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.)
- It is bad to get the skills that "improve" metalworking.
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?
as we think the formula for metal products looks like that, if you lower the anvil and hammer effect on final q - same work what Redlaw mention will give much less profit. Well it's still be a thing - and it's good coz spiraling in general is not bad idea - improve metal by pounding and reforging pretty common practice for ancient world.
