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What is this?
The purpose of this suggestion is to make forging require more skill in a way that should not be overly complicated or unnecessarily difficult to implement.
I have been putting this together for a long time, and first mentioned the idea in this suggestion by S’moregoth. While a slightly different system is laid out there, it is actually a fantastic suggestion and a lot of ideas there would work well with this system, like having workability level for every material.
The basic idea is that you will need to heat up metal weapons and armor to reforge or repair them more effectively, and if you heat them up too much they melt. The amount of heat determines the tier of modifiers you can get from reforging, as well as the likelihood of getting modifiers (and likelihood of good versus bad). Other wooden, stone, leather, etc. weapons and items are more crude and do not need to be heated up to work with.
How it works
In order to heat things up, I had originally planned on holding an item in tongs. But that is kinda weird and would be difficult to do. Now I am thinking the player would need a special furnace, called a Blacksmith Forge or Smithing Furnace or something to that effect. Either this would be uncraftable (only obtainable from any blacksmith trader or their generated structures) or craftable on a regular crafting table.
It would be really great if the blacksmith forge were made to look like a pit of coal, as with real blacksmiths. Any piece of metal (or partially metal) equipment can be placed in this forge. Ex. Iron / bronze / gold / mithril armor, all metal swords, axes, hammers, spears, lances, and other weapons with a metal tip, iron and faction shovels and pickaxes, etc. Not chain-mail armor, and part leather armor (like ranger armor or Rohirric armor), wooden or stone tools or weapons, etc.
The player then needs to right click the blacksmith forge to open its GUI. They will put the object in and some fuel. It would be cool if the forge could use any adjacent lava blocks as an infinite source of heat. This is unrealistic, but it would make those lava blocks in blacksmith shops more useful. The mechanics for this system would work better with a steady source of heat rather than a certain amount of fuel. The weapon will slowly heat up, getting hotter around every 10-20 seconds. This should be somewhat randomized so that there aren’t specific fuel recipes for each heat level. Some metals would melt faster than others; mithril would be very slow. Additionally modifiers could affect this speed: cooling, unwithering, and Belegostian would slow down the heating process proportionally (additionally chilling), and infernal would speed it up.
The heat would be treated as a temporary modifier. It would have several levels, in order below:
1. Red-hot
2. Orange-hot
3. Yellow-hot
4. White-hot
Hot items would be covered in a simple shimmering overlay of their color like the purple color for vanilla enchanted items, but this would either be red, orange, yellow, or white.
Upon removing the item from the forge, it would have a chance to cool down to the previous level every few seconds, resulting in the heat lingering and diminishing over a couple minutes after removal.
If the item is still held in the fire while it is white-hot, it will soon begin to melt, losing its durability over the course of about 10-20 seconds until it melts away, leaving nothing left. This process will not give ingots - that is what an unsmeltery is for. Right-clicking a cauldron or regular water with a hot item in tongs will cool it down instantly, using up one increment of the water’s depth (cauldrons only) for each level of heat. Extreme thermal shock can damage materials, so cooling a yellow-hot or white-hot item in water will damage its durability slightly.
It would be cool if there were some kind of blacksmith’s glove item you could wear. Perhaps the best way to do this is have them sell the blacksmith’s apron. When equipped in the chestplate slot, it would show the player not only wearing an apron but gloves as well. This will protect from the heat. Maybe there is a better way to do this though. Without any gloves, the hot items will deal fire damage to the player. It will be dealt once per second and with magnitude proportional to the heat rate. Wearing white-hot armour is not recommended either. Glowing weapons will also deal heat damage to enemies proportional to the hotness (something like one extra point of damage per level, they will not set enemies on fire), but they will lose a lot of durability if used hot and have a chance of getting new bad modifiers like stunted, blunt, short, etc and losing good modifiers. The same goes for armor.
Now suppose you heat up your item, then open the anvil GUI. You can then repair and reforge the item. The system would change so that:
> Repairing an item could be done cold.
> Repairing an item hot would require less material. The hotter it is, the less material it would require.
> You could not reforge an item cold. It has to have some degree of heat.
> The hotter the item is, the more extreme the modifiers will be. For example.
- Red-hot items will hardly ever get any modifiers. Very rarely plain ones like long or short, poor or sluggish, mostly good modifiers when they happen.
- Orange-hot items would frequently get tier one modifiers, like cooling, lucky, glancing, hardy, and the ones mentioned above. About an equal chance to get good or bad modifiers. The tough modifier could not be created from orange-hot items.
- Yellow-hot items could get everything before, as well as get tier two modifiers, like crude, strongshod, fortunate, nimble, silken, hulking, crooked, lasting, etc. They would have a higher chance of getting bad modifiers, and also would be the minimum heat required for tough armor.
- White-hot items would get all the others as well as tier three modifiers like blessed, mighty, Eölean, Belegostian, lightfooted, hasty, etc. and very rarely tier four modifiers like legendary. They would receive bad modifiers much more often than good ones. This would be the only heat at which the steadfast modifier could be obtained.
> On the whole, white-hot items would receive modifiers much more often when reforged than yellow-hot, yellow-hot more than orange-hot, and orange-hot more than red-hot.
> The hotter the item is, the more ingots it costs to reforge it.
The item would stay at its heat level for around 20-30 seconds, then cool down to the next one. This gives you some time to reforge it, then you can cool it off in a cauldron when it is done.
This system would make the process of smithing much more realistic, but it has other merits. It means players have better control over the items they produce, and it takes more skill to make really powerful weapons. For example, if I am mass-producing weapons for an army, and I don’t want any variation between them good or bad, I could reforge any I don’t like only red-hot, and have a very good chance to get nothing at all. If I am making myself a formidable war hammer, I will heat it up white-hot. Additionally repairing hot items will require much less material than repairing cold items. This means taking the time to heat up your sword to yellow- or white-hot could save you several mithril ingots, even if it takes a few minutes.
Here are some possible notes to enhance gameplay or change the system, while not being necessary to the basic mechanic:
1. Blacksmiths, whenever reforging an item, could take the time to go over to their forge (which should be added to their structures), heat it up, then go to the anvil and reforge it. You could request a modifier for extra money and they would be likelier to forge that. This would mean hired forging actually takes a little time instead of just putting in a sword and a stack of coins and clicking until you get what you want. This may make the process too tedious however.
2. As an alternative to making mithril sources rarer and rarer (which seems to have been the current strategy to limit usage), mithril items might only heat up very slowly like around 30-45 seconds for each level of heat. It could also cool off fast, meaning forging amazing mithril weapons would take a lot longer, so they would be harder to get. The advantage is cooling off orange-hot, yellow-hot and even white-hot mithril in a cauldron would not damage its durability at all because of its exceptional properties. Maybe it also would not melt no matter how long you leave it in the forge.
3. There have been suggestions recommending learning skill from a blacksmith to forge certain things. I propose a very easy way to implement this: the anvil GUI can only be opened when right-clicking it with a Blacksmith Hammer. The player has to have alignment with a faction, find a blacksmith, be on good terms with them, and buy tools from them, so it is like learning from them. If the player is not holding a blacksmith hammer, right-clicking the anvil would result in smoke particles and a message telling the player to get a blacksmith hammer. I first brought up this idea here.
4. It would be really annoying and a lot harder to get anything done if the item lost one level of heat each time it was reforged or repaired and had to be heated back up. This would be a good challenge, but it would make the process even slower and probably wouldn’t be very much fun. It could also just have a chance to immediately lose one heat level every time it was reforged.
5. I have also seen suggestions recommending using experience levels for forging. That would work nicely with this: whenever you reforge an item, you will choose the amount of XP levels to spend. The more levels you have, the likelier it is you will get a good modifier. This will not change the likelihood of getting a modifier at all, and the tier of the modifier will still be limited by the heat.
Thank you for reading this lengthy suggestion! The idea, while taking a long time to explain, is really simple in essence and I don’t think it should be unnecessarily complex to code because it’s based on the already implemented modifier system. It would give a better level of control over reforging and make it take more time and skill to compound the ultimate weapon, but less costly to maintain afterwards. Ideas and constructive criticism are welcome.
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