IndustrialStory

Required Dependencies:

Advanced Geology: https://mods.vintagestory.at/advancedgeology
Glassmaking FORK: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/52809

Recommended Companions:

Interesting Ore Gen: https://mods.vintagestory.at/interestingoregen
Big Bellows Fix: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/50798

Main Features

Massively changes how you interact with ores:

• Ores require labor and resource intensive preprocessing steps such as roasting and crushing before they can be smelted.
• Smelting itself is a more complex and time consuming process. Many ores previously smelted in a crucible on a firepit now require a firebrick modular smelter to refine. Molten metal from the smelter is tapped from the furnace and cast into sand casting networks that allow you to cast several items at once with a single smelt. All smelters can use forced air to raise smelting temperatures, but whether this is required depends on the type of ore being smelted.
• You can roast ores either in a firepit or on the new roasting heaps. To make a roasting heap, pile 16 firewood in the world, then shift right click with a roastable nugget or other item. You will be able to place 12 roastable items per stack of firewood. Ignite the heap and it will burn and roast the items.
• The early game is longer but makes more sense than vanilla. A primitive pit furnace is used to smelt copper ores into a workable mass. This mass can be forged on a stone anvil by heating it in a firepit. This allows you to craft items like copper saws immediately instead of needing to cast a copper anvil.
• Ore generation is overhauled to be more realistic. Instead of native copper, the much more common chalcopyrite dominates. More details can be found on the Advanced Geology page.
• Ores are treated realistically with respect to their chemical compositions. Sulfide and hydroxide ores require roasting before they can be smelted.
• Creating ceramics for metalworking now requires kaolinite, a new mineral found at the bottom of red clay deposits in certain stone types, namely granite. Fireclay crucibles are the only valid crucibles for alloying and scrap melting operations.
• To fire fireclay bricks and fireclay ceramic items, you must construct a stack kiln multiblock. This can be constructed from any clay brick and uses fireclay and crushed quartz as a sacrificial refractory lining to fire high temperature ceramics. It can also fire large quantities of standard bricks, or using the fireclay ceramic saggar, fire large amounts of standard ceramic items. The kiln is operated by simply fueling it with charcoal and lighting it.
• Except for when using the pit furnace, all ores must be crushed before they can be smelted. This can be done by placing the ores on a hard surface on the ground and shift right clicking them with a hammer. This process can be automated with the vanilla pulverizer. Vanilla pulverizer recipes like chromite crushing still require the relevant vanilla pulverizer cap tier.
• Silver is now randomly hidden[1] in tetrahedrite and galena and can be discovered using cupellation assays. Then, using cupellation and/or liquation, the silver can be separated from the copper or lead bars. Native silver and gold in quartz still exists, for now.
• Meteoric iron is no longer bloomed. Instead, you can directly heat meteoric iron pieces with the forge. Then, forging two pieces together on an iron anvil, beating off the impurities, and drawing the iron out into a flat bar, splitting the bar with a chisel (must have hammer in hotbar), and forging the split layers back together will make a meteoric iron ingot.
• Adds a blast furnace and other late-game multiblocks for dealing with high tech steel smelting and high tech metals like nickel.

 

This mod does not yet make any changes to steelmaking.

[1]: On world generation entire deposits, or large chunks of deposits if using IOG, are assigned a hidden silver grade which is stored in the ore, metal, and even items created from the metal such as nails (not finished, unmeltable items such as tools however). Silver-bearing metal/ore stacks with itself, but not with barren metal/ore.

General Metalworking Changes:

• A dedicated firebrick furnace has been added which is used for crucible smelting and alloying. Many recipes will require forced air from the bellows to reach the correct temperatures. Note that low temperature operations like melting lead scrap can still be done in a firepit, but the vanilla firepit is hard limited to 500 C.
• The smelter is modular. Using the smelter with just a chimney will allow you to either smelt blooms or meltable metal like copper. Attaching a retort smelter on top will allow you to refine zinc metal by combining crushed roasted zinc ore with powdered charcoal.
• Many alloying recipes have been modified in various ways to be more realistic. For example, you can now create bronze by combining crushed cassiterite, charcoal, and copper bits. In general, you will need to alloy with already-smelted pure metal bits rather than directly alloying raw ore.
• A bone ash cupel item, similar to the crucible, has been added. This item will allow you to cupellate lead bits and extract silver from them. Smelt the litharge-impregnated cupel with charcoal to recover (most of) the lead.
• To extract silver from copper, namely that produced by tetrahedrite, combine the silver-bearing copper bits with lead bits to create liquation alloy ingots. Then, smelt the liquation alloy bits to melt the lead out. All of the silver contained in both the input lead and copper bits will be sucked into the lead, which can then be cupellated.
• Vanilla ceramic molds have been replaced with sand casting. Simply craft casting sand and stamp a tool head into the sand to create a mold. Use a shovel to create channels which metal can flow through into multiple molds at a time. Other mods' ceramic molds still work for now, but I will be adding sand casts and compat later.
• The vanilla forge is still used for metalworking. Forging mechanics have not changed, only the way you acquire metals has.
• In the late game, a blast furnace may be constructed to quickly smelt large amounts of iron ore into pig iron. This pig iron can be puddled in a multiblock reverberatory furnace to produce wrought iron much more easily than dealing with bloomeries.
• A late game wind furnace, with a graphite crucible, may be used to melt nickel into alloys, and will be used to create end-game cast steel alloys as well.

Glassmaking is completely overhauled:

• Glass is no longer smelted in bloomeries. Instead, glass mixtures are crafted from various chemicals and from crushed quartz based on their real life recipes. The glass is melted in Glassmaking's smelteries and worked using a glassblowing rod. To make glass panes and glass blocks, an iron plate rolling table is used to roll out molten glass into panes. Use a ladle (requires iron or steel) to transfer molten glass from the smeltery to the rolling table.
• Glass objects require annealing in an annealing oven, or they will shatter. Use firewood to heat the annealing oven to 700C and place freshly-blown or rolled glass items into it and let them cool down normally. It will say when it is annealing.
• Crushing quartz can no longer be done directly. Instead, the quartz can be heated up red hot in a fire and then thrown into water to shatter itself into a crushable form.
• Every vanilla colored glass is now craftable. In addition, all colored glass panes can be crafted into 'camed glass panes' (vanilla's leaded glass). Lead crystal glass replaces the unobtainable vanilla "Vintage Glass".
• To get soda ash (a primary ingredient of glass mixtures), gather seaweed, burn it, dissolve the ash in water, then boil the solution away.
• To get litharge, resmelt molten lead in a brick furnace.

New Chemistry System

• With glassblowing, you can create glass reaction vessels and receiving flasks to perform simple chemistry
• Many vanilla recipes such as creating sulfuric acid in a cooking pot have been disabled, and have been replaced with realistic recipes performed in glassware.
• There is also a large number of additional chemical reactions to produce chemicals for glassmaking, and more to come.

Other additions include

• A fireclay pottery saggar that allows you to stack up to 8 standard pottery items into a single block, and also stack the saggars on top of each other in the stack kiln or beehive kiln. This will allow you to fire very large amounts of pottery items at once.
• Red and blue clay can be manufactured by crushing and slaking claystone and shale in water. In real life, most commercially manufactured bricks are made directly from crushed shale.
• Overhauled and realistic chromium tanning process.

Future Planned Content:

Next few updates:

• Expand chemical crafting to include dyes, industrial chemicals, and other useful items.
• Implement mercury and sulfur distillation in a new distillation smelter module.
• Implement gold/silver in quartz processing via mercury amalgamation and cyanidation.

 

Further afield:

• Steelmaking expansion and higher tech chemistry overhaul.
• Improvements and expansions to mechanical power; Industrial machinery starting from the 1600s (ex: hollander beater for making paper from wood pulp).
• Oil, wood gas, coal gas, and other high tech fuels.
• High tech smelting processes such as nickel speiss, acid leaching, and more.
• Overhaul of processing for industrial crops such as flax. Expansion of chemical fertilizer options.

 

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Viceroy for help with some models.

 

This mod is in alpha. There are a couple of placeholder textures and there may be bugs. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.