Allow direct crafting from stone for certain items

[Songleaves]

The very first tool man ever created was the stone hand axe. Our ancestors didn't need to build a research bench, research stone cutting, build a stone cutting bench, and cut out stone blocks in order to make these.

What I would like to propose is to allow direct manufacturing of stone melee weapons from chunks of stone at the crafting spot. I think making stone melee weapons more accessible in the early game like this will make them more relevant. To balance this change I would decrease crafting exp gains from crafting stone weapons and increase the time needed to craft them.

[Boston]

Why?

The colonists land with plenty of steel available, both in straight usable form and from the slag from their drop pods. Why would you try to make an axe from stone when you can file down the edge on some steel scrap?

[Vaporisor]

Actually stone tools are harder to make than one thinks in order to do properly.  Stone tools like a stone club and mace should be changed to be at the simple crafting bench although it should need say five wood and a single stone block.  Stone blades would be harder and require stonecutting.  Wood clubs and maces doable from start?

[Boston]

Actually stone tools are harder to make than one thinks in order to do properly.  Stone tools like a stone club and mace should be changed to be at the simple crafting bench although it should need say five wood and a single stone block.  Stone blades would be harder and require stonecutting.  Wood clubs and maces doable from start?

Exactly. While pecking a groove in a cobble and lashing it to a handle isn't difficult, actually making cutting blades using stone is hard. Much on the level of smithing and forging metal, it is a trained skill.

Oh, and the difference between a stone club and a stone mace is academic. They are basically the same thing.

[Songleaves]

Everything in Rimworld is harder to make than people think. Certainly making a stone club or axe is easier than a bow. And if our colonists can fabricate solar panels from steel I think they can handle making a sharp stone axe.

As to the "why". Remember that in the next alpha Rimworld will have different scenarios with limited tech. You may start with tribals with no dropped/available steel at the start, but who are experienced in things like stone crafting. Additionally it because there's not much reason to craft stone melee weapons that I'm suggesting it be made easier to craft them so they may have more utility.

[milon]

But this also isn't the stone age.  This is way in the future where most people (likely) wouldn't be familiar with stone working.  It makes sense that they have to research it.

[Kegereneku]

Idea : Reverse the research requirement for Tribal-Scenario.

In those scenario you must research metal crafting.

[Vaporisor]

Idea : Reverse the research requirement for Tribal-Scenario.

In those scenario you must research metal crafting.

That actually is probably already in the works.  In the video I think about alpha 14 plans, I believe Tynan said tribal starts will have a different research tree.

[Boston]

Idea : Reverse the research requirement for Tribal-Scenario.

In those scenario you must research metal crafting.

Why wouldn't tribals know about metal working? I see tribals with metal weapons all the time.

[Songleaves]

Why wouldn't tribals know about metal working? I see tribals with metal weapons all the time.

Because metalworking with steel requires heat that can only be acquired with forges or other similar constructs, which presumably the tribals don't have access to.

[Boston]

Again, why not?

You can build a smelting furnace and a forge from mud and straw. You can burn charcoal as a heat source, which can be made from any hardwood tree. The actual ore itself can be literally scraped from the rock walls surrounding your camp, or, if we ignore that little nugget of lore-foolishness, found in any bog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron) or in certain types of clay from riverbanks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite).

To be entirely honest, I find it far more of a stretch to assume the tribals forgot how to work metal vs them retaining that knowledge. They would have to learn how to work stone "all over again", which is difficult at the best of times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ

[Songleaves]

Metalworking with primitive technology isn't something that you remember because it is far removed from modern metalworking techniques (and it will give you really crappy results). If you watch the video of iron smelting in Africa that you linked you will find that it is much more involved than you are giving credit.

The iron smelting they are doing in that vid: uses clay not mud (and it's pure clay from termite mounds), has a built in bellows, and they smelt the iron ore by mixing it with a special flux of local minerals (which I presume contains lime) which helps it smelt at lower than usual temperatures. The bloomery they make needs to be actively worked with a bellows for 10 hours.

Actually constructing a furnace like what they created which 1) doesn't break, and 2) achieves hot enough temperature to use, takes a lot of trial and error, especially when you must take into consideration the local materials. They bloomeries they produce are also one-time use only. Additionally if you don't control the temperatures properly and add in the correct amount of charcoal you will end up either not purifying the iron, or adding too much carbon to the iron making it extremely brittle and unworkable. Meanwhile, this is all ignoring the fact that the tribals don't have have tools (tongs to grab the hot metal, hammers hard enough to work the metal, an anvil) to actually work the metal.

If you stuck a bunch of random modern-day people on a desert island, they would learn how competently knapp before they ever learned to work metal.

[Boston]

The tribals aren't modern people. They have been on the planet for thousands of years. Long enough to, logically, learn how to work metal again. The Africans in the video I linked to have been using that process for thousands of years.

They also don't need to be smelting actual ore. You can in-game literally pull weapons-grade steel from the exposed rock walls of the canyon, just like the space-borne colonists do. If a civilization-ending event happened in the real world today, what do you think would be more likely: people would experiment with various forms of scrap metal (hint: leaf springs from vehicles, mower blades from lawnmowers, and steel from hand-tools makes for good steel), or would they go "TIME TO KNAP SOME FLINT, GUYS"?

Come on, now

Adding carbon to iron doesn't make it "brittle and unworkable" per se, it makes carbon steel. Steel is an alloy of iron, carbon, and certain other metals. The more carbon, the harder the steel (and more brittle, I will give you that) You can relax the amount of carbon in steel through tempering and quenching. Any weapon made "right" will be made from different grades of steel, anyways. High-carbon steel for the edge, low-carbon steel for the middle and the back

How do you know the tribals lack the necessary tools? We never see their settlements.The "unofficial" apprentice test for blacksmiths is to make their own tools. Many blacksmiths make all of their own tools, like different types of tongs, hammers, swage blocks, etc. Look at the tools the blacksmiths used in the video I linked to: the anvil is maybe 6 inches in diameter, the hammers are small and handmade, same with the tongs.

About the forging and smelting facilities: yeah, and? Look, here is a European version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3rjjpuhCLI

Looks quite the same, no? Before the development of the Bessemer Process in the Industrial Revolution, that above method was used pretty much worldwide, with some local modifications. It is called a "bloomery" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery). As for it taking "10 hours", I say again: yeah, and? What of it? Does it matter? The tribals have pretty large populations by the numbers they can throw at you in raids, which would give them a large workforce.

You haven't said anything yet to persuade me to believe tribals don't work their own metal.

[Songleaves]

The ancient city of Çatalhöyük was flourishing with 5-7,000 people roughly 6,000 years before the discovery of iron. The Bronze Age started roughly 2,000 years before iron smelting. The Great Pyramids of Giza were constructed over 1,000 years before iron. By the time the technology to smelt iron is produced you already have massive and advanced cultures and civilizations.

It's hard to describe what the steel is that they are dealing with. If you are considering small things like leaf springs that are somehow not rusted away into nothing then yes I agree they can bend them and do other simple metal working. But steel is incredibly strong, you cannot meaningfully work steel that isn't super thin without significantly heating it up. The furnaces you need to heat up steel enough to work it, those with blow pipes equipped with bellows, are the same furnaces you need to smelt iron.

It is a common misconception that you add carbon to iron to make steel. In fact iron doesn't generally exist in a pure form on earth, and the purification process leaves it with a ton of carbon in it. You get steel be removing the carbon from iron that's been processed from ore until the carbon only makes up around 1%. Because bloomeries are not hot enough to melt iron, the iron is instead purified by reacting the iron oxide with carbon monoxide, leaving just elemental iron and a lot of carbon contamination. If you are good at controlling the temperatures and adding the right amount of charcoal at the right times you can get pig iron, which is only contaminated with about 3-4% carbon, any more than that and you are left with a chunk of unusable, brittle iron. Further refining in a hearth can get you wrought iron. But you aren't going to produce meaningful amounts of steel until you create a new process entirely.

The tools they make are made using tools. My question is where did the original tools originate from? If the people on Rimworld found the tools then so be it. I can acknowledge that given the abundant steel in Rimworld that perhaps they saw that they could heat copper and tin and other metals if they got them hot enough, and perhaps that led to the idea that if they heat up the steel hot enough they can work it, so it is reasonable that perhaps the jump from working those metals to work steel was much shorter. However, in the meantime they still need edges, which rocks and knapping provide an immediate access to. In the meantime though it still took thousands of years for people to develop furnaces hot enough to work steel, and that was largely just a by product of people trying to make hotter furnaces for pottery.

As far as saying something to persuade you... how could I say anything to persuade you if you don't even read my posts? I used the term bloomery multiple times in my last post, I know what it is.

[Vaporisor]

Answer to some of the questions you have Songleaves, the first thing is to visualize what the galaxy looks like.  So thousands of years prior to the game, humanity spread out and started colonizing and worked their way more to the core of the galaxy.  At the core, stars are close enough to create an interstellar network.  Due to travel distance and communication delays (no FTL existing) any other colonization is isolated.  Some planets became heavily populated and urbanized.  Some highly technically advanced.  Some even transcending beyond what we define as humanity.

But the rimworlds also fell into disarray and collapse.  We dont hear or care about some ship where they crashed into paradise, we have a survival story on a planet that fell due to say nuclear war, terraforming issue, natural disaster, etc.  The surface of the planets in game are littered with ruins.  Hence the plasteel, compact machinery, and regular steel.  They are not "mining" in traditional sense, but instead I view it as more of a collecting of rubble or getting into structures long since claimed by the environment and buried.  Tools would exist around, relics, antiques and perhaps even revered for their greatest craftsmen.

So in that aspect, steel forging isn't a long shot if we can get a proper furnace.  It just doesn't need to be up to smelter to due so for the primitives.  But that said even reforging is a difficult process vs stone tools for a more primitive or nomadic culture.  The colonists are just average joes.  Most people would be much less hard pressed to tie a rock to a stick vs trying to build a forge if stranded.  Even a wood forge.  It would take trial and error to figure out how to make the clay or stone/steel brickwork in a way that functions.