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Flubb

Building materials from steel

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This is just a simple suggestion to add items like nails and ribbons to the list of items craftable from steel. These items could be used in lieu of their iron counterparts with the natural steel benefits like taking less damage as steel does (Less decay and less failed attachment damage), and it wouldn't leave aspiring metallurgists on a mountain of cheap steel that they'll need a contrived way of getting rid of.

 

I've originally not suggested added benefits but taken the point that leaving the suggestion too small leaves no room for making cheap steel truly sexy again, so here are some things the steel components could do (without messing too deeply with the current material system and how decay and damage is accounted for):

1) Increased (effective) QL, resulting in better attachment chance and quality increase, perhaps 20% better QL to be in line with the 20% less damage.

2) Steel components use a third less material, being more lightweight and taking up less volume. This would also mean that (in a scenario with 100% creation chance for brevities sake) for building components steel is 300% efficient in iron use as opposed to making them directly from iron. (200% efficiency by steel which is one half coal, and another 150% by reduced weight of the building components). This reflects, at least approximately, the extra effort of making steel, which is 3 stages as opposed to directly mining and smelting iron in one stage.

 

On that last note, please don't derail the topic with counter suggestions how to currently get rid of masses of cheap steel. I'm imaginative enough to come up with something myself, but it'd be just nicer to have the metallurgy grinding byproducts be useful for more general purposes.

Edited by Flubb
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Make bronze or brass. It gives more skill and all of the product can be used. Skilling on steel is just wasteful. Steel for nails is just as wasteful. +1 to any better thought out use for repurposing low ql steel. 

Edited by armyskin
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Bringing up wastefulness is a good point, though I have though I have to disagree to the point of turning the argument around; using relatively rare materials required for brass and bronze that could otherwise be used for transmutation liquids is immensely wasteful to me, which is why I stick to steel. In fact, speaking in raw mass, steel production doubles your cheap iron, which is good because ribbons eat tons of material if you're going to make a lot of them. And even if brass and bronze are more efficient xp/action-wise, you still end up with tons of cheap metal of some kind, so the "problem" in my premise isn't addressed by your answer at all...

 

There could be "better", more elaborate additions to make low QL steel useful, sure, but I see no reason why this shouldn't be an avenue that can presumably be very easily implemented.

 

EDIT: Checked the wiki, there are actually brass ribbons that could drain away the cheap skilling byproduct, but there's stil lthe issue with using lots of zinc which I'd rather use to kill all the clay tiles in my way.

Edited by Flubb

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I don't have a large stock of 1 to 20 ql steel but always have an abundance of 30 to 50. If the use of steel components would add a resistance to damage I wouldn't feel bad about using that steel for bulk materials.

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What is rare about tin, zinc and copper?

 

These are plentiful, you may have to travel but none the less there is plenty of ores out there.

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3 hours ago, JakeRivers said:

What is rare about tin, zinc and copper?

 

The emphasis was on "relatively rare", though I concede this may be a "local" problem and just my impression. I'm drowning in lead here, on the other hand. In either case, I'd prefer to use them for other things.

3 hours ago, armyskin said:

I don't have a large stock of 1 to 20 ql steel but always have an abundance of 30 to 50. If the use of steel components would add a resistance to damage I wouldn't feel bad about using that steel for bulk materials.

Okay, but do you have any substantial, non-subjective reason why these things shouldn't be possible to be made of steel? There's always the possibility of making the classical iron ones if you feel that way.

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10 minutes ago, Flubb said:

I'm drowning in lead here,

 

Yup look around and you will find yourself drowning in zinc/tin/copper

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My issue is using a resource that is more labor intensive to make and get zero benefit other than using a material on hand. If there was an incentive to spend it that would be different. And to say that it is stretching out iron stocks is a bit silly. Twice the amount of iron for all the extra hassle of coal then steel. Not much faster than going out and mining the iron from the get go. Now of course the massive runs of steel that us metalurgists make does have a major issue with the amounts of substandard quality lumps that are bound to happen from the RNG. This is much worse when skilling. Rather than inventing a new and wasteful way to use up steel instead go back and erase your OP and suggest that we be able to refine low quality lumps of steel in a way that does not harm the existing market of iron suppliers but would rather create the need for more iron to be used to re roll an existing lump in a smelting pot along with a new coal and iron lump.

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That's a perfectly defensible position, but I'm not erasing my suggestion because we're at obvious disagreement what is "wasteful" or "silly". I do however concede that steel nails and ribbons having some beneficial effect would in fact be better, no denying that, but I was making a suggestion with as simple development effort in mind as possible; keeping track of something having been built with steel components might be tricky with the material system as it currently is, as these components usually never influence the outcoming material of the product. Your suggestion of imping steel is also fine and I'd even support it, but that's a bit out of the scope of what I had in mind for this idea. You could make a new thread for that or I could quote that part in the OP as an alternative or additional suggestion.

 

But let's adress that gripe of lacking incentive other than having a drain for crap steel so this thread has at least something productive going on:

Just from the tip of my head I'd wager that steel components having a flat percuental bonus to effective QL is feasible enough, resulting in more QL added by attachment and better attachment chance. (Resulting QL is not very useful, however, as the item is usually impable or its QL doesn't matter. It'd just be a byproduct of higher effective QL)

 

Another option, though I'm just spitballing this and I'm not sure if it's more or less silly, is justifying using less materials for the steel components as steel is wogically more sturdy than iron(That's code for "Let's not be too realistic"). This would create items that have 1) less weight and volume, allowing for better storage and 2) even less materials use, effectively stretching the iron stocks out further to reflect the extra effort for creating steel that you have correctly pointed out. I think with the joint bonus of reduced volume and weight, and in order to be not to wogical, the steel counterparts could be one third "thinner" than the iron version. (Both less weight and volume). That's a 50% boost in effective iron mass ontop of the 100% boost by steel production itself multiplicatively, resulting in in three times the amount of effective iron for building components. This would at least reflect the 3 rough stages of steel production: producing iron, producing coal, and combining both. It doesn't add up perfectly though because of how coal production works, where required actions are not that easily pinned down. (Because like metallurgy, coal making has a lot of RNG involved, which has also been subject to its share of griping here.)

Edited by Flubb
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Hey flub, crank out brass ribbons =p

 

then you will know why there should not be steel ribbons, nix on your idea

 

now if they added a new item like say a crossbow and it required steel ribbons, sure

 

 

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On 10/5/2017 at 0:45 PM, armyskin said:

Make bronze or brass. It gives more skill and all of the product can be used. Skilling on steel is just wasteful. 

 

I skill on steel because I need it for PS. Brass and bronze are still pretty useless.

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