Dry wood vs coal.

[Badmagic]

Just wanted to ask, anyone that’s knowledgeable about this stuff IRL, can dry wood actually burn hot enough to work a smelting furnace, I know for certain normal wood and branches let alone plant fibre should not be able to power a furnace, but what about dry wood?

The tanner only functions on bark as an example, so we know they could lock the furnace to specific fuel types.

For the sake of my own immersion I don’t allow furnaces to run off anything but coal at the moment, but, dry wood I just don’t know.

Kinda bugging me to be honest.

[KVogler]

Nope, It cant. It would indeed be more realistic if things would behave more along the lines of :
- Wood can be used in furnaces, but only to produce bricks and iron bars.
- If you want to smelt steel you would need coal as fuel.
- Also the blacksmith bench schould require coal as fuel. Its funny how there is a smoldering coal fire on the bench, yet magically it does not reuire fuel.
- Why does the drying rack needs bark as fuel? Letting something dry should ot require any other resource than time.

Also that Ichor to stone consolidant routine is somewhat non-immersive...
The guys comming up with the recipes are a bit strange.
Same goes for XP. Some high resource items give you only a small XP while your progressbar really gets going when crafting steel reinforcements....

I hope they will revise some of that in a balancing pass.

[Badmagic]

Good to know its not only me, I hope they revist it at some point but if not I guess I could hope for a mod, or if I ever get off the craptop back onto a desktop I may be able to get the tools to do it myself.

[cinless]

If they decided to make the process a bit more realistic and decided regular wood would be insufficient for smelting, then I would like it if they would let us make charcoal as well. Maybe that's their plan though, why else would they include a coal resource when wood does the job just fine?

[Agrorix]

Originally posted by kvogler77:

- Why does the drying rack needs bark as fuel? Letting something dry should ot require any other resource than time.

You don't dry meat with mere time, meat mere rot with time. You dry meat with a soft fire as more specifically smoke or salt.

Originally posted by Neuromancer:

If they decided to make the process a bit more realistic and decided regular wood would be insufficient for smelting, then I would like it if they would let us make charcoal as well. Maybe that's their plan though, why else would they include a coal resource when wood does the job just fine?

Charcoal wouldn't be more effective than coal at all, that'd be useless to have bark, charcoal, wood and coal.

[Falknir]

Dried wood (which might be charcoal at this point) would be capable of being used in smelting steel from iron. It's been done and it's easily reproducable. Though Anthracite or Bitumen coal is usually preferred as it can get a crucible / smelter to higher temperatures.

[Solomon Hawk]

To be a little more realistic though, you need a blower to get the coal hot enough to work the steel. The Black Ice is a tempering agent.

[Agrorix]

Originally posted by Falknir:

Dried wood (which might be charcoal at this point) would be capable of being used in smelting steel from iron. It's been done and it's easily reproducable. Though Anthracite or Bitumen coal is usually preferred as it can get a crucible / smelter to higher temperatures.

Charcoal is not rich in carbon enough and does not give a high temperature enough to get steel but of bad quality. Hence the use of coal to get higher temperature and carbon enough and sulphur as alloy.

[TRB]

You could, potentially, gassify wood and run a furnace off of wood gas, but thats fairly high-tech compared to coal.