I feel that the speed advantage of a blast furnace is not really worth the additional cost of crafting it, the reduction in XP yield, and the limitation to only smelting metals. The real bottleneck on producing iron, after all, is the time it takes to mine the ore; it takes MUCH longer to produce one iron ore than it does to smelt one iron ingot, and the smelting can happen in the background while one is mining. So there is very little benefit to using a blast furnace over a traditional furnace.
As well, simply speeding up the existing smelting recipes seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to solve another problem: sometimes absurdly wasteful recycling of tools/armour. A brand new undamaged chestplate that took 8 ingots (72 nuggets) to produce generates only 1 nugget? Some loss should be expected, but a single measly nugget no matter what you start with always annoyed me.
So what I propose is that blast furnaces yield an output that is more closely tied to the input ore/item, and more efficient than what a traditional furnace would produce. Instead of having one input item produce one output item (ingot or nugget), have each input produce a number of nuggets calculated from the input item. For an ore, the blast furnace could produce 10 nuggets, slightly better than one would get from a traditional furnace. For an item, it could produce a number of nuggets based on (1) how many ingots went into its production, and (2) how damaged it is, minus 1 nugget so there's always at least SOME lossiness.
For example, the above mentioned pristine chest plate could yield 71 nuggets, while one at 50% damage would produce only 35. (Since stacks can only contain 64 items, this is a good reason for the increased speed of the blast furnace; uness you have invested in setting up a hopper system, you will actually need to keep tending the furnace to remove nuggets so they don't go to waste.)
Please sign in to leave a comment.
6 Comments