This has been bothering me for a while, I had to get it drawn out and sorted. After many hours of procrastination, failed attempts at digitising my drawing, and furious clicking in SketchUp, I present to you my first shot at concept art: The Smelter!
Ooooh! Aaaaah!
Some close ups: Thick, iron crucible with fancy H-pattern flame hole underneath. Also note the open funnel design to watch that metal flow!
Maybe? They seem a bit brighter than nether bricks, but then again I’ve used the Sphax BDCraft texture pack for so long I can hardly remember what the vanilla ones look like .
I wasn’t sure if six molds would fit in a useable model, but it looks just as good with four.
I’m really glad you went with brick for the furnace. It was my original intention to make it out of red brick, but I didn’t feel like modeling bricks or texturing the model with brick pics so I painted it maroon instead. Ideally, I pictured the crucible going from dark grey to an orange glow when the contents are heated, but I’m not sure if that’s possible in the game.
Well done cubifying the funnel as well, it ties in really nicely with the voxel look of SH!
Nothing special going on in back, just a chimney starting from the base:
I didn’t have a colour scheme in mind when designing this… I started colouring the furnace door based on a green metal hatch I’d seen on a brick wall in a museum somewhere. Maybe brass would be a better fit, to tie in with the diffuser?
I wasn’t sure if this was noticed yet, but one of the faucets for the ingot trays is blocked off with a voxel in the first version model. Facing us, it’s the one closer to the brick base.
How do you get the iron in the first place. I assume the only way to get proper iron/steel is with a smelter*. Another problem leading from this is that it doesn’t take very much to build a smelter, maybe 3 stone, or it could that only a mason could make a smelter, but then if their were multiple blacksmiths who would own each smelter if neither of them had built their own…
Arrgghhh, my head hurts
*(I never looked into how iron would be extracted from it’s ore in Stonehearth)
Hmm yes it would make sense to let the smelter cost more as it is a crafting station in to get a steady progression path such things need to cost a bit.
How do you get a carpenter’s saw when you need a blacksmith to forge one?
I put the metal in there to encourage trading or quests, so that this becomes harder to obtain.
Obviously, its not my decision, but I felt like needing something rare to build the tool that gives you more of that rare resource makes it more valuable to the player. It could also delay metallurgy without having to level your mason up to a very high skill level, something stone-averse players would be happier with. Furthermore, making that initial iron chunk expensive (perhaps by requiring a lot of resources / gold for bartering) would make sure your settlement is “ready” for metal. If metal is worth a lot, score-wise, I’d assume it will be drawing in large crowds of enemies, something an underdeveloped settlement won’t be able to cope with.
Just my thoughts!
Btw, steel is not typically cast! Cast iron is really brittle (think outdoor furniture cracking). Steel is melted in a special furnace (bloomery) and then forged. I doubt for the game’s sake they’d force you to make steel in bloomeries then forge it.
Perhaps the “original” iron could be acquired by putting A Hunk o’ Ironic Stone iron ore in a fire pit. It would take a lot of ore to make a small amount of metal over a long amount of time (a long amount of time shorter than a night because fire pits don’t burn in the day). It wouldn’t be a sustainable or long-term effective method, but it would be a stepping stone to “real” metalworking.
Thanks =]
I guessed from the color that you choose that it was brick. Great minds, eh?
It should be possible, if crops can change over time I don’t see why the crucible could’t
Ah okay, I had it sticking out of the top part, like so:
However I can change it, to the full chimney if that would be more correct.
I’ll tweak with the color some and see what come out of it
Interesting fact, the color for the bricks is the color of the bricks my high school was built out of.
Good eye! It is now fixed
In my mind, this is a second tier smelter, it would be made by the blacksmith and replaces his first one.(There used to be talk about upgrading workstations, and I think this will still be the case?) The first tier "smelter’ I think would be called a bloomery. Which, according to wikipedia, was the first furnace capable of smelting iron.
The bloomery is made of stone/bricks/ceramics. So it could be a high tier Mason product.
Mason: Stone → Bricks
Mason[tier 2 or 3]: Bricks → Bloomer
Blacksmith: ore → Iron/copper/non-aloyed metals → weapons etc
Blacksmith[tier 2 or 3]: Iron → Smelter → faster ore processing and alloys
Here are some pics of bloomeries, I was thinking on starting modeling it after I finish fine tuning the smelter:
Versions 1.1(a/b/c)
Here are some recolorations of the smelter. I made they bricks more brickish colored. The models are UnNoised, which means solid colors. I plan on adding noise to whichever one you guys like the most.
Most like the original, but with a Bronze/Goldish door
Similar to the original, but all the metal is Iron
I’m not sure how I feel about this one, but I figured I’d post it anyway. It’s Iron and Brick
What do you guys think?
EDIT: Also, I should have asked this before, but @phector2004, what exactly is the top part made of? It looks like terracotta/ceramic, but I’m not entirely sure ^^;
For me the color doesn’t feel right. Especially the green door on that maroon brick color.
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