Allow direct crafting from stone for certain items

[Mikhail Reign]

But they are sweet to make a functional solar panel from steel, or make an assault rifle on a bench they bashed together in less then a day.

[Boston]

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.

Yep, humanity has been capable of some pretty amazing things, even back during the Stone Ages. Never said anything different.

I, for those who don't already know, have majorissues with the "compacted steel" we see in-game, for many of the reasons we see in this thread. However, until (if) that gets changed, the only source of metal we have in game is steel, exposed to the elements for god-knows how long, that is capable of being worked in a wood-powered forge. Not charcoal, or coal, but regular firewood.

-shrugs- I just take it as I see it.

They could always be case-hardening the iron they make. Turn it into hard-carbon steel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-hardening). Take some bars of the softer wrought iron, twist them together with bars of steel, and forge-weld them together. Boom, pattern-welding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_welding)

Using a composite of iron and steel together is how most weapons were made until crucible steel was developed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel), and it is cheaper and easier besides. Soft iron for the center and back, for flexibility and shock-absorption, and steel for the edge for sharpness.

I dunno, I just find it a huuuuggggggeeeeeee stretch for survivors of a post-apocalyptic world to jump straight to flint-knapping as soon as they lose technology. Again, if something happened to us today, and we lost our technology base, what  would you do first: pick up some rocks and try to make an edge off them, or look at the world around you, think, "hey, the ancients made tons of stuff from this metal, let's take a look at it", and try to make a knife by filing an edge on a thin piece of scrap metal?

Also, note that the tribals will never (at least, I have never seen anything else) have weapons that have a lot of steel, like swords. Instead, they have weapons that usually take less steel (and more iron), and can be made relatively easily, with less training: arrows, knives, spears. Those weapons can be made mostly from wrought iron, with steel for the cutting edges. That is traditionally how those weapons were made, and why they were so common in real life.

I just don't see any real reason for tribals to use stone weapons. Any idiot can pick up a pointy bit of metal and lash it to a handle, and there is a lot of metal in Rimworld.

I think part of the problem is that when people read "tribal" they think of Native Americans, which, granted, are a big influence on the Tribes of Rimworld. But, don't forget, "tribe" is a system of government, not a cultural/technological level. The Vikings were tribal, the Scots were tribal, ALL of non-Hellenic/Classical Europe was tribal, from the Stone Ages up to the early Medieval period. Almost all, if not most of Africa, was, and still is, tribal.

Tribalism was/is arguably the most common "form of government" in the world. Just because someone is a "tribal" doesn't mean they are primitive, or less-technologically advanced than someone who isn't a tribal. The Native Americans dropped bows and stone tools almost as soon as they could get firearms and iron. They even learned how to work iron and steel by themselves. And even then, certain Native groups learned to work copper and bronze all on their own.

[Mikhail Reign]

Nah they have swords. I've pulled a few iron longswords from tribals. Plasteal too

[hwfanatic]

Back on topic, I'm not sure you'd want to craft stone weapons anyway. Cool down and sharp damage modifiers are rather unfavorable.

[b0rsuk]

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.

Our earliest ancestors didn't have the concept of metalworking. Metal needs to smelted from ore. Stone is readily available. Rimworld colonists all come from technologically advanced societies, used to working in metal, not stone.

As for tools needed... note the initial 3 colonists are not wounded. Presumably they had a little time to gather at least the 5500 A.D. equivalents of saw and hammer and carry them to escape pods. Note they drop down with steel, wood, components, medicine, weapons, and a whole bunch of survival rations. I doubt it all dropped down in the same spot as them by chance, no, they prepared it before the planetfall.

They can also have snapshots of the 5500 Wikipedia at least. It may not be detailed enough to start production, but enough to get people going in the right direction.

It would probably make more sense to get the majority of steel from deconstructing ruins and derelict spaceships, but Tynan is unwilling to let some Dwarf Fortress-isms go. I'm not saying steel is directly mined in DF, but that it comes from rocks that are mined, like most resources in Rimworld. That's a bit of lazy design - he didn't spend much time rethinking things.

As for the tribes - they are described as "neolithic".

[Boston]

As for the tribes - they are described as "neolithic".

And, yet, they use metal weapons (and, presumably by proxy, metal tools) all the time. If they make use of metal, then they are not neolithic.

Of course, Rimworld is the game that labels an arming sword and a gladius as "neolithic" weapons . One is Classical, and the other is Late Medieval/Early Modern.

With regards to the "tools" argument, specifically the "tribals don't have metalworking tools" argument, I can bring up the fact that, in-game, the colonists don't exactly have tools, either . Nope, according to that brand of logic, the colonists cut down trees, mine rock and hammer things together by punching them, and use workbenches by staring intently at the project in question until it finishes itself

It is also important to note that of all the "types" of stone available in Rimworld (granite, marble, slate, sandstone and limestone), only slate would be suitable for cutting edges. And, even then, it isn't knapped.  There are no knapp-able stone types in Rimworld.

I still shake my head in bemusement whenever I see some of the weapons in this game.

[b0rsuk]

And, yet, they use metal weapons (and, presumably by proxy, metal tools) all the time. If they make use of metal, then they are not neolithic.

It's one of my personal annoyances that tribes in the game are treated in such a dismissive manner. The only thing they wear is generic 'tribalwear', and - despite being good crafters on average - their clothes are crap. It's like they are modelled after steoretypical cavemen and The Flintstones.

[Boston]

I know, right?

Their clothing is junk, their weapons tend to be junk, when in "reality", they should have the most reason to make decent tools, weapons and clothing, considering how they need them for survival.

Even if they were based totally on Neolithic peoples, Neolithic peoples didn't wear Flintstones-style furs and such. They wore trousers, shirts, jackets, shoes, etc, all things that we would be able to recognize as clothing, made from leather, wool, linen, etc.

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Given that stone-blocks have to be unlocked through research, creating stone-shanks, clubs, and the like should really utilize unprocessed stone I agree.
We need super low barriers to entry to the weakest weapons otherwise they'll never get used.