[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:1226, topic:5570”]Yeah, I didn’t touch the small kiln. It’s more efficient than the big one, because it requires more progress in game (requires a welder).
Thought that 48 rocks is quite a fortune, now that I think about it. You probably won’t get that much without burning a house and picking the remains (which is boring and tedious).
I think it may be a good idea to make it into a charcoal burning clamp. Clamp is basically a stack of wood covered in earth, then lit. Those are less efficient than proper kilns, but don’t require rocks. Since my version of kiln is very inefficient, it would make a bit more sense.
Though then it would be slightly unrealistic, because clamp is built by stacking wood and covering it, not by building a clamp and filling it. Currently it’s not possible to build furniture on tiles with items. And I’d like to retain the ability to fill the kiln with whatever and not just specific items (ie. all wood, not just logs).
What do you think?[/quote]
If you’ve ever played the TerraFirmaCraft Minecraft mod, that’s actually exactly how you make charcoal there. I think it was the historical method, too, and I agree with KA101 on the “build the clamp and then fill it” workaround being close enough to reality for game purposes.
As for the small kiln requiring a welder: this isn’t entirely true. If you have a low-end Electronics book, you can increase a soldering iron’s battery capacity and use it instead–maybe two soldering irons would also work. It’s less battery-efficient and requires more charge than a soldering iron even has by default (hence needing increased capacity or at least two soldering irons), but it’ll get you a kiln without a welder. I actually did this in my most recent game. Granted, this probably doesn’t actually change things. Sure, the small kiln is more efficient, but I don’t think its balancing factor is “requires a welder” so much as it is “harder on your sanity.” If you live near a forest, the efficiency loss with the stationary kiln is a non-issue in the present game barring extreme situations like “I plan on living in the same place for a few hundred in-game years.”
As for rock-picking being tedious, this is true, but I also did it in my most recent game in order to build a fireplace in the evac shelter I holed up in, since getting Construction 5 to build a wood stove is an even bigger pain in the ass than rock-picking. I didn’t even burn a house down for it; I just gathered rocks as I traveled through field tiles. That said, if smashing up items that would reasonably have a lot of rocks in them (like fireplaces you find in houses that are not in a position where you want to live) produced a large amount of usable rocks, that’d probably be a handy workaround. Also, what about bricks as an alternative for people with the good fortune to live by a river? Rivers are awesome. I just wish you could live by a river and a forest without getting eggs laid in you.
(Another alternative recipe for the standing kiln: three or more full-sized metal tanks and a hacksaw, seeing as the small kiln is made from a small metal tank. Granted, since full-sized metal tanks are perhaps even more readily available by way of just tearing gas tanks out of vehicles, this could make the standing kiln even easier to make compared to the portable one.)
Oh, and on the blunt weapon thing: I can think of two balancing factors here. One, there’s the thing we already have, which is the thing where decent blunt improvised weapons are relatively available. The other thing is that blunt weapons give less of a shit about armour, which is partly represented by things like blunt weapons making mi-go encounters an unintentionally hilarious game of clubbing the shit out of a pinata full of mutagen fodder while it spouts nonsensical phrases.