RFC: Metal spiraling

[LostJustice]

Still a cap. It even has cap in the word Granger. I didn't miss it. You don't need to repeat yourself like you have most of this thread. You still have yet to prove anything without capping it.

Havn't got the memo of the word (or the discussion of the concept) 'cap' being non-grata on this forum. Let's see:

To begin with, the main problems that we wish to address are these:

• The qualities of metal (or iron, at least) seem to depend mainly on the equipment used, rather than the ore, which doesn't seem right. (Not least in the light of meteorites supposedly providing higher quality, but regardless of that too.)

[...]
As for the quality problem [...] 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.

[...]

He said cap!

hqdefault[1].jpg

Maybe you go stone loftar for a while?

• Insert your other favorite solution here

Comments?

Which exactly was what I did... so I think I'm on topic, you not linking the evil c-word is your problem.
Even spent quite some time on trying to clarify the reasoning to you, which I'll stop now as you don't seem to (want to) get it for reasons beyone me.

Mathematically, the upper bound created by a soft cap is a cap. It the same thing. Do math. Please. And if it isn't a cap like you say it is, you still haven't fixed any issue and probably would hurt hermits and smaller groups more.

[Reyajh]

Sorry, Granger.
I like playing a hermit. Therefore, I tend to remain behind specialized players, bot masters and others.
BUT. There must be some reward for people playing more time than me. No matter if I am a late starter or a hermit or simply have only 10 hours a week to spend playing, I should never compare to a guy that never wandered around to see the world, he just "worked" 10 hours a day for those numbers you all talk about and only left his base when he needed to find a better node.

And if the difference is I can use q 100 and he can use q 120, he will quit. He will go play WoW or MC or anything else where you do not loose what you gained just because some time passed. As long as the difference is in 6 months I get into the good quality items (easy living) while the no-lifer gets outside of values used for balancing and does things unexpected for game developers, I get a little reward for my little work, he gets a huge reward for his huge time and effort and maybe even money invested and all is fair.

You call achieving numbers the game is not prepared for a cancer. As long as all is done legit, I have to disagree.

Please, everyone, beware of "entitled casuals" and their "I play the same game as you, I must have in game what you have in game. Me being dumb and playing it wrong or me investing less than 10% of what you invest in terms of time, focus and money does not matter at all." doctrine. That is not a cancer, but it is simply unfair.

This ^
If you gonna cap anything please....cap that ass

[MagicManICT]

Mathematically, the upper bound created by a soft cap is a cap. It the same thing. Do math. Please. And if it isn't a cap like you say it is, you still haven't fixed any issue and probably would hurt hermits and smaller groups more.

It really depends on how it's done. That statement is making certain assumptions about how it may be done. Take, for example, the silk moth. It gets capped by the leaves it eats. An issueif you can't keep herbalist tables and such upgraded so your trees gain quality. (Not an issue this last world, but was in legacy.) Given the +/- random range, it wasn't completely capped by having a soft-cap. There was still a small growth rate of around .5 or so per generation, but it took a lot of eggs to get it.

Personally, I don't think caps on quality (or stats) are a bad thing. I think quality could be thrown completely out the door and it won't affect actual game mechanics one bit. You'd see people playing differently, for sure, and to get up to the top ends you'd need to produce significantly more of whatever you're making.

[LostJustice]

Mathematically, the upper bound created by a soft cap is a cap. It the same thing. Do math. Please. And if it isn't a cap like you say it is, you still haven't fixed any issue and probably would hurt hermits and smaller groups more.

It really depends on how it's done. That statement is making certain assumptions about how it may be done. Take, for example, the silk moth. It gets capped by the leaves it eats. An issueif you can't keep herbalist tables and such upgraded so your trees gain quality. (Not an issue this last world, but was in legacy.) Given the +/- random range, it wasn't completely capped by having a soft-cap. There was still a small growth rate of around .5 or so per generation, but it took a lot of eggs to get it.

Personally, I don't think caps on quality (or stats) are a bad thing. I think quality could be thrown completely out the door and it won't affect actual game mechanics one bit. You'd see people playing differently, for sure, and to get up to the top ends you'd need to produce significantly more of whatever you're making.

I said two cases. Second case would still be unbounded in which case what have you fixed? It is bounded if the base quality items like flax do not go higher. It is unbounded and totally dependent on flax if it is not fixed. In which case people will just say it unfair factions or some group has higher flax, so what has been fixed. While I agree with you that some people don’t like quality, I have to say that you can still play the game as in this manner with quality, just simply ignore the number or even turn rendering quality numbers off in your client. But for many others, this has been a main core mechanic of this game and for me personally and probably many others it one of the main reasons I joined. If you take out quality I might as well go play another MMORPG or some other game or maybe just host my own Dont Starve Servers. And one of the biggest things that I have always turned away from any game is when the game makes recipes with a lot of materials for no other reason than to force to collect more resources just for the sake of collecting and taking up more time.

[ivka]

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.

That is probably the main thing that I myself hate about metal spiraling: to do something better, you need worse skills.
And it really looks like a good solution!

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 don't see a problem per se in this. There is also crop spiraling, animal spiraling, water spiraling, tree spiraling, even mud spiraling, and the idea of "folding it thousand times" sounds quite logical to me about metal spiraling. After all, each cycle also depletes ore, it's a situation where quantity turns into quality. And, in fact, quality of the ore used does affect spiraling - by reducing quantity of the ore that you need to reach certain quality.

What I don't like in this mechanic - is that you can't raise bronze quality this way and it makes bronze items obsolete very fast. On the other hand, if you stunt iron/wrought/steel spiraling, that would lead to metal equipment going obsolete eventually with people running in leather equipment just because you can grow leather quality indefinitely - and all the ingredients for leather and leather armor can be raised in quality through farming/animal breeding/tree growing and well digging.

[falinix]

imo the big problem with spiraling is the fact that you can basictly do it endless and turn q 200 ish bars into 2000+. it's alot of work and you also end up wit alot of "shit metal" which is only good for mine supports etc. (we used everythin below 1,3k for supports etc which seems like a big waste and also feels very unrewarding).

i would like to see a hard cap by with the quality of a bar of metal can be increased by spiraling. let's say you have a q200 bar then i think it would be resonable to hardcap the max q with spiraling at q600. instead of the tools infuencing the q directly i would let them influence the "number of attempts" to reach the hardcap. imo it seems resonable to reach 50% of the hardcap in 3-8 tries and 100% in 15-30. this ofc requires the play to be bale to pound wroght iron more then once or turn it back to bloom by heating it again until the hardcap q is reached)


this system would ahve the floowing pros:

- metal-q has a decent soft-cap which can still be raised by increasing smelter, coal and ore q (this fixes the absurd q on metal product e.g. armor, weapons, symbols)
-ore q matters since the q after metling the first time hardcapps spiraling q
- you can still spiral through crits
- you cant spiral endlessly with shit bars as input
- no useless metal since you can technicaly bring all you metal to it's hardcapped q

[Granger]

What I don't like in this mechanic - is that you can't raise bronze quality this way and it makes bronze items obsolete very fast. On the other hand, if you stunt iron/wrought/steel spiraling, that would lead to metal equipment going obsolete eventually with people running in leather equipment just because you can grow leather quality indefinitely - and all the ingredients for leather and leather armor can be raised in quality through farming/animal breeding/tree growing and well digging.

From my perspective this argument reads similar to

we already have mass shootings in schools, universities, malls, churches and festivals... let's have some in kindergartens too.

[lachlaan]

If : Low skill chars are used to get more frequent upgraded wrought instead of steel

If : Needing low skills is considered too annoying for the playerbase

Then : Make the chance of a steel outcome independant of skill, or sacrifice quality at lower skill levels.

If : Being able to so frequently obtain higher Q wrought breaks desired progression speed

If : The work put in by metal spiralers as opposed to miners is too low

Then : Make the chance of wrought instead of steel lower, but not 0

If : The possibility of higher metal through spiraling is more than mining ever could yield, perhaps make diminishing returns on any given bloom.
Bloom reprocess = Finesse +5% , chance to increase in quality = current value * (1 - finesse of bar used). Adjust finesse to obtain desired max upgrade
in conjunction with what the increase in tool quality will do to future ore used.

TL;DR, if it's too easy to reach high qualities this way. make it slower/harder. If it's too annoying to have to use low chars do indeed remove that feature somehow. If such high quality should never be achieved then some sort of general softcap, or some tether between original ore quality and end result metal bar/tool.

[kris_hole]

instead of the tools infuencing the q directly i would let them influence the "number of attempts" to reach the hardcap.

i think this would be really good. so long as other mechanics do let you hit like Q1500+ if the world was running long enough like the current world and with enough grinding from all other objects involved: Hammer, Anvil, Smelter, Fuel, Ore etc. Removing the negative affect from skills by letting you do iron and wrought into blooms again and having a cap on how many times it can be worked would stop easy mass production. although i think 6 times may be a small number, perhaps this could scale with the ore quality that was used, or even just on the quality of the metal when it was originally smelted. You could just use a square root and it wouldn't be too unreasonable. Sure it would make early game metal spiraling harder but shouldn't that be the case anyway with lower Q gear? it makes sense?

for instance:

| Metal Q | Chances |
| 10 | 3 |
| 50 | 7 |
| 200 | 14 |
| 400 | 20 |


so it would make sense to spend more time also upgrading clay/bricks for the smelter and the fuel involved. It does make the whole processes as a whole more difficult as a lot more is taken into account when the initial bar is smelted, but it would enforce a cap on a per ingot basis that as time goes on in the world will slowly raise. So long as potters clay isn't nerfed too hard

[SlicingTheMoon]

I did see an interesting video about how to make swords, you basicly put iron ore, some coal and some other material in to a clay crucible to craft one bar of steel, that they later on made in to a viking sword.
So how about adding something like a clay product in to the process?

But then again, you would need to none stop baking these clay crucible to support the mountains of ore they have laying around.
This could be solved by reducing the amount of ore mined per tile or found, making metal a lot more rare and valuable.

Maybe make so ore is less commonly found close to the surface but less rare the further down you go.
This would slow down the world progress, sins people would need a lot more str, con, agi to mine further down... but this could give botters a head start... i do not know.