Salem

So i was going to put some lime in my unlit furnace and no luck. Can't put it in. So i lit the furnace, and nope, still can't put it in. Just wasted my last bit of charcoal and some perfectly good ore. How am i supposed to get iron if i can't even put in lime?!

Sorry, by furnace i ment ore smelter

linkfanpc wrote:So i was going to put some lime in my unlit furnace and no luck. Can't put it in. So i lit the furnace, and nope, still can't put it in. Just wasted my last bit of charcoal and some perfectly good ore. How am i supposed to get iron if i can't even put in lime?!

Hm, sorry if it's a dumb suggestion but was there room for the lime or was it already full of ore? Either way, you definitely can't mess with it at all after you light it until it's finished (~40 mins later)

jcwilk wrote:

linkfanpc wrote:So i was going to put some lime in my unlit furnace and no luck. Can't put it in. So i lit the furnace, and nope, still can't put it in. Just wasted my last bit of charcoal and some perfectly good ore. How am i supposed to get iron if i can't even put in lime?!

Hm, sorry if it's a dumb suggestion but was there room for the lime or was it already full of ore? Either way, you definitely can't mess with it at all after you light it until it's finished (~40 mins later)

Wait, i thought you were right-click it in? I'm not allowed to put anything in except ore, so i didn't try putting lime in with the ore. This is an extremely stupid design. There is no reason to use lime when smelting, that's just a stupid made-up thing to make smelting harder on newer players. Again, this is dumb and needs to be changed.

Oh and in-case anyone was going to go on Google to prove me wrong about using lime in an old-fashioned ore smelter:

http://penn.museum/documents/publicatio ... milton.pdf

linkfanpc wrote:Wait, i thought you were right-click it in? I'm not allowed to put anything in except ore, so i didn't try putting lime in with the ore. This is an extremely stupid design. There is no reason to use lime when smelting, that's just a stupid made-up thing to make smelting harder on newer players. Again, this is dumb and needs to be changed.

Well you're entitled to that opinion, but I think it's actually a pretty cool mechanic... If you have trouble finding ore veins or are smelting a rare type of ore then you can use a ton of lime and just a tiny bit of ore and it will stretch your ore out more and give you more bars per X ore. Inversely, if you have trouble getting lime you can do mostly ore with only a little lime, or if you must, no lime, and still get bars but just significantly less per X ore. One of the devs at some point said something along the lines of "a little bit more ore than lime" being the most efficient mix (as far as bars per load aka bars per charcoal/time) which I interpreted to be 13 ore + 12 lime.

Anyways, you -can- run only ore but you'll probably only get a bar every 2-4 loads. This is how people make really high purity bars from high purity ore, they run only ore so the lime doesn't "pollute" it and bring the purity down.

Plus getting access to lime is a pretty easy task compared to all the other things required to get iron production going (all the nails for the entrance+smelter, 3 bars for the smelter, expensive pickaxe to mine, woo-woo wand for prospecting, finding a vein in the mine)

linkfanpc wrote:Oh and in-case anyone was going to go on Google to prove me wrong about using lime in an old-fashioned ore smelter

That's one old fashioned method, there are likely others and google suggests lime is indeed used in at least some smelting processes... Hard to tell whether any of those were used back then though.

It's documented in the wiki though, so that covers you The page is a bit out of date with the specifics of the numbers but the general explanations are still valid - http://salemwiki.info/index.php/Ore_Smelter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting

Wiki disagrees with you.

linkfanpc wrote:Oh and in-case anyone was going to go on Google to prove me wrong about using lime in an old-fashioned ore smelter:

http://penn.museum/documents/publicatio ... milton.pdf

Metal works and metallurgy have come a long way since the 17th century. However in all my research I have done Salem provides an accurate description of how things were made and things that were used. Keep in mind the cementation process has fallen so out of favor of modern steel methods that the word cementation is not even recognized by google chrome's spell check. Despite the fact that the Cementation process is a real process that did indeed use a long burning coal fire to produce steel. Teasel is even represented correctly as a natural material that was used in cloth manufacturing to raise the nap nap on clothing. I am not sure who performed the research but historically they are very accurate on the 17th century processing of materials.

JohnCarver wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting

Wiki disagrees with you.

Lol even the developers are coming at me to make me look like an idiot.