Steel/Coal ratio

[Nikodemus]

I just got an idea that maybe you need 5 ingots only when you are highly unskilled. When you master the craft, you don't make silly mistakes anymore and don't waste ingots.
The thing is that while making a blade, you may break it in the process and so the ingot is wasted. Also, sorry if  messed something up stock-ingot i don't know the crafting in PS well.
But if it is the case, i think it was made in a bit wrong way. It is player friendly that you know always how much ingots you will use with a given skill. But  say that everytime you try to make a blade, you take one ingot for a dagger for example and try, you can be extremaly lucky and success at the first time, but you can as well break 10 ingots and nothing. That would be more realistic, as more direct touch with the rules of reality, but less player friendly, because less predictable. But I'm all for it.

[rtrentc]

A couple of points, up until the point when the blade is quenched if you don't like the shape you can just reshape it.  Now when you quench the blade your going to make some very radical changes in the structure of the metal, and at this point it would be possible for a blade to be ruined, but even if it is, you can heat the blade back up to just under the melting point and start hammering on it again or if worse comes to worse you can put the broken blades into the furnace and recycle them. To keep the carbon levels high enough, you may need to add some more coal, but that I am not sure about. I haven't researched that end of it enough. But I am sure that heating to just under the melting point is most likely sufficient to reuse the steel. So the stock weight issue still stands.

[John80sk]

Those are lbs, which is 0.45 Kg.

 So it's about 0.45x10x5=22,5 kilos.

I can't even curl 240lbs... 15lbs on the other hand seems sensible, I figure a steel dagger would weigh a little under 5lbs... and in game it weight 1lbs... so for 240lbs of iron we've got 1lbs of dagger.

And I'm going to say again that a less efficient furnace means more coal, not more iron.

Er, and I dunno, my stock is all at least 250/250, so why would I throw it away?

I did notice the devs reduced the weight of coal though... which kindof goes against what I've been saying here, but it does make it easier for crafting so I'll give it a temporary thumbs up with the condition that it will be fixed someday in the future

[Garon]

Perhaps a mid ground could be reached where scrap is saved and can be remelted into molten steel (obviously less then you started with, say scrap from 5 stocks will make 3 new ones or something close to it), that'd make sense and be somewhat realistic:  I doubt they'd throw away the 239 lb of leftover steel... but 240 daggers from 5 stocks seems unreasonable... so we can just say that it came from waste, and improve the scrap gathering at higher levels of blacksmithing (from say 5-1 orig. to scrap for new to 5-3 or 5-4 org. to scrap for new).  This would be relatively player friendly while still requiring the person to get more steel to make more weapons.

Of course, I'm fine with it as it is... mass producing weapons could cause problems, as prices would drop lower then they already are, and it would mean more people using illegal 1000/1000 weapons or the like.