Ferax wrote:I don't quite follow the suggestion about using boxes and porting. Is it possible to port while lifting something?
I'll explain this very explicitly in case you're not familiar with the process since it's a useful trick, particularly for lime which can't always be sourced from nearby one's base. Apologies if you're already familiar with some of the mechanics:
- Station one or more alts (alternate characters) at the lime pit using new world surveys to teleport them there.
- One new account per alt so that you can log into all of them at once in multiple windows, may require a computer with a good amount of RAM depending on how many, just open the client up again for each alt and alt-tab between the windows to control them
- Get one or more of the alts to quarrying so they can dig up the lime
- Get them lots of food, maybe lumberjack frikadels or trail mix
- Build a bunch of boxes near the pit
- Fill all the boxes with lime grinding away with your alts
- Get your alts barkparks and maybe grind their yellow blood (better carrying) and phlegm (more efficient for food/digging) up
- Fill their inventories and barkpacks with lime until they're full and port to town
- Take your main character from your base and port to town
- Fill up your main's inventory with lime from the alts by trading at a barrel
- Port back to your base with your main (which can likely hold much more than an individual alt)
- Repeat until all the lime is transferred
The more alts, the more efficient the process... You may also want alts in addition to your main to port it to your base. This process is called "alt porting" and is useful for transporting materials to anywhere in the map. It's more difficult now than it used to be due to the weight restrictions, but if you're planning on doing it many times it can be worth the initial investment of buffing up your alts a bit.
Ferax wrote:So, on the smelting side, I have in my smelter 11 lime and the rest ore, as the wiki seems to suggest. Am I right in reading that that will give me just one pig iron bar, or is it 180% x the number of ores?
As far as I understand that page is out of date and the current formula depends, in part, on your Mines & Mountains. From what I could find on the forums, one of the admins would only say as much as "A little bit more ore than lime is optimal efficiency" so I usually do 13 ore and 12 lime and that gives me 2 bars per load, 3 bars every 5 load... so... around 220%, though I suspect that would increase if my M&M was higher.
I think they bumped up the efficiency of smelters to reduce the value of pig iron to balance with there now being more valuable types of iron which require additional processing (wrought, blistersteel) and to make iron a more attainable resource for low tech settlements (makes nails, metal tools, etc cheaper)