Another row for the Finery Forge

[Nikixos]

Well, it's pretty damn slow and boring to make wrought iron, maybe with 3 people using trip hammers and 1 person puting coal and taking care of the bellows it would be faster?
edit: while you are at it i want the smoke come out a different colour everytime it turns off and on, and also a choo choo sound when the forge is lit.

[jcwilk]

maybe with 3 people using trip hammers

+1, it's too easy to do everything with alts right now anyways, just need one alt with amalgamation and an alt or two for bellows and it's a one human job... Adding another row or making trips/heating faster would make the multitasking more challenging and more of an incentive to get a player or two to help out.

[jcwilk]

The JC approach would probably be to add another row and make it consume coal 50% faster so you need to consume all 3 rows in order to make it as coal efficient as it used to be xD which would be fine, I like that it's easier and/or more beneficial to groups and making it more-so would seem like a win.

[jakhollin]

-1 I cant stand making wrought it is painful. Making it harder for one person would be more agonizing. I say give us donkey powered smelters like they actually used to use. Adding a building that when built near it powers the smelter and then only coal and making wrought are needed.

[MaxPlanck]

Since a player can do only 2 wrought iron within the time frame of it turning into dross the max spots of 6 makes it an idol thing to have 3 people doing the trip hammer.

If you don't have 4 people in total you can just stick with 2 people minimum
(don't ever solo make wrought iron, its a waste of time and coal because while you are in the middle of making wrought the forges smoke will go out and you'll have to wait a super long time inbetween each wrought)

If you are running 2 people(or)1 person and their alt, I suggest the following optimized setup.

Player 1: Fills coal/Pumps Bellow/Puts iron in the forge
Player 2: Uses the trip hammer

The important process is to place 2 iron, and then place another 2 iron when the first 2 iron is halfway from turning into bloom. This allows player 2 to always be using the trip hammer without any wait for the next blooms since the time it takes to finish 2 wrought iron is equivalent to half the bar of speed on iron turning into blooms.

If you are running 4 people, the person pumping the bellow/filling coal should still place the iron in but you don't need to worry about the iron as much as running 2 people. (Yes, it is most certainly faster and saves a lot more coal and time)

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This doesn't really sound like a suggestion, what would another row be for exactly? So that you can run up to 5 people at a time?
I honestly thought this should have been in the help section but was kind've confused.

[jakhollin]

I use 2 alts one to watch the bellows another to fill coal and iron. Like you said tho I am only able to do 2 at a time. But for a hermit it is so damned time consuming and such a pain that I want to carve my eyeballs out with a pencil that has had the eraser removed.

[Nikixos]

It still needs more persons to make wrought faster, the problem is that it's a very tedious process, i mean if it was faster but required more effort from the player it would be a better design. It would be cool if salem had you to solve puzzles or some **** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiUbNcy947o&t=8m20s

[jcwilk]

Since a player can do only 2 wrought iron within the time frame of it turning into dross

Are you certain? I do 1 trip per 3 slots and it seems to work fine... Put a bar in, wait for 33%, put another in, wait for 66%, put another in, then whenever you fetch a bloom put another in. Maybe if I was perfect on the bellows it wouldn't be enough time though, not sure.

[MaxPlanck]

I use 2 alts one to watch the bellows another to fill coal and iron. Like you said tho I am only able to do 2 at a time. But for a hermit it is so damned time consuming and such a pain that I want to carve my eyeballs out with a pencil that has had the eraser removed.

If you have stockbins of coal and iron right near the forge you really only need 1 alt for pumping/coaling/putting iron in. As long as the red bar stays above 90 the iron will turn into bloom.
It only takes 3 seconds to move to a bellow and the bar won't go below 90 in that instance, just make sure you fill the coal inbetween pumping bellows.

When you think about it, 2 players is almost just as fast as 4 players on one forge.
Since when running 2 people you are doing 4 wrought iron in the time it takes 4 people in total to do 6 wrought iron.

I'll try to better explain it
(The numbers below are just measurements and not the actual speed)
Every 1 minute the 2 man team can make 2 wrought iron

Every 2 minutes the 4 man team can make 6 wrought iron
Which means the 4 man team actually makes 3 wrought iron per 1 minute

The 2 man team is always making wrought iron with no wait inbetween because you put more wrought iron halfway through,
while the 4 man team must wait for 6 more wrought iron to cook completely.

By calculations, the 4 man team is only 50% faster in making wrought, not 200% faster

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As for your post jcwilk, when I say a player can only do 2 wrought at a time
(is if you put 2 in at once you can finish both before they would turn into dross)
and that a player can't do place 3 iron at the same time because it takes too long to convert it 3 wrought in a row.

If your method of putting one every 33% makes the character constantly make wrought then it is just as efficient as putting 2 at a time since my method also has the character always using the trip hammer. Only small difference is you spend more time looking at the irons timer to put one in every 33% and you spend more time running back and forth on the person using the trip hammer. Other than that, there's nothing wrong with either method.


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Also one last thing while I'm still thinking about it before I go to bed. If you want to run a 4-man team still, split them between 2 forges. It will cost more coal but you'll finish with 8 wrought iron per 2 minutes instead of 6 wrought per 2 minutes running a 4-man on one finery forge. (Don't try to run a 1 man, 4 alt team on 2 finery forges though, you'll just end up stressing out with 4 clients and trying to keep both forges run at the same time and and and....yeah, don't do that)

[jcwilk]

By calculations, the 4 man team is only 50% faster in making wrought, not 200% faster

Yeah, I think that's the point of the OP... It's too easy to saturate the efficiency of a forge right now, with more slots it would take more people/hammers/effort to max it out. Or, if the heating time was shorter. Either might require additional adjustments to not throw off the overall "balance"... Presumably in the form of coal consumed per second.

you put 2 in at once you can finish both before they would turn into dross

Ah, I didn't realize the dross timeout was so generous, I'll have to experiment a bit with different methods then. Regardless of the method, most objective way to think about efficiency I suppose is what % of the time all 6 slots in the forge have pig iron still heating up. If a bloom sits there unused, taking up a slot, or if a slot is empty for any non-negligible amount of time then it's not peak efficiency. So if the forge is 50% empty/bloomed 50% of the time then that's 75% efficiency (1 - 0.5*0.5 = 0.75) What happens with hammers and number of players and such is irrelevant as long as the bloom gets converted prior to turning to dross one way or another.