Rain's Ironworking V0.9

Versions

• 0.90
• 0.91 - Much more labor intensive, better pot recipe, minor fixes

Not quite ready for release, but good enough to post. Figured I should dump this asap before Skyrim comes out and I get distracted.

Items that can be made:

• Knife
• Spear
• Handaxe
• Woodsman's Axe
• Shortsword
• Sickle
• Shortsword
• Mace (as "Hammer")
• Shovel
• Large Ring Cowl
• Ring shirt
• Long Ring Hauberk
• Ring Leggings
• Ring Gauntlets
• Pot

Quick and dirty directions:

• Go to a mire and dig up bog iron
• make one or more big charcoal piles (5 day burn time)
• Smelt the bog iron into blooms (loses 80% of mass, 1 day burn time)
• Make first an anvil, then a hammer out of the blooms
• Hammer the blooms into wrought iron
• Make a variety of blades out of wrought iron
• hammer, temper, and sharpen those blades
• attach them to handles

Most steps involve the use of charcoal as fuel. Expect to make several batches. I intentionally made this very labor intensive to make up for how easy the iron is to get.

The charcoal pile should be kept on the ground next to your forge area, as should the anvil. Keeping a fire lit is required for almost all steps.

When making ring armor, you'll need new versions (or several worn copies) of leather armor to make the various pieces - you can not make a ring shirt out of a 1lb 80% damaged leather shirt - you need a full 6lbs.

I decided against using an iron plant for a number of reasons - it never worked well enough to my satisfaction.

Release version will be submitted to Sami along with an update to my cloth mod, followed by a bundle mod that includes both, revamped menus and many other items made using the two technologies.

menudef_rainsiron.txt

diy_rainsiron.txt

Too bad I'm seeing this after 3 hours of modding...
I didn't know that somebody was allready working on a iron mod.

I made one too (in very early stage though), but I think yours will be way better if you can finish it

May I suggest using one of my graphics though?

I appreciate the offer (and they are good graphics) but the only way to use them currently is to make the mod using cookery menus - which for a number of reasons I'm not willing to do. But thanks anyway. At some point Sami will likely make custom objects and external graphics files possible, at which time I'll sweep back through my mods and give everything a fresh look. Until then a lot of rocks, stones, and hunting horns will do.

I think this is actually the third or fourth iron-working mod put forward. This is just my take on the subject which I think has a decent depth to it, good balance and works consistent with the way things tend to work in UrW vanilla.

Nice Rain,
the fundamentals of what you have built seem strong to me.

100 fire wood for 50 charcoal, and 5 charcoal for 3 iron blooms
Iron bloom makes spear head in 1 hour.
hammer an hour
temper an hour
sharpen 45 min
attach handle 25 min

4 hours to create a spear starting with the iron and a staff.

I think that has to be a great guess as to the time. Would skill level impact success rate and time it takes? What does the survival skill in the first few tasks mean? That the smelt is a survival roll not a black smith roll?
Very exciting. Well done.

The only time skills get involved are making the big fires (charcoal and smelt) where I brought survival in (since it covers firemaking). Near the end carpentry comes into play for attaching blades to handles but the times are low enough that it just adds a random elements to it (and gives you a chance to gain skill). I'd love the ability to add a smithing skill but I'd assume we have to wait until smithing in Vanilla for that.

A lot of my research suggests the charcoal requirements are way too low, so I might come close to doubling it. Maybe a combination of getting less from the pile (50% was the number I got from expert charcoal makers) and using more in certain steps like smelting, making items from blooms and hammering.

Did you have any trouble figuring it out - did the order of steps and how the menus worked seem intuitive?

No I figured it out right away with your description. Its well done.
Cant really do any of this without a tuyere.
Make Pottery Tuyere. Needs clay and a fire. 6 hr
Make iron Tuyere, needs 2 lb of iron. anvil, hammer. 3 hr

Of course then you need a bellows.
Simple Bellows, can handle iron up to 3 lb iron bloom
clay tuyrere,6 lb of skins, 4 boards, tying material,

Great bellows
iron tuyere, 10 lb skins, 6 boards. 1 lb iron. can handle up to 10lb iron bloom
Your charcoal usage is good for game purposes, the recently posted vids show about a bushel to smelt a 6 pound bloom, but with 3 people to do the work. Making it less charcoal efficient for one person is a nice trade off.

The bog iron has to come in differing sizes, above a fairly small size, you need the top gear to work it. But it is a valuable trade item with a town smith.


Charcoal burning is very weather dependent. Wind makes it tough. With one person, if the wind comes up, force a role to see if he doesn't lose half the charcoal.

The reason I didn't include bellows is that the game makes the cow sound anytime you interact with the item.

As to the rest of your post, I'm not sure if you are talking about real life of the game - but almost all of what you described can not be modded in easily and some of it is downright impossible. There is no way to make a check to lose half the coal or a way to make digging bog iron produce 2 or more sizes at random.

Making two tiers of tools (with the better set being able to do more) is possible but I don't plan to include it: it just makes two more menu entries (stone hammer and stone anvil) that aren't really used except to make their iron versions.

Just adding thoughts.
What you have created is far more then a start, but I just thought putting in some of the infrastructure limitations that a person starting with nothing would face would be interesting at some point.
Finding bog iron is really a foraging activity, and the quality and quantity of bog iron found could be controllable by the Sami. Your crafting structure is great though.

Steeling would be an interesting addition to your tasks. Improving the edge value of created items.

Changed up charcoal production a bit. lowered the results to 40% but also broke it up into [patch:5] of 50 firewood each.

Probably going to make the anvil into a stone anvil to make things a little more elegant.

I found a bug. When tempering a soft blade the descriptions says you need 1.00 lbs of... of what? I found the answer by looking into the diy file, its water of course, but I don't know how to change it so it displays the name.

But I like it alot, great work.

I'd make the whole process even more work intensive. As the average PC can be assumed to be dabbling smith at best using small scale methods, most characters should be happy to make 150km round trip to the nearest shop to get fine sword (or search for foregin traders) than go through the whole ordeal of making one themselves.

As far as I'm reading this right, you can make 3 knife blades out one batch of bog iron. Preferably, searching for enough iron bearing ore from bog for even one knife should be a full day's work, IMO. Let's say 4-5 hours to dig up 1 lb of ore which yields 0.2 lb iron bloom. Can't really remember what kind of exact weights the game has, but lets's say about 8-10 blooms for a short sword and couple for small knife or spearhead.

Oh yes, it would be a good idea to remove the wooden javelins with this mod and replace them with iron headed one. They can be oath-of-ironed anyway.

Hammering the bloom into wrought iron was quite arduous process even with multiple men hammering (and possibly bellowing) the bloom. For just one guy, I'd make it long multi stage progress that requires re-heating of the bloom every now and then (though, IIRC, working cold bloom is also possible, maybe). Perhaps minimum 4 30m phases with need for fire for every phase.

I'd also introduce two different kinds of bloom iron and the respective follow up products. During early medieval, there was clear distinction between low carbon (0.05 or lower) high phosphorous iron and higher carbon wrought iron (even up to 0.2-0.4%, wrought mild steel really) that was used mostly for high quality weapons grade crafts.

The low-grade iron should be much easier to work with during all phases, starting with hammering of the bloom (it's softer, afterall) but should be mostly usable for items with tool functionality. Lets say all axes except throwing and battle; small knife, knife, and broad knife; javelin, spear (but not the tribe specific ones) and all tridents; hammer; arrowheads; all crafts with only tool functionality, like pots, shovels, fish hooks and so on. This kind of iron could not be tempered, so only way to harden it was by work hardening (hammering).

The high grade iron would be usable (and required) for rest of the stuff. Mostly things like swords, high quality knifes and spears, battleaxes and armour. Technically, the wire for mail was often drawn from soft iron, but I think keeping armour work intensive would work better for the game. Blades made out of high grade iron were frequently (but not always) tempered. Once ironworking can be made skill, tempering is one process easily botched up, possibly making perfectly good blade into useless brittle rod of metal that snaps easily.

Cast iron should not exist. It only became common in Europe with blast furnaces from 15th-16th century onwards. So iron pot should be hammered into shape like everything else.

Making anvil and hammer out of iron bloom is bit sketchy. I'd rather opt for shop bought hammer and large stone as ad-hoc anvil. Possibly allow only low grade iron to be worked on large stone until you can make proper anvil out of iron (or buy one from shop). Tongs would be nice to have as well.

@Gladius
Thanks for the heads up. I had noticed it during testing as well but I appreciate you pointing it out. It was missing a +.


@Matti
The next revision already includes a significant increase in the effort needed for raw material collection and production. Since weight is not something that can be modded and I'm really limited to just using one lb rocks and 14lb stones, all the recipes have to stay in those terms.

Current version has a longer dig time, less blooms per bog iron, slightly less efficient charcoal production (but patchwise) and more charcoal and/or time used on many actions.

I won't be changing any default items at all. That would require overwriting the players diy files and would make this not modular. It'll be stand-alone just like my cloth mod, although the two will probably get integrated into one super overhauled diy set up at a later date.

Multiple stages are only possible if the item undergoes a slight name change. Each phase of hammering would need its own menu entry. That is a lot of menu entries for a little realism. Instead the whole thing can be abstracted into one action that represents heating, hammering and reheating. Current version has each bloom taking 3 hrs to hammer instead of one.

Multiple grades of materials adds needless complexity to what is otherwise a simple mod. It also creates countless menu entries.

Good point on the casting anachronism - I'll make it a direct recipe using smithing tools.

There is no "buy one from the shop". Modded items can only be player made. So the rather inaccurate way I go about making the hammer is going to stay. The order, however, might change. You might make the hammer first using a large stone as an anvil and only then be able to make a proper anvil.

Version 0.91 for UrW 3.13.p4

Thanks for amazing work Rain!

O graphics part - maybe one of the guys who mod gfx-sets can do a few quick and dirty sprites for your iron mode?