas would really set this apart from TFC1. like say one of my advancements for cooking is buying a cooking pot and being able to make stews along side sandwhiches and salads. maybe add a oven to bake bread and other baked goods. I would love to see advancement with brewing, even if its included in the Cooking skill or its own skill. its been awhile since i played TFC. i played mostly around the first implementation of Ingots being able to stack in the world. the server i played on died out so i didn't play again for some time later after the pit kiln was implemented(loved that change.) If TFC2 can maintain some of TFC1 but vastly improve on multiple aspects of skills and progression i can say it will be my goto non HQM mod.

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I didn't notice this topic when I originaly posted my sugestion, so I'm going to repost it here.

 

 

The things I learnd in my Materials Technology course this semester made me think about the metalworking mechanics in TFC and I belive that I found room for improvement. Now, don't get me wrong, the current mechanics are pretty good, I just think that it's possibe to make the even better.

 

 

First, let's talk about steel, becuse I find the way iron and steel are currently handled somewhat lacking. So, here are my major points of critique:

 

1) There is too much of a technological jump from making wrought iron from iron bloom (iron age) to steel from a blast furnace (19th century), other methods such as Finery (15th century), Puddling (late 17th century) or Cruciblle Steel (middle ages) are comletly ignored.

 

2) You can't turn pig iron into steel by just repeatedly hitting it with a hammer, you have to use some kind of conversion process.

 

3) The steel alloys (red steel and blue steel) indtroduced by TFC feel rather arbitray.

 

Yes, I'm aware that some of it is done for balancing purposes, but it should be possibe to impliment some of the methods mentioned above without upsetting the game balance.

 

Firstly, I would propose adding Puddling as a more efficient late mid-game method of getting wrought iron to replace bloomeries. I chose wrought iron as the product so blast funaces aren't rendered redundant and because puddled steel's material properties are verry similar to wrought iron, making them technicaly the same thing. Furthermore, the proces of "hitting a bar of pig iron untill it turns into steel" should be replaced with the player having to turn the still liquid pig iron into steel using a primitve version the Bessemer process.

 

 

In my opinion, the current "progession tree of metals" gets boring and grindy after some time, so to make it more interesting and encourage experimentation I propose the following system: Instead of having a set of predefined alloys, each metal is assigned a set of hidden, semi-random values that produce workable alloys with the right combination. This would take ome of the grindyness out of the metalurgy process, as it opens the possibility of randomy discovering interesting new combinations of metals. This would also make the hig tier steel alloys feel less arbitrary, as the player feels like developing them on their own.

 

Lastly, it can be frustrating for a metal tool you put a lot of efford to make to just break and dissarpear, so i propose to add scrap tho the game, that drops when metal items break and can be melted down and recycled. Sracp would drop ata a rato of one item per ingot used for the cration of the broken item and yield slightly less than a full ingot for balance.

 

 

Here are some helpfull wikipedia links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puddling_%28metallurgy%29#Puddling_furnace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process

 

 

To summarize: I propose to add Puddling as a step between Bloomeries and Steel, to make the process of steelmaking more realistic, to make all alloys procedural and to add scrap as a way to recycle broken tools.

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Do you have a proposal for how this might look in game?  I briefly skimmed the first parts of the puddling article on wiki and it mentioned it didn't use charcoal.  But it feels like the game uses charcoal as a general fuel for these processes, even in the blast furnace, to help add difficulty.  So does the blast furnace also need to change, and/or bloomery?  How will the progression go?  Will there be an intermediate product between wrought iron and steel?  It's all well and good to suggest these things, but it's probably going to help the chances of your suggestion a LOT more to make some actual game mechanics suggestions, rather than just pointing out a historical thing and saying it should be included, when the progression we have already works fairly well, imo. 

 

SO just considering the existing situation, there is indeed a very steep work gap between the 16 sheets of bronze in the bloomery, and then the 76 sheets of iron plus 110 graphite for the blast furnace.  BF uses charcoal at a 1:1 ratio ore-to-charcoal, whereas the bloomery always uses 8 charcoal that don't do anything ore-wise.  And in theory, after extraction wrought iron takes 3 steps to produce a finished ingot, while steel only takes two.  Though in practice I imagine most people have a crucible for smelting their wrought iron, and taking that into account, plus the tedium of crucible melting and pouring, one might argue that the ingot work level is similar between the two, and they both produce a similar amount of raw material at max height (regular ore: bloomery 600 units, BF 500 units).  So what process will fit in there, using an in-between amount of metal, and using a similar amount of work to refine the ingots?  Or how can the existing processes be altered to allow such a step?

 

As for tool scraps, in current TFC I don't see it as necessary - there's so much ore around, tools are pretty trivial to remake.   If ore is rarer in TFC2 it might be more useful. 

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I wonder if it would be fun/possible to have (and maybe this is already planned, idk) a system where not only durability, weight, and damage can be affected by the alloying, but also the resistances to weapon damages such as slash/blunt/pierce (although those could also be governed by armor type, if we ever have different types), but also 'magical' damage types like cold, fire, acid, negative energy.  Maybe an alloy that confers a degree of magic resistance.  Not too much, probably need to leave room for magic to confer better bonuses of these kinds.  Or maybe the types of 'special' enchantments the armor will accept is governed by the alloy type (feather falling, light, water breathing, health regeneration, warmth, coolness etc).  So then the armorer plays the role of setting up the armor to accept the enchantment, but you still need a magician to actually place the enchantment..

 

Ooooh... this reminds me.  Just to tag on an idea for something that was a factor in real life: behavior of alloys at different temperatures.  As an example of what I mean, there is some good evidence that back in medieval times, there were nobles who had one sword for the winter, and another for summer.  What differed was phosphorus content.  A small amount of phosphorus in wrought iron yields an exceptionally tough and flexible iron that holds a keen edge when made into a sword.  A blade made of such a material was best used in the summer, though, because the phosphorus-rich metal was pretty cold-short, so much so that the blade would become a lot more prone to breaking in cold weather!

So, in this system for TFC2, perhaps some alloys would perform wonderfully in one climate, but terribly in another!  :)

Also, on a general note about this proposed procedural metal system, I find that such an idea actually reflects a bit of what real-life metallurgists of prehistory had to go through in order to discover how to make this or that metal.  If smelting fuel and the behavior (and design) of furnaces used for smelting also played a role, this could shape up to be quite a metallurgy simulator! 

Oh!  And for those commenting on magic and the like... a fun fact is that metallurgists of old (in some cultures) were in their own right considered magicians and alchemists in the purest senses of those words, and powerful ones at that!

Edited by Andeerz
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One interesting aspect of sword making is that it would have a different material in the center than the edges. One flexible and one hard. 

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To me it's always amazing that some ancient technologies, such as Damascus steel, were lost.  The notion that many people can know a process, and still eventually it dies out, confounds in this day and age where all things are recorded.  This is an interesting article though, about how a man can keep a metallurgy practice a secret despite using and widely selling it all his life, while employing men helping him, and still take the secret to his grave, less than 100 years ago.   The description of the things he could do with those knives, sounds basically like magic to me, today.   Note that at the end of the article when they make some guesses as to how this man made his incredible knives, one of those guesses involved 'quenching' the blade in molten lead.  Interesting. 

Edited by Darmo
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Beautiful article I loved it. Just like Black Bronze. It makes we wonder how many more secrets and technologies human kind have lost to time.

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Yeah I agree with the idea that steel is lacking and colored steel is arbitrary, and I would love for a more in depth, player skill oriented blacksmithing system to be implemented in tfc2, where a highly skilled player-smith could make and excellent steel sword with the materials that a noob player could barely make a functional sword with.Some elements of this could simply copy real life, with tempering, quenching, and annealing to add the depth to smithing. I think crucible steel would be a nice intermediate tho, it could go something like this:

 

It could be done by building a structure like the bloomery but without the bronze door, and made out of fire bricks, or stone. You would then place a large ceramic vessel in the bottom of the furnace. This would act as the crucible. You would put the appropriate iron ore, some charcoal or perhaps bones in the vessel to add carbon (it could be at 1 charcoal/bone [the carbon adding content] per 100 metal units of iron), seal the vessel, put down 8 charcoal layers on the ground of the furnace, and throw a torch down to light it.

After after~8 in game hours the charcoal would burn down and there would be the vessel, but you would have to break it to get the steel ingot (s) inside. When you break the vessel the ingots inside would drop as items.

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It could be done by building a structure like the bloomery but without the bronze door, and made out of fire bricks, or stone. You would then place a large ceramic vessel in the bottom of the furnace. This would act as the crucible. You would put the appropriate iron ore, some charcoal or perhaps bones in the vessel to add carbon (it could be at 1 charcoal/bone [the carbon adding content] per 100 metal units of iron), seal the vessel, put down 8 charcoal layers on the ground of the furnace, and throw a torch down to light it.

After after~8 in game hours the charcoal would burn down and there would be the vessel, but you would have to break it to get the steel ingot (s) inside. When you break the vessel the ingots inside would drop as items.

 

It would at least need to be made of firebrick, or the structure and process would be cheaper than a bloomery.  At least 16 sheets of bronze costs 3200 units.  A large clay vessel is relatively worthless, and all other current iron processes are at best 1 charcoal to 35 units of iron, so 1 charcoal to 100 units is very cheap by comparison.   And then you break the vessel and ingots pop out?  No smithing required as the bloomery and blast furnace?  Way too easy.

 

But even if you up the carbon cost, and use fire bricks, and require ingot smithing, then you basically have something that mimics a bloomery, but with graphite added in.   I don't think that's adding anything of value to the game, to have something that is almost the same process, and just produces an intermediate level of metal between wrought iron and steel.  In my opinion it would be better to spend the development effort on processes beyond steel.  Stuff that's new and different, with interesting mechanics.  Not just a hybrid bloomery-blast-furnace.  Something to replace the current production 'feature' of beyond-steel metals, which is just making more metal, melting it to make the next tier, and then having ingots of the previous tier vanish as you weld them on.

 

Maybe further metals require even hotter temperatures, requiring the player to make mechanisms and blowers to stoke the furnace.  Mechanisms and blowers could require a sand-casting process for the gears and other parts.  These in addition to a structure made of fire brick block, and metal sheets.  These can be hand, animal, or engine powered (engines requiring other sand-cast parts).  The metal this produces allows the pumping of lava, opening the door for the next tier of production, a magma furnace.  Maybe from magma furnace it's just a matter of adding more pumps and/or blowers, since procedural metals would be effectively unending, and you can't realistically have a new process for each tier. 

 

Overall I think it'd be better to think up more interesting processes beyond the blast furnace, rather than try to shoe-horn something between the bloomery and blast furnace.  That, or shake up the entire chain. 

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I think the main issue is that we are trying to create a Artificial technological ladder, when in reality the ladder is based in knowledge.

Take for example The mysterious Island from Jules Verne. the Characters in that book went straight for iron, without the need for copper or bronze. 

Maybe we would be better off creating a knowledge barrier.One where the player would have to find a book in the next Island before he/she would have the knowledge to work that metal.

Either that or not have Iron on the first Island, It could work if we only had Copper on the first Island, on the second we would have the ores needed to make Bronze and only have Iron on the Third Island.

Just some ideas, not really sure how that would work.

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Either that or not have Iron on the first Island, It could work if we only had Copper on the first Island, on the second we would have the ores needed to make Bronze and only have Iron on the Third Island.

 

I guess I've been assuming that's exactly how it was going to work.  I'm pretty sure that's how Bioxx said it would be.  Each island you get to go up one tier.  Although I wasn't sure if the first island was going to have copper, or make you do a whole island in the stone age.  I'm hoping the starting islands have copper, and not make you go through clearing it (and/or the next one?) with stone weapons.

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If that's the case, I hope we have one Island only on stone age, but a more realistic Stoneage, where we can actually work wood and stone.

I hate how people imagine stone age man as nothing more than a chimp living in caves.

People forget that stonehenge was built by a neolithic civilization, using only stone tools. That's how advanced they were. 

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Going back onto alloying a little, could we have a testing bench? So we make a new alloy and we don't know what it's like, it seems wasteful to make a tool just to test it. Maybe we could have a testing bench, on it you can run various little options like heating it, trying to scratch it, trying to bend it ect. This'd let quicken the process of making new alloys and just generally be neat.

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Going back onto alloying a little, could we have a testing bench? So we make a new alloy and we don't know what it's like, it seems wasteful to make a tool just to test it. Maybe we could have a testing bench, on it you can run various little options like heating it, trying to scratch it, trying to bend it ect. This'd let quicken the process of making new alloys and just generally be neat.

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Do you have a proposal for how this might look in game?  I briefly skimmed the first parts of the puddling article on wiki and it mentioned it didn't use charcoal.  But it feels like the game uses charcoal as a general fuel for these processes, even in the blast furnace, to help add difficulty.  So does the blast furnace also need to change, and/or bloomery?  How will the progression go?  Will there be an intermediate product between wrought iron and steel?  It's all well and good to suggest these things, but it's probably going to help the chances of your suggestion a LOT more to make some actual game mechanics suggestions, rather than just pointing out a historical thing and saying it should be included, when the progression we have already works fairly well, imo. 

 

SO just considering the existing situation, there is indeed a very steep work gap between the 16 sheets of bronze in the bloomery, and then the 76 sheets of iron plus 110 graphite for the blast furnace.  BF uses charcoal at a 1:1 ratio ore-to-charcoal, whereas the bloomery always uses 8 charcoal that don't do anything ore-wise.  And in theory, after extraction wrought iron takes 3 steps to produce a finished ingot, while steel only takes two.  Though in practice I imagine most people have a crucible for smelting their wrought iron, and taking that into account, plus the tedium of crucible melting and pouring, one might argue that the ingot work level is similar between the two, and they both produce a similar amount of raw material at max height (regular ore: bloomery 600 units, BF 500 units).  So what process will fit in there, using an in-between amount of metal, and using a similar amount of work to refine the ingots?  Or how can the existing processes be altered to allow such a step?

 

 

The idea was to add a Puddling Furnace mutiblock that turns iron ore directly into wrought iron but requires the player to activly ineract with the mutiblock to simulate stiring the liquid iron rather then the usual method of "trowing in some ore+charcoal and waiting a day".

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Ah, I see.  I like the notion of providing a different method of production, that has more intense time requirements, but produces a better product.   trading constant attention (like the blast furnace) for a product that doesn't require a bunch of refining seems somewhat reasonable, depending on the balance, and material factors.  Though really, for all we know, the processes might get totally revised and shuffled anyway.

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I wonder if a Dwarf Fortress-esque system could be used for the metals, where they have a hardness, sharpness and density stat (hidden by default, perhaps high level metallurgists could identify the traits?)?

 

Harder ones are more durable and have better armour against sharp and crush damage, softer have less durability but... I dunno, perhaps increased piercing resistance?, sharpness is basically how sharp an edge the metal can hold, so a sword made of a high sharpness metal would inflict more damage, for example. Density would be how dense it is, so something like a mace made out of a high density metal would do more damage, but with reduced swing speed? And wearing high density armour gives a speed debuff (if you tried running in a solid gold set of armour, you'd be pretty slow I imagine). It could stimulate a degree of trading. Someone makes metal ABC which is light and sharp, but soft, and someone makes metal XYZ, which is heavy and hard, but can't hold an edge, then someone makes metal 123 which is light and hard, but can't hold an edge. ABC could be suited for swords, XYZ for maces, and ABC for armour.

 

I say dwarf fortress-esque because going into the same level of detail (sharpness, density, how much strain before they fracture etc.) would be a bit nuts.

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For as realistic as dwarf fortress mostly is, it's always bugged me that they have heavier metals do more bludgeoning damage.   Here are the densities of the metals in TFC1 (in kg per cubic meter): Copper 8940, bronze 7400-8900 depending on alloy, iron 7850, steel 7850.   Those are the rl weapon metals of TFC1.  There is not a lot of difference between them.  Try getting hit by an 8 lb hammer, and a 9 lb hammer.  I'll bet you can't tell the difference.

Every 'normal' metal (i.e. not rare earths, or hard to process stuff like tungsten) fall within these ranges, except lead, which is 11340.  As a practical matter, lead is a terrible metal for weaponry.  It is soft, and after repeated use, it will work it's way loose of the socket, or simply break apart.  If you want a heavier bludgeoning weapon, it's a far better idea to use 30% more of a sturdier metal.  Lead is great for a weapon like a sap, which needs to be concealable and small and is held in a pouch.  Terrible for anything else.

 

Moreover, I think the notion of higher tier metals doing more damage is not a good one.  If you get stabbed in the gut with a copper sword, or a steel sword, it will make 0 difference.  Your guts and muscle are much softer by far than either metal, they will both do the same amount of damage.   

 

This is one reason I proposed the tiered armor vs weapon system.  The idea being that the weapon material doesn't really make a difference in damage.  It makes a difference in how much of the damage gets through the armor. Certain metals are harder than others, and therefore can more easily pierce the inferior metal, getting through to flesh. 

 

Personally I think it would be better to have weapon damage affected by things like smithing skill, or special processes such as pattern welding, or enchantments.  To me metallurgy is a better fit for durability increases. 

Edited by Darmo
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I really love that ore vein. Time for some big scale mining!

 

As as single player I know TFC is not meant to be balanced for me. However, I love the current system of metal tier progression with an capped end. To be more constructive in regard to the "more variation / procedural tier", I would like to suggest a steel alloy system instead of a procedurally generated alloy:

 

1. Simple pure iron steel is the "final" tier.

2. Relative small nuances are achieved by steel alloys using some limited (3?) parameters

 

Steel parameters could be believable class names like "brittleness", "toughness" and "..." - sorry as English is not my first language, I can't judge the correct vocabularies for those attributes

Those three parameters achieve before mentioned tiered armor vs weapon system in a "Rock, Paper, Scissors" manner.

 

The parameters could depend on alloy ingredients and the temperature of the production process, including some unobtainable secret information. That way it is not possible to produce a steel with set target values for the parameters right away. Experience with try and error comes into play.

 

And as a single player, I could still stick with plain steel without any big loss.

 

A complete other use of alloys is creative colouring of buildings: Useless alloys still make up great decorative furnitures, statues and more...

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first i'd like to say love your mod. my group and i play religiously (god bioxx :P) anyway how will armour looks work (do all metals look the same?)

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Rather than procedurally generating new ores, you could use the dozens of metals we use to create different alloys in the real world; Manganese, Chrome, Nickel, Molybdenum and Boron, to name a few. These elements might spawn in extremely low quantities, and have very specific purposes, such as increasing the durability or changing the colour (because who doesn't love custom colours). If you give each metal a predictable but different quality you make sure there is no "best alloy", rather each one has a specific function; I for one would spend hours trying to find that perfect blue coloured alloy.

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So how would textures for custom alloys work? 

i do love the idea of custom alloys and would support this whole heartedly though with the above question what are the traits for these new metals going to be?

Malibility, strength, and melting temperature are all examples of what could be used.

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On 7/8/2016 at 9:15 AM, TheUnknownSpecimen said:

So how would textures for custom alloys work?

There's a handful of different ways the textures can be done. One of those that's fairly simple to implement and is already used in vanilla Minecraft is just using a color multiplier. So the texture image itself is grayscale, and we overlay different colors on it. In vanilla this is how dyed leather armor, grass, leaves, etc. are done.

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On 07/09/2016 at 8:13 PM, Kittychanley said:

There's a handful of different ways the textures can be done. One of those that's fairly simple to implement and is already used in vanilla Minecraft is just using a color multiplier. So the texture image itself is grayscale, and we overlay different colors on it. In vanilla this is how dyed leather armor, grass, leaves, etc. are done.

This can work for most metals...

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