New Furnace Suggestion

[Arium 321]

First of all, yes, i know there is already another furnace suggestion made my Jberg, to be found right here .

But since this is not simply suggesting a bigger smelting tool but a full furnace concept i thought it's worth its own thread.

So here it is.

 

After the recent announcement that fountain containers will be removed in the future, now it really is about time for advanced ore smelting equipment!

So this furnace is my attempt to design a tool that will both satisfy the need for a way to smelt lots of ores way quicker than with forges, yet won't come too cheap.

 

The basic idea:

 

The main item is the furnace itself, while it also requires a new pottery item as material, namely lump molds.

 

The furnace itself should come with a hard requirement of 35-40 masonry.

Further, there should be three things scaling with the QL of the furnace.

Those are:

1. The burning duration: Simply take it from forge and oven. It's fine as it is and there's no need to change it for a single item.
   
2. The amount of ores it can hold: At QL1 the furnace should hold 50 ores. . Up to Ql50, every full QL should make the furnace hold one more ore, so that at Ql50 it can hold a full 100 ores. This is already a big improvement over the current 28 ores, and once you have the required masonry to build this, you can quickly improve it to QL40+.
   
3. The smelting time: While the furnace should already have slightly faster smelting at a higher QL, i think this still isn't enough to make people prefer the furnace over their already built forges. Due to this, every full QL over 50 will reduce the smelting time by 0.5%, so that a QL100 furnace will smelt ores 25% faster than a Ql100 forge.
   

These three benefits added up will put a single furnace at the smelting speed of roughly 5 forges, while taking less materials, only needing 1/5th of the fuel, and not littering the whole screen with windows.

 

Rarity status:

Every tier of rarity bonus will add to the smelting time, too.

A rare furnace will add 1%, boosting the maximum to 26%.

A supreme furnace will add 2.5%, boosting the maximum to 27.5%.

A fantastic furnace will add 5%, boosting the maximum to 30%.

The rarity status should still give the same benefit to burning duration it does for normal forges.

 

To sum it up, creating this will already need a seasoned player, hitting the maximum ore hold will need a well-skilled mason, and being able to enjoy the FULL speed of this tool will require to have a veteran mason imping it.

However, due to the furnace only being able to hold ores, it will also not be too strong.

 

The items:

 

Furnace:

 

Creation:

Activate stone brick

right-click clay

total materials:

30x stone bricks

30x clay

4x dirt

8x lump molds

result:

furnace

 

There have been suggestions of this type of tool with material requirements of dozens, or even hundreds of bricks and clay, however giving it a hard requirement on masonry will be more effective to make it an "advanced" tool.

 

Design:

There have been some good suggestions on Jberg's thread already, and i think somewhere between

and

 

Having something that resembles the left one, but with a bigger opening for the fireplace at the bottom, and a look that resembles the forge with its brick-design would probably fit into the game pretty well. The ingot molds of the right one would also fit it pretty well, and give it quite a different look from the other fireplaces currently ingame.

Size-wise it should be slightly larger than the kiln, but not having the limitation of only being build-able outside of houses, since most people prefer having their smithy inside.

 

 

Lump mold:

 

creation

activate hand

right-click clay (2.20kg)

result

lump mold (2.00kg)

 

The lump mold will only be a material that's supposed to make the creation of the furnace not simply masonry-based and give our potters a little love.

Design-wise the molds would probably just look like slightly bigger smelting pots.

 

 

So far that's it about the item itself.

Feel free to support this idea or give feedback on what you think is good already, or could be better.

 

 

 

But i still have some thoughts about other things i read about improvements to ore smelting so far, so i'll add those here.

 

1) Make the furnace use several times more fuel than the forge needs.

What for? If people already have their several forges and the furnace would give them close to four times the ore hold while it requires, let's say five times, the amount of fuel to stay lit for the same duration, who would actually build this?

2) Make the furnace need 50 bricks, 100 clay, 60 masonry, maybe some other materials.

Well, i think in this case a hard requirement for the furnace is better, but it shouldn't be too high either. Most people only have the masonry they got from building the fences and houses on their deed. The way it would be now would already be enough. It DOES have a hard requirement, and people with higher or very high masonry will benefit from it by having a furnace that smelts the ores faster.

3) Make the furnace something that's only build-able outside of houses.

No. As i already said, most people have their smithys inside a house or have forges to smelt the iron even inside their warehouse. And since the kiln is only able to be built outside, but can be loaded onto a wagon and then be unloaded inside the house, this restriction is rather useless.

4) Being able to load a crate full of ores into the furnace.

That's way too close to automation. You want your ores smelted? Then you can as well just drag and drop them,in there. Not having to move the ores and lumps from a crate into several different forges, then into a cooling forge and back into the crate is already a huge benefit for lazy people, one mustn't overdo it.

5) I already have my several forges, why should i even bother building this when it can only hold ores?

You don't have to build it if you don't like it. But having this inside a mine, probably right next to the vein, or on site of community projects where a lot of people mine lots of ores pretty quickly will make it faster to build one or two of these instead of 5 or 10 forges.

6) It's supposed to smelt any kind of metal, so give it the same functionality as a smelting pot.

This would make the smelting pot completely useless and come with a number of serious issues. How would you determine when the tool/weapon/armor should smelt? Right at the beginning, as soon as you drop it in while the furnace is lit? What happens then if you accidentally drop your favorite, all enchants 100+ supreme main weapon in there instead of the tool you really wanted to smelt? Once it hits glowing hot? If the faster heating of ores would apply to everything in the furnace it would heat the tools of lumps up faster aswell, and you could simply take the tool out once its close to glowing hot and then continue in the forge.

7) Metallurgy should work with this tool as well, make it burn coal while having iron lumps inside to create steel for example.

How would you determine skill gains if it's like this? Wouldn't that make metallurgy loose its purpose and creating huge amounts of high quality steel for pas or whatever you want it for way too easy.

8) Just increase the volume of forges!

I say YES! to this, especially for large metal shields and other stuff that doesn't fit into backpacks, the volume limit is pretty annoying. For everything that does fit into a backpack, however, the current volume is good.

 

That's all from me so far, hope someone can give more pointers to the devs how exactly we would like our furnaces and that we can see them in the game as quickly as possible.

Edited October 23, 2015 by Arium

[Odynn 2,248]

+1 and well rounded post.

 

this would bump the mining and smithing business forward, removing the tedious and letting us focus on the mining / smithing and not the boring smelting.

 

making large batch of alloys or smelting items to lump is also a good idea, tying those to the furnace QL could be an option to determine the alloy QL or the amount gained.

 

Code wise we would have a trouble on how the game/code would manage smelting items / ores / making alloy if you throw everything inside at the same time. Ie : if you throw in zinc ore and copper ore, are you looking for lumps of each... or the brass alloy ? One solution to that would be an input container to throw in the ore... and an output one (or mold one) to get the results.

[Jaz 2,666]

I second the idea, the current smelting process is very annoying - I use 6-7 forges for bigger smelting projects and still it takes full attention - to avoid the need of cooling forge I tryt to pull the lumps as soon as smelted from the ores for faster cooling...

I'm fine with the higher skill requirements to build but can go for me with the higher material erqueirements as well - just not both, please

I would exclude the alloy creation from the furnace, though.

Edited October 23, 2015 by Jaz

[Zizelia 2]

This is a great idea, and well thought out.

+1

[KyleBooze 451]

looks nice... any object that can hold/smelt 100ores would be good in my book, just don't put some silly skill requirement like "80 masonry needed" it's getting out of hand with the newer stuff.