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Stand Alone Iron Smelter?

Started by Maldrick, April 21, 2017, 02:36:12 PM

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Discrepancy

#30
in game, I'm not happy with some of these textures yet:



Should I add decorations like crates, barrels, piles of iron? or leave it up to player to decorate with 'ghost' pieces?


And the bigger question.

What should we use as Fuel?

Firewood is really out of the question, it would never get hot enough. Even coal as too impure.
Do I make a coke oven for Coke Fuel? or something else? I should probably include options to use Furnace Fuel...


@Tom Sawyer , looking at your wiki you have changed the production of Iron? from 1-2 to 3-4? . I think I will just have to let your mod override mine.

Paeng

Quote from: Discrepancy on May 01, 2017, 12:12:39 AMnot happy with some of these textures

Hmmm...  maybe they could be somewhat rougher - for the roof a dark slate, like the stonehouses?
Have you thought about placing a scaffold to one side, that always looks pretty cool, and breaks the straight faces...

It ought to be not a "nice" place to work in, rather a hellish spot of hard labor...  ;)


QuoteShould I add decorations like crates, barrels, piles of iron?

Looks like you made it "traffic-enabled", so players can decorate easily... maybe some small touches with your new coal bins, an occasional barrel...


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QueryEverything

I agree with @Paeng on this too :)  It needs to be a little rough and dirty.  Maybe have 2 F-variants - dark & broody, coal faced, hard labour, and 1 lighter (like this one), for those that play with darker lighting settings, and shadows, so the details aren't all lost in the textures.

As for decorations, definitely your new iron & coal bins (shame they aren't ghosted, perfect place to use them now), placed & odd angles.  Also plenty of room for our own decorations, a nice balance. :)

Fuel wise - a couple of choices:  coke, furnace fuel, let the player choose from the heavy hard burning fuels.
I normally end up with more than I need with one, so I swap to it whilst another is being made, then back again.  :)

I could almost imagine a dragon lying against it, rubbing it's belly on it for warmth :) 
Maybe too much imagination happening there ... lol
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Maldrick

#33
Quote from: Discrepancy on May 01, 2017, 12:12:39 AM
in game, I'm not happy with some of these textures yet:



Should I add decorations like crates, barrels, piles of iron? or leave it up to player to decorate with 'ghost' pieces?


And the bigger question.

What should we use as Fuel?

Firewood is really out of the question, it would never get hot enough. Even coal as too impure.
Do I make a coke oven for Coke Fuel? or something else? I should probably include options to use Furnace Fuel...


@Tom Sawyer , looking at your wiki you have changed the production of Iron? from 1-2 to 3-4? . I think I will just have to let your mod override mine.

I guess it would depend on your intended use of the mod, really.

The reason I was asking about a standalone smelter is I've been piecing together mods rather than using CC or MM and I ran across a building that brought ore into the picture.  Your tunnel mine, actually.  So I thought it might be fun to play with if I could find a building that processes it. Didn't know at the time that the updated version of RK's blacksmith did this, which was why I was asking.

Point being, in this case it would need to be something accessible like firewood, logs, or coal.  I believe coal is still used in the modern production of steel, but I think it's converted to coke first for consistency, as you say.  But then I would be looking for a standalone coke burner. Lol

Might also be an opportunity to put to use oils @embx61 has brought into play with his standalone oil press.  But then, as a player, you are getting into having to farm to produce a material that can be traded for with one building as has always been the case even in vanilla just to avoid having to mine.  Production chains are my preference, but depending on map it's often better to just cut to the chase and trade for something, especially when the jobs are dangerous like mining or if space is tight, if farming would be needed.

Actually, when RK mentioned his Smith made iron I ran some tests.  Was planning on limited mining but mostly trading for ore as its cheaper than iron.  If the resource was included, trading for coke would work even without a building that made it, assuming the costs were in line with just trading for iron.

If you are intending for the smelter to be used with CC the fact that furnace fuel is required for the smelters with that is a consideration. You'd have to decide if you are going more for an alternate building in line with CC or offering an alternate that bypasses the established order of things there.

And, of course, any intentions you have for this with your own modsets.  You mentioned when I posted you were already working on this, so I assume you had a use for it in mind already.  How would it best address what you planned it for, fuel-wise?

Just some food for thought from a player's perspective.

Aesthetically, I think it looks great. Could fit a medieval or colonial / early industrial revolution setting. Maybe even an earlier period.  F-variants are always great, though. :)
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Nilla

I would suggest charcoal as fuel. That's historically correct. It could be made in a smaller scale in piles like those from @Tom Sawyer or rather for a big smelter like yours, in furnaces. It's basically the same product; raw material wood. The only thing that's different is the production rate. Coal from mines has to be purified to before it can be used to make iron and steel.

Tom Sawyer

@Discrepancy yes iron is changed from 2/1 to 4/3 to reduce the penalty for uneducated workers to 25%. So if you keep the vanilla values it will be twice as efficient in the North. But it would not be a big problem. We can overwrite the input of your furnace in the North to balance it. And Nordic people would probably feet this machine with something from wood, so charcoal. But I found your model in Wikipedia and it's the first German coke blast furnace from 1794, right? :)


elemental

Furnace fuel sounds good to me. But why not have options to use a few different fuels?

I like the idea of having a couple of texture variants. Dark and dirty and also something a bit cleaner. I also like the idea of decorating it myself. If you can provide some deco pieces (raw materials, finished product) that would be perfect. They could be used around docks, too. Actually - and this would be a bit of work, but what about some deco railway pieces? Not like the choochoo mod, but mining railway. Small rail carts, coal stockpiles, that sort of thing. As purely decorative items they could link mining, industrial, and trade areas. (why does one building always lead to 5 more ideas and hours of more work???  ::) )

I'm not keen on brown grass as a ground texture on any building. The sharp lines between green and brown look bad. Looks like we can pave it with road, so that's good, so do we need the brown grass? Under a real industrial building you'd expect very little grass.

Overall though, so far it looks great.  :)

TheOtherMicheal

#37
I remember that @Discrepancy had a link at one time to some information about the blast furnace he was modelling.
After reading about it, I learnt that these early blast furnaces could operate with any of the earlier fuel types we are talking about because, as I understand it, the most important change they made from being a simple bloomery, was that they significantly increased the air flow into the furnace.

So I think that any medieval blast furnace like the one Discrepancy is modelling could use any of the fuels in Banished, the most important aspect of the blast furnace is increasing the air flow which allowed hotter temperatures within the furnace which results in higher purity of the iron.
I think that making the furnace use any fuel - I know that this will add your workload Discrepancy, sorry about that  :( - or making it just use the basic Banished fuels would be suitable.

Edit: In an effort to learn more about blast furnaces, I found this item about the earliest one in Sweden. @Tom Sawyer it may interest you, it's only a small article but it mentions a specific time period of AD 1250-1300
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X1530170X

Tom Sawyer

@TheOtherMicheal That's what I found. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Germany_First_Coke_Blast_Furnace_Miniature_DM.jpg Look at the details. :)

I also think that a few options for it would be the best. I would suggest charcoal and coke. Both are realistic and more or less the same (pure carbon). Just the one made from wood and the other from coal. Of course coke would need to be produced by a coke oven and we don't have it yet. In the North I would just fill it with charcoal. CC probably needs an option for "furnace fuel".

Discrepancy

@Tom Sawyer & @TheOtherMicheal , it is made from that image :)
I couldn't find any more images of the model from different angles, the original links seem to be broken.

Yes I think a few different fuels. Coke / Charcoal / Furnace Fuel

Coal will have to be turned into Coke, so yes I will also make a Coke Oven for the set.
... what else. I'm undecided.


A few F variants :) of course for the Blast Furnace. The code was already written with that in mind.



@elemental , the footprint is only temporary. As most would know by now, I'm lazy with footprints, most I have as nothing. But for this building I will add one, and it won't be brown grass.

Tom Sawyer

I can go to this museum and make some more photos of the miniature, just a few km. ;D

But no need of it, your model is already great. And also great you make a coke oven to complete the chain. It becomes a historical project.^^ And it has a nice effect to bring coal a bit more in the game again. If you have charcoal and "home made" coke then you actually don't need the third option of "furnace fuel" which is actually just the category.

And if you are lazy with footprints, I can make a nice one from Nordic terrain to match it in when loaded in the North. If you like.

Discrepancy

#41
Thanks for the the offer @Tom Sawyer to take more pictures of the model. But you are right. I think it looks nice enough as is, I will add a scaffold like @Paeng suggested also.
But the Blast Furnace looks too small. I think I'll make it bigger.



a work in progress on the Coke Oven

I should say ovens. Modular build, 1 worker operates two ovens in a single 5x4 module. There is a floor above and work point, so the ramps on the end allow a nicer looking travel up to the top, though I don't like how square edged it all is. They are still pretty low-poly so I will 'bulge' the stone out a bit and arch the ramp slightly.
I'm also making a 1x4 Ladder piece to get to the top.

I'm not happy with the turf roof texture, it looks too nice for an industrial oven. I'm not sure if they would have ended up getting grass on them anyway until afterwards, in disused life.
I'll change it to a rocky soil texture, fading out to turf on the ramps.

@elemental , I'm thinking of the railway carts etc. They will match well with the coke oven.

So what does everyone think though?
Does this style Coke oven fit that well with the Blast Furnace? I'm not sure.

QueryEverything

I don't know much about this sort of engineering, coke fuel makers etc, so I can't offer on the reality of it, or anything along those lines - so, let me just say:
I like the basis of them, I like how they are forming, you know I'm not into big buildings, but I think perhaps (and in reality I may be very wrong), that the scaling between the 2 is out a bit, but, I'm not sure on that.

Again, maybe a couple of F-variants so people can have pretty green, and mucky charcoal green.  The viking storage wouldn't look out of place near here, camo'ed :D

Will you be working with @embx61 & Tom (as above), and possibly @Necora to get all the charcoals interusable, or are you introducing your own new version of it (I don't mind, either way, it's a question is all :D )

Your grungy new dock housing textures would't look out of place here either for workers' housing.  :)

As for railway tracks - definitely!! And carts, I wonder if it's possible to somehow have a transition piece between yours (if you do it) and Red's, that way for people who are making large settlements with rail roads, they can transition from your mining district to the transport & merchants district.  :)  Just a thought ....  :D
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embx61

I am open to any suggestions about the values of the charcoal. how much logs to produce how much charcoal.

As longs as we keep the Raw material file the same name it will be alright and all our buildings will take the materials to process them.
Even if some values are different the Mod highest in the mod list values will be taken so in that case it is up to the player what values they want.

But I agree that trying to get our numbers the same or close would be the best but some mods want more difficulty like Tom's Nordic Mod and so I can see where Tom maybe decide to have some different values because it fits his mod more.
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Discrepancy

I increased the size of the Blast Furnace to 1.4x.
It now sits on 10x10.

The ladder piece is made for the ovens, though I'm still getting lines where the modular pieces meet. I might have to disguise them somehow.