Let us put whole logs into a tar kiln

[jordancoles]

Pretty sure I've suggested this in the past but nothing came up when searching for 'tar kiln' or 'tarkiln'

Currently you have to chop every block up and then put them in, but blocks are the same q as log q so why make us do this step?
Please let us dump entire logs into the tarkiln

[Oswald3]

+1

[Nek]

+1

[jordancoles]

I would still like this to be added because it would save literal hours of my life and if we could also put full logs into bonfires with an "empty" button like chicken coops that'd be great as well for dealing with extra logs

[wafflecat]

+1 to this.

I got another suggestion, instead of creating another thread thought I'd put it here

Let us collect coal with a wheelbarrow instead of picking them from the kiln one by one.
There's way more than we can fit in our inventory so it's just walking back and forth to the stockpile and waiting a long time for it to pick.

[shubla]

-1 it doesn't work like that. That is like asking if you can throw a minehole in your smelter!
Chopping the blocks is one of the most important stages in making tar.
https://youtu.be/WH4KbDNKXYc
Here is an educational video about making tar in a tar pit. Its in finnish though but the video is good even without
comprehension of audio.
Finland was pretty much biggest producer of tar in the world for a long, long time, so the people in the video know what they are doing!

Actually. we have tar making very easy in HnH!
Normally you start preparing the wood that you want to make tar from more than 5 years in advance, to make it produce lots of resin. Then you have to dry the wood for a few years, then chop it into small blocks, then dry the small blocks for ½-1 year.
Then when you burn it in the tar kiln, you pile dirt and bough on top to prevent the wood from burning too fast. The actual burning of tar takes around 1 week and requires 24/7 supervision in order to prevent the wood from burning too fast or slow. And for first few days you don't even get any actual tar out of it, but black non-tar-liquid instead. And if its too windy or rainy when you burn the tar kiln, the tar making will fail...

You can skip the preparation part, drying part and supervision part, but that will pretty much decrease the yield to 0.

Jorb likes these traditional things so you will never get this thread through, it may be locked now.

[loleznub]

Each type of log has a different number of blocks you get when chopping, that's why this extra step is so involved

[VDZ]

What's next, allowing us to build houses directly from logs without having to chop it into blocks and saw it into boards? Adding an additional step makes it more tedious, but that adds value to the end product. (In the same way, chopping a tree and bringing the log to the tar kiln is also tedious. For zero tedium you would be able to just instantly light the tar kiln without having to fetch wood - but obviously that would be weird.)

The process of producing tar is itself fine; the probable root cause of your frustration is that you need to burn so many logs to get the amount of tar you need. For a knarr dock, you need 250 liters of tar - that's over 19 pine logs just for a dock (which, by the way, is handbashable). If done using a single tar kiln refilling at the perfect time every cycle, that's over 43 days of work to get just the dock, not even considering the other stuff you need tar for (mainly ships and ship repairs). So you have to build, fill, and manage multiple tar kilns at a time to get anywhere in a reasonable timespan, and that makes it tedious.

(Also, the intermediate action of chopping makes the stone axe -> metal axe upgrade more relevant. I think even with the ability to insert logs directly into tar kilns it remains sufficiently relevant, but that's also an argument for the added value of that step.)

[jordancoles]

I would still like this to be added because it would save literal hours of my life and if we could also put full logs into bonfires with an "empty" button like chicken coops that'd be great as well for dealing with extra logs

[Clemence]

Or just hire a migrant to do the work of shopping the log.