RFC: Metal spiraling

[pheonix]

From my experience with this industry it seems the best at utilizing low q materials in the process which if that principle is taken to other industries gives hermits and newbs a decent way to trade onwards. When i was doing spiraling there were a few things that made it good and bad.

Accidentally clicking the skills made me worry alot especially if it was a public spiral character. if i was to change this i would make it so skills increase the chance to get metal back and have forges make bloom 100% and have 2 skills, 1 makes wrought for steel and the other for cast iron then add in a chance to stay same q or 20% it is atm or turns to slag. this way we aint dropping tons of slag immediately but have to gamble when making metal and maybe make wrought have a higher chance for bar then cast iron recipe, because in my opinion i love the gamble of will it proc or not vs the fuck i got 80% slags in my forges.

Now that may seem a bit op in some regards, but its merely swapping it around to allow for another situation where we can add in other recipes such as tin/copper/bronze spiraling depending on which is most common in your area and we can add in that meteorite has a very low slag chance meaning if you get a few bars then your chance to spiral a few times from it is much higher and more sort after.

[Yorla]

Additional softcap may be applied by using oil for cooling down the final product. Say, without oil we always get wrought iron and with cooling down - cast iron or a chance for cast iron. Oil can be a "mineral" mined naturally or just cultivated linseed oil.

[Vert]

It is bad to get the skills that "improve" metalworking.[/list]
Fixing the bad-skill problem seems simple: Just allow wrought iron, in addition to cast iron, to be re-made into bloom in the finery forge.

steelmaking skill
The embers of your forge have run glowing red hot, and from them now spring the stranges, most wonderful materials. You have learned how to make steel in steel crucibles, and also enjoy greater success at forging wrought iron.

metallurgy skill
You have acquired a natural mastery of the metals, their uses and abuses. You discover slightly better Ores, and enjoy significantly greater success when forging wrought iron.

deep artifice
You have seen far beyond the mundane trivialitiesof petty craftsmanship, and your thoughts seek in all matters of artifice the eternal. You enjoy the greatest possible success when mining and forging iron.

remove wrought iron chance from skill, and make it instead constant. if you increase chance to get wrought iron it will be harder to crit, if the chance will be less it will be easier.
if chance of wrought will be really high, you can remake Völva's Wand recipe so it accept wrought.

spiraling must be a thing after 5-7 months, from low q iron so iron have some cost and can be tradeable.
you can add some debuff on iron so it cant be used for sometime after forging, so at the start of the world it be easier to find high q spot then spiraling. and in the middle of the world when you cant find better q in spot you can still spiraling with some cooldown.

[Necroliter]

Some people say that low-Q iron having value is a good thing.
While i somewhat agree, i want to note, that without metal spiraling the point at which iron is considered low-Q will move SO much lower, that it will be much easier to produce acceptable-Q metals.

Also, i really enjoy any change that lowers requirement for alts/bots to be competitive.

[Scilly_guy]

I think the main problem, as already pointed out by a few people is the exponential nature of metal spiralling, after 2 years the metal Q is around what? 3-4k? I bought a q2500 axe fairly recently at CF, in another month metal could have reached 6-7k? despite it taking 2 years to reach 3-4k, or am I wrong, does wood/fuel q cap it too much. Does metal Q double approximately every 4 months? The question J&L need to ask themselves is what sort of growth of metal q do you want to see A) Over the age of the world, and B)Per piece of ore.
Exponential growth as we see now, Logarithmic growth with something that limits just how high you can get, linear growth like with crops, arguably the most boring mechanic, or logistic growth which really is quite similar to logarithmic but starts out like exponential.

How would it affect things if instead of a 10% chance of a 20% increase you got a 50% chance of 1-20% increase, 25% slag, 25% wrought. Or more granularly 10% chance of each (+0%, +5%,+10%,+15%,+20%), 25% chance of slag and 25% wrought.
In these scenarios you still get a 10% chance of a 20% increase but 40% of the time you get some increase, so this would accelerate the growth of q. By reducing the chance of an increase and the maximum increase you can limit the speed and potentially cap of the quality.

Should the increase of a bars q be capped to 20% of its q? ie even if you have q2000 anvil and hammer a bar can only be inceased thus:
10->12->14->17->21->25->30->etc
300->360->432->518->622->746->896->etc

[MagicManICT]

I keep on writing up things to say here, but I can't seem to back it up or state it clearly, and now a few ideas have been posted that I'll just have to agree with and highlight.

1) The % increase is probably what's broken in the first place. Carrots don't go up by 10% randomly, so metals probably shouldn't, either. We'd probably have q9000 carrots by now.

2) having value for low quality anything is great. That metal has as much value relative to everything else just points to the flaws in the system. A) quality gains in metal have such a huge factor on the rest of the game; B) maybe it takes too much metal for the spiraling process leaving little choice but to bot or dedicate a huge amount of time to it; and there's a C) here, but I can't quite put my finger on what I want to say

TBH, I'm surprised we never saw this level of quality in worlds 6 or 7 given the length they ran.

[phoenix]

Hello

Fixing the bad-skill problem seems simple: Just allow wrought iron, in addition to cast iron, to be re-made into bloom in the finery forge.

Good idea. Just do it right now.

As for the quality problem, I'm not entirely sure how the metalworking procedure of those doing it "professionally" looks these days, but I assume that the main reason is that, given how metal can be re-wrought an almost arbitrary number of times, each cycle simply makes the metal quality approach that of the tools used, and thus ore quality isn't really important. I don't assume that the ±10% random quality roll on the wrought-iron recipe has a role in this (which is what I traditionally referred to as "metal spiraling"). I can see a couple of potential ways to change this:

• The brute-force solution would be to make the finery forge and the wrought-iron crafting recipe soft-cap qualities rather than simply mix them. I don't really like this solution, since it works incongruently with how other similar mechanics work, but it is a possible solution nevertheless.
• One could consider doing it so that, by each forging of bloom into wrought iron, further processing affects the quality of that particular piece of metal less and less, preferably exponentially less so, except for the aforementioned random roll. It feels a bit ugly to add state to pieces of metal, though, but I could live with it.
• Insert your other favorite solution here

Comments?

What's goal of rework spiraling with quality? For 2 years quality 4-5k? And 10-100 ql it's 1000% up in 1st month? Next comparable up is 1k ql and 10k. How fast is was? Most of what they write here, buyers of high-quality metal on the market. But give out great tips here. And those who work with spiraling, they really worked very hard. And they again will hardworking and all other again will cry.

Maybe better to think about separating the spiral. For example, so that the clay can be spiraled regardless of metal.

[Lyrroth]

Hello

Fixing the bad-skill problem seems simple: Just allow wrought iron, in addition to cast iron, to be re-made into bloom in the finery forge.

Good idea. Just do it right now.

As for the quality problem, I'm not entirely sure how the metalworking procedure of those doing it "professionally" looks these days, but I assume that the main reason is that, given how metal can be re-wrought an almost arbitrary number of times, each cycle simply makes the metal quality approach that of the tools used, and thus ore quality isn't really important. I don't assume that the ±10% random quality roll on the wrought-iron recipe has a role in this (which is what I traditionally referred to as "metal spiraling"). I can see a couple of potential ways to change this:

• The brute-force solution would be to make the finery forge and the wrought-iron crafting recipe soft-cap qualities rather than simply mix them. I don't really like this solution, since it works incongruently with how other similar mechanics work, but it is a possible solution nevertheless.
• One could consider doing it so that, by each forging of bloom into wrought iron, further processing affects the quality of that particular piece of metal less and less, preferably exponentially less so, except for the aforementioned random roll. It feels a bit ugly to add state to pieces of metal, though, but I could live with it.
• Insert your other favorite solution here

Comments?

What's goal of rework spiraling with quality? For 2 years quality 4-5k? And 10-100 ql it's 1000% up in 1st month? Next comparable up is 1k ql and 10k. How fast is was? Most of what they write here, buyers of high-quality metal on the market. But give out great tips here. And those who work with spiraling, they really worked very hard. And they again will hardworking and all other again will cry.

Maybe better to think about separating the spiral. For example, so that the clay can be spiraled regardless of metal.

Its not about hard work in spiraling but amount where it escapes everything else and affects everything else almost. you have farm that isnt even above 2k while metal is already 5k. on top of that, after jorb made that grill called Gridiron, metal spiraling not only affected clay industry but tree farming or gardening industry as well making mulch quality jumping right away. spiraling should get nerfed, not removed. if after 2 years it would be somewhere around 2k but not above 3k it would be okay, but its just affecting too much the way it is now and im not crying, im just saying its dumb that metal can run away so much and affect everything else later

[stickman]

Going up by a percent is the issue. maybe it should be a fixed value instead... or as other have said a lower % to slow it down.

I just hope whatever solution you choose makes it so regular folk can still be competative with botters/major villages...

[Ysh]

I just hope whatever solution you choose makes it so regular folk can still be competative with botters/major villages...

Having more than one man is always more advantage than having one man.