Possible ways to improve the furnace

[The Shadow Nose]

Here are some ideas [which may have been discussed before] that could help free up space with the furnace.

1. When inserting items in the furnace, they automatically stack with your other items. So placing 10 iron ores individually into the furnace will cause all your iron ores to auto-stack into a stack of 10. Then when they melt they stack into a stack of melted iron. Really, there is no reason not to stack your items when putting them in the furnace. A stack of 10 iron ores when melted gives the same practice as ten individual iron ores. Though, I don't think iron ingots will melt properly when stacked in the furnace right now.

2. Have a seperate piece of equipment for combining ores. So you take your iron ore and coal, place them in the 'combiner' and get a stack of 10 steel sludge [or coal sludge depending on the recipe] then put that stack in the furnace to melt into steel. This would save some time since you could quickly combine your ores and then just use 1 slot in the furnace to melt it into steel.

3. If someone places garbage like animal parts or potions or anything like that in the furnace, it will burst into flames or explode causing injury to the person who put it in. Nothing fancy, just turn the item to dust and have the furnace cast a lvl 1 flame burst on them. If its a potion then it's a lvl 10. A stack will cause it to cast several flame bursts and if the target leaves it stops casting and turns all non-metals into dust. I know this could cause all sort of dangeous bugs... but it would be a pretty unique feature. Also pretty somewhat realistic (Seriously, playing with fire is dangerous).


I know this has been discussed before and these may not be the best solutions [I admit #3 would have potential to go really wrong] but anyway, any better solutions?

[eldoth_terevan]

1. No. There is an IG reason why.
2. The 'combiner' you are speaking of... is a furnace.
3. Better would be to have slots automatically reset their ownership after an appropriate amount of time so other people could remove things...

[grenkar]

They do sound like great Ideas to save time, but be realistic.  Wouldn't it seem a bit strange to have hundreds of pieces of ore in one furnace?

But the explosion thing, I'm all for that.  Sounds good.

[Gondric]

once the game gets going they wil need to make the furnace much bigger or make many more youd have a line of 100 people w8in to use the furnace

[Rudlfax]

there definately need something to be done about the ppl that fill up the furnace, then log off n stay off for several days, all the time occupying the furnace. Esp since the molten ore stays molten ore over the whole time.

[The Shadow Nose]

Okay, one redesign that may work and keep some realism is that to use a furnace the user has to have a tool like a heat-resistant container (I think I recall seeing a show or something where smelters would have a ceramic cup with the molten metal in it that they removed from the furnace).

So the player puts the metal into the melting cup, then puts the cup in their right hand [a pair of metal tongs or something would be included so they can be set in the furnace without getting burned] than /use the furnace to melt the metal in the cup. wait a bit and then the cup is removed with the molten metal in it.

Essentially, instead of having one container that everyone shares, everyone has a small container they use to melt the metal in with the help of the furnace. If they leave before its done then they just don't melt the metal. And since the tool would be a container, then making steel would consist of putting the iron and coal in the cup and then melting it in there.


[one minor idea that may cause catrostrophic  problems if ever implemented: if people have the ceramic cups to keep the metal in to melt, make it possible to cast a Red Way fire spell on the cup to melt it without the use of a furnace, naturally it would need quite a few ranks in Red way to get the needed heat but it would make sense given the description of how blacksmiths try to learn Red Way for that purpose.]

[RayvenD]

There are some pretty good ideas here, but to be honest i'd prefer it if some day the furnace and other smithing equipment problems would be fixed through ownership. If we are going to have a game with realistic roleplayed lives then at some point you would expect that we would be building our own houses etc. As more skills become implemented there will be a lot less smiths by neccessity because a) people will want to try the new skills, and b) the market will become even more saturated than it already is for smiths etc. this leads me to conclude that in the future if you are a smith and have had sufficient training, you would build your own forge and therefore would have no need for public equipment, similarly if you were a trader you would have a shop to trade from. maybe this is wishful thinking but i would much prefer PC villages with tradespeople setting up shop than the game always being done with big crods of people at public amenities using the same equipment, as although the current system works, it is far from realistic.