RFC: Metal spiraling

[not_a_cat]

"Quantity into quality" system might be alright, no clue
Another issue that should be addressed is a process itself. At moment it is a job for afk alt windows and bots, rather than for players, and Kilakan's idea seems like a decent suggestion to me

Perhaps a better way of changing it would be by giving metalworkers some method by which they can refine metal with a large cost of materials into a higher quality than what the ore starts as, while removing the randomness from it. Sort of how with farming and enough time you can slowly grow your crops up to whatever your skillcap is. It could maybe take the form of forging 5 iron bars into one, that gains a bonus of 10% of your sqrt(smithing*str) each forging?

[Lyrroth]

fix fuel bug to slow it down as well

[Zentetsuken]

fix fuel bug to slow it down as well

THIS.

If people actually have to use the full amount of fuel per smelt the sheer amounts of metal left to spiral might actually be reduced due to lack of fuel.

[Ardennesss]

fix fuel bug to slow it down as well

THIS.

If people actually have to use the full amount of fuel per smelt the sheer amounts of metal left to spiral might actually be reduced due to lack of fuel.

Spoiler - it won't. Most spiraling is done with the lowest quality shit cast iron you can imagine.

[Thedrah]

fuel exploit probably should be fixed but aside from silver/gold, what would all the scrap coal be used for? i found many 20-30q coal patches that just didnt matter. i liked the exploit for letting hermits get better material. maybe increase tar kiln yields and have coal only on mine levels 1/2

if metal spiraling will be a defining point of hafen, can other bronze and maybe copper/tin get a form aswell? possibly resmelting it to be more pure or something, idk if theres a fancy smelting process like iron has for it but i feel bronze doesnt compete well with iron, it just becomes hard metal building material. it doesnt get much of a place for trade aside from a couple curios

[boreial]

An alternative "fix" is to create a new metal that the bloom produces instead of cast iron being one of the outcomes make it "grey metal" that can be used as a hard metal source but not in the wrought iron recipe.

[Adder1234]

Another fix for the problem with skills is to make each of the respective skills improve the chances of increasing the quality when spiraling. i.e. the chance of a +20% increase is 5% with only the first skill, but increases by another 5% for each skill you have.

As for the problem of the metal qualities themselves being irrelevant, imo the easiest fix would be to just make the metal quality more important in the formula that determines the quality of the end result. It's a difficult decision to make though, because on one hand I like that q10 iron has value, meaning that hermits and noobs can make money, but on the other hand it's stupid that a q300 bar of cast iron is hardly any more valuable than a q10 bar.

[Fierce_Deity]

As a miner i hate spiraling, its so boring but necessary. I would love to see more extremely rare high q nodes (both for ores/coal) instead of spiraling (at least i would be able to trade my goods without autism called spiraling). Gold was too common in previous worlds - i think it should be more rare. or maybe more mine levels with higher q but with much greater requirement on strength and tools.
I would also like to see that a pickaxe, a hammer, and other tools have fatigue - so to speak, as in real life - iron has the ability to scratch, so that you would have to update the tool all the time. You could have option to repair but with decreasing of quality

+1 to this. Spiraling metal isn't fun as it currently stands, its just tedious. Even if its a bit heavy handed, adding states to iron to give diminishing returns to spiraling sounds good to me. Very rare nodes of high quality metals would also be fun, perhaps it could be a uniquely named ore too.
Much deeper mining levels is another approach to always allow metal quality to increase naturally. As the world ekes on and on our strength will increase and we can come to handle lower and lower levels. More difficult mine holes could be added for levels after 5. Imagine having 50 potential levels, maybe growing more exotic as it gets lower. Could have the world start with 5 and add more over time.

[Granger]

I see the following problems with metals:

The increase on a critical hit is a percentage (if the comments in this topic are correct), this results in quality increase following an exponential function. Same as in RL this looks quite harmless at the beginning... but a little while later, as soon as the numbers have increased over a certain threshold, the function takes off.

Then the quality of the resulting product in smithing is averaged with the quality of anvil and hammer. This has for the problems of being able to cycle an item repeatedly (as is possible with cast->bloom->cast) will move its quality quickly toward that of anvil/hammer within a few rounds, when adding in the % increase from the critical hit chance it's (statistically) easy to end up with a way highter quality than these, rebuild them, repeat - and that having reached a high quality anvil+hammer one can endlessly stamp out quality metal items from no-quality metal.

My suggestion is to turn all quality modifiers that are not consumed in an item transmutation - at least all objects (like anvil/herbalist table/compost bin/loom/...) but possibly (not really certain about that) also the items used (smiths hammer, axe, saws, treeplanter pots) - into softcaps (so these can't raise ingredient quality anymore) and all quality formulas (for crafting, but also for things soil/water/seed in the tree formula) that still use arithmetic means into using geometric averages.

Sure, this would both cut down speed of progression (as a single high quality ingredient would increase the result less) and couple the maximum achievable qualities (eg. for trees as the herbalist table wouldn't boost the result anymore) tighter to the qualities of the resources that can be extracted from the world - but that would be a good thing as IMHO Haven works quite well until the moment it reaches the point where the exponential functions take off, then it starts to fall apart.

[pppp]

Add wooden handle to the hammer.