Hey there! If you're like me, you want to get the most bang for your buck with metalworking, quenching, and tempering, without loosing your stuff. Steel and Iron can be costly to make and acquire, and loosing your entire finished product because you got greedy with a few extra percentage points from quenching that aren't really worth it sucks! The line between quality and risk will be different for everyone, but before we can even touch on that, we should get into the basics:
The How-To:
This update completely changes our options for how we interact with ferrous metals (iron and steel). If you already know what you're doing, feel free to skip to the next section! But a lot has changed, and block wise, the biggest addition is this: the bellows.
The Small Bellows crafting recipe and guide book information.
You'll need 6 of any plank, 6 leather, and 3 of any nails and strips. If you don't have leather making up yet, don't worry, there's a crude alternative. It might take you a few more puffs, but it'll work just as well. (It should be noted that there is also a "Large Bellows" in the game that will be able to work with mechanical power, but as of writing, this feature isn't implemented, so I won't be going over it here.)
The recipe for a crude bellows, you'll need 2 rope, 4 sticks, and a large hide or greater.
As the guide book notes, bronze and copper materials won't need the bellows to work; but in order to get our iron or steel up to a workable temperature, we'll need to take our bellows, and put them next to the forge, like so.
Left-clicking on the bellows shoots a puff of air into our forge, which allows us to pump up our temps a bit at the cost of burning our fuel a little faster (in other words, less time burning.) You can forge the ingots into the metal parts as normal, but for the tempering and quenching process, we'll want fire clay and a barrel of water to cool our metal in. If you want the easy way out, you can stop the process and use the worked metal you've created in your tools as per normal. But if we want to get the most out of our metalworking, we need to get it up to temp again and cool it rapidly with quenching.
Hovering over our metalwork shows us the temperature we need to get it up to before we can quench it by dipping it into our water barrel. Quenching metal increases its 'power' rating, which effects its damage on weapons and block break speed on most tools. If we coat the metal in fire clay before we heat it up, however (by simply combining the worked metal with clay in our crafting inventory) we can instead increase its durability when we go to quench it instead.
Every quench has an increased chance of breaking your metalwork; and if that happens, you end up with nothing! There's no way to reduce it to 0, but we can definitely lessen our odds by tempering the metal by heating it up to the indicated temperature and allowing it to cool SLOWLY. Tossing the heated metal onto lake ice, or trying to dip it in water will ruin the tempering process! You MUST allow it to cool slowly in a chest, on the floor, or in your inventory.
The Important Things:
The biggest numbers things you need to know when working with your metal is 1) the total number of times it's been quenched (it doesn't matter the type), 2) the amount of improved power or durability you're gaining with each quench, and 3) the workable metal's chance of shattering with each quench.
There are a couple of things that are easy to remember.
- Every time you successfully quench your metal, its chance to shatter goes up by a flat 5%. It doesn't matter if its at 5%, 50% or something weird like 22.6%. If you successfully quench the metal without breaking it, the chance it'll break next quench goes up another 5%.
- You can only temper something as many times as it's been quenched. This is a big one! It means you can't get ahead with reducing your risk, and the cost will always be exponential
- Tempering the metal does not have a chance to shatter it, but reduces the Power stat in turn. You have to wait for it to cool on its own either on the ground, in the air, or your inventory. Time is also an investment.
- ONLY Power and shatter chance goes down when you temper, NOT DURABILITY. If you're adding a lot of durability and only a little power, it might be more worth it for you to add the durability first, then the power at the very end so it's not constantly being reduced by tempers.
- "Power" dictates damage and block brake efficiency, whereas durability ups the amount of times you can use the tool. Not every tool needs extra power, like tongs, hammers, chisels, or shears; where speed doesn't matter, and the tools don't really do damage.
- Quenching has fairly linear diminishing returns, but you'll always get twice as much durability as you'd get power. It doesn't matter how many times you've tempered, or what combination of power and durability you had before that, the 6th time quenching will give you a 5% increase in power, or a 10% increase in durability.
- The order of your quenches and tempering matters. Since this is a fairly linear process that just cares about the total number of quenches for each gain, quenching for power first vs quenching for durability first result in two vastly different results.
A falx quenched for durability first, then power
A falx quenched for power first, then durability
Each of the above blades were quenched 3x for durability, and 4x for power.
PQ= Power Quench ; T=Temper ; DQ= Durability Quench
The first sword was forged using a process of 2DQ > 1T > 1DQ > 1PQ > 1T > 2PQ > 1T > 1PQ
The second sword was forged using a process of 2PQ > 1T > 2PQ > 1T > 2DQ > 1T > 1DQ
The Crunchy Part
Now, for all those crunchy numbers. This is the part that took me the most work, trying a bunch of things, waiting for them to cool, noting things down, etc. the following "total" categories assume all the previous quenches were of the same type.
| Quenches | Total Power | Power Increase | Total Durability | Durability Increase | Un-Tempered Shatter Chance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | +0% | - | +0% | - | 5% |
| 1 | +10% | +10% | +20% | +20% | 10% |
| 2 | +18.3% | +8.3% | +36.6% | +16.6% | 15% |
| 3 | +25.5% | +6.9% | +50.4% | +13.8% | 20% |
| 4 | +31.7% | +6.2% | +62.8% | +12.4% | 25% |
| 5 | +37.3% | +5.6% | +74% | +11.2% | 30% |
| 6 | +42.3% | +5% | +84% | +10% | 35% |
| 7 | +46.8% | +4.5% | +93% | +9% | 40% |
| 8 | +51% | +4.2% | +101.4% | +8.4% | 45% |
| 9 | +54.8% | +3.8% | +109% | +7.6% | 50% |
| 10 | +58.4% | +3.6% | +116.2% | +7.2% | 55% |
The numbers go well past this, but the important thing is that each level of quenching is about 83% as efficient as the last.
Tempering, as far as I can tell, reduces the shatter chance by ~20% of what it was before, with equally diminishing returns as other things, while reducing the power by about 8% to a total of 92% of whatever the number was before tempering. By far, tempering is the part of this I've stress tested the least, so if anyone wants to chime in, please let me know!
Recommended Methods and Closing
There are a couple methods I've seen tossed around for getting a good bang for your buck on your metallurgy. A popular one I've seen both for Vintage Story (and in real life!) is two quenches for whatever you think is best, and then one temper, repeating as necessary. Easy to remember and efficient.
Personally, I find the returns after 7 quenches, even taking advantage of durability's double gains, to be more risk than reward. My personal method I've taken all this time to figure out, is doing 4 quenches for power, then alternating tempering and durability quenches for the final three. The break chance covers around 20%, and the extra durability also leaves plenty of room to sharpen it, leaving me with this lovely final blade.
I kinda lost all sense of time working on all these and trying to puzzle it out, but I did do all the math and research for this today. If I got anything wrong, please correct me! There's a real chance I missed something, so I'll edit and fix things as they're brought to my attention as best I can.
EDIT: Thanks for the support! I'm looking into doing more research on tempering and submitting the information to the wiki in the next couple of days. Glad this info is helping!