Grinding away to get enough iron...

[valenti_scott]

Hello-
I was away for about a year, and I wanted to see what changes or improvements have been made to the game. All in all I've been enjoying it a lot (in single-player) and finding it addictive.

Last year I wanted to build a blast furnace, in order to smelt iron without all the tailings. Now apparently the blast furnace creates tailings, but half as fast as the bloomery.

Also, it takes a lot more iron to get the blast furnace than it used to. This is mainly because of all the intermediate machines which have to be crafted, such as the screw press, for iron plates, or the lathe, for screws.

So now I fear the game has turned into too much of a grind. Maybe it's better in multiplayer, since everyone pitches in and has specialties, but I can't get into any multiplayer worlds because of connection issues. So I'm sort of dead in the water at this point.
-Scott

[Pigeon]

The game is balanced for multiplayer, it just the hard fact. Most/all sandbox games typically are built around multiplayer to a degree. For connection issues what you mean by that?

[valenti_scott]

Every time I try to connect to a world I get a connection error, usually a timeout error. It's funny because I haven't had issues with other applications, like streaming video, online chess, Warcraft, Arma, etc.

[Pigeon]

Hm try this and see if it a dns error, wont cause too much issues i believe beside having to get those names again but that is practically instant.

ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /registerdns
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
netsh winsock reset

Verify files on steam

see if disabling the firewall/antivirus or both help at all

Can try reinstalling since it might be a bug somewhere along the line, and the game is smallish so wont take too long.

[Gorak]

Don't forget you can adjust rates if you're playing on a low pop server (or single player). The game certainly is balanced for multiplayer, so changing a few settings to make it more reasonable for small groups is a decent solution.

[valenti_scott]

How do you adjust rates?
Edit: In the OP I complained about needing so much iron for the various machining tasks, but I forgot to take leveling-up into account. Leveling-up in machining of course greatly reduces the iron ore requirements for the various projects. Also, I created an iron mine in the desert, with the machining right there, next to the mine, so at this point I'm feeling better.