workbench available too late

[fiery trench]

The workbench really ought to be available to craft much earlier, particularly because the bicycle needs it to be crafted.

Also, why is the forge available so early when bronze items are so far away from being capable of crafting? It seems like the workbench ought to be where the forge is in workstation progression.

[warm crown]

forge is obtainable super early, but to make "early" game tools, you need either enough iron to skip the step to an iron anvil, or TONS of bronze which only provides a marginal upgrade over mid tier scrap tools, I believe it would be better to have some form of rock/primitive anvil that allows you to make bronze tools instead of a full bronze anvil, which will let players to properly utilize the tool tier, (the rock anvil will allow SOME bronze crafting items, simpler bronze tools/items that dont require more precise smithing.

the bicycle in my opinion should be hand craftable as apposed to requiring the workbench.

[fiery trench]

yah the other option is to just make the bike not need the workbench

and bronze gear is soooo far away for me on crafting, it's rather ridiculous that I can make bronze bars weeks before I can do anything with them

[rose hazel]

Agree about the workbench!!! It should be available earlier, plz. I have bicycle and minibike parts unlocked but the workbench is not even close.

[shy schooner]

The same happened in our MP session. But you can still use the research table to create the required books for the workbench.

[sharp kestrel]

The research table being a thing still require 150 books scrapped to make the 30 required one for the workbench. I am day 22 and still do not have one yet. (and it is fine)

It should be easier in MP if people go around and only one read all the books ^^

[lime cape]

Idk why you say bronze is a marginal upgrade over scrap, because bronze has the same stats as vanilla iron 👀

[shy schooner]

Patience. I didn't have a workbench until day 50 in my playthrough.
Next time I will be faster, of course. Many players compare this mod with other mods. But the progress in most other mods is just way too fast.

[sharp kestrel]

I am not complaining or comparing, it is fine by me.

Also depends of the overhaul ^^

[fiery trench]

it's not about patience really- it's about making sense. I should be able to make the tier 1 vehicle when it becomes available, and not have to wait until I have motorcycles unlocked. It defeats the entire purpose of a progression path in that case.

[lime cape]

well what if bicycle was craftable without workbench

[shy schooner]

Different story. You should be able to put bike pieces together without a workbench. Maybe craft the pieces in the forge.

As crafting the chassis isn't easy without a tool.

[fiery trench]

that would definitely make sense, especially considering they're able to be put together by hand irl too

in the same vein, it seems like there's a lot of pressure to use the research station to pump out 'forge ahead' books to unlock workstations, in particular the workbench, in lieu of other options that a player would otherwise like to pursue like weapons/item crafting. Perhaps making a lower-tiered workbench in the same way you have tiers of forges and workstation mods could be similarly applied to workbenches.

[shy schooner]

Is there anything else next to the bicycle that puts this pressure?

[fiery trench]

basic mods for tools immediately comes to mind

[warm crown]

Well. If your scrapping books that you know you’ll never need. You end up with enough to skip it

Pretty easily too

[lime cape]

bloody hell I got some people saying books are too slow and some saying theyre too fast

[fiery trench]

i think theyre saying that the loot people get often overshadows their crafting level

like i have a hunting knife and i'm a ways out yet of being able to craft anything beyond bone. my friend has some iron knucks and a scrap sledge, both looted. We're a wayyyys away from crafting anything other than primitive atm

[warm crown]

I focus on crafting progression, and almost always use temporary bases, constantly swapping from town to town once each place’s more notable POI’s are looted. Getting through 3+ crack a books early with same marginal point expenditure into looting. Can net you DOZENS of skill papers, and with a cost of only 3 for 1 tools digest, you can very VERY quickly pass the bronze stage and skip to the far superior iron tools. Which would anyway be your main staple for most of the mid-late game anyway.

The issue is, you have to go out of your way to get access to bronze. Unlike iron which is abundant when salvaging 95% of the random junk you can find around. Wrenching a few dozen cars and busted vending machines can net you more iron (and even early steel) than spending a few hours swinging away at ores. (Which also require advance crucibles and whatnot to make steel anyway)

So my point is, it’s the outright availability of bronze which is the issue. As its material requirement is obtainable solely by mining, and the RNG of scrap. You get almost nothing from smelting scrap and you’re just better off preparing for iron instead.

[lime cape]

damn I added so much shit to make bronze viable

[warm crown]

I know. And don’t get me wrong I LOVE the bronze stuff. It’s just in this weird middle ground of being difficult to gather compared to the simply better iron. And too expensive once gathered to justify the time expended.

[lime cape]

well with iron you need coal at least so there's that

argh

[warm crown]

There is the one POI which isn’t too uncommon which has a rather large pile of coal just sitting outside, and TONS more inside

Again, it’s the entire availability of bronze which hampers its viability

[fiery trench]

hm i didnt think of just beelining it to iron tools bc i assumed it needed a workbench to craft

apparently it still needs lvl25 in workstations to do, so it's not far off from just needing a workbench
I also dont understand how u got to iron tools in just 3 bookstores. Do you have xp over 100% or something?

[devout root]

No shot I could skip to Iron tools on my Insane/Sprint playthrough. Everything I could spare went into survival and the ability to kill. My progression was kinda inverted in that I have a good wooden bow, kiln unlocked to be able to fortify with bricks, before I could craft bronze tools. For me bronze felt so far off compared to scrap.

Also going into cities to loot crack a books was far to dangerous for a permadeath type run

[shy schooner]

It's not possible to optimize for all. There are players who like to rush. Of course they progress way faster if they loot every book store on the map, scrap all vending machines etc. to get high tier resources like steel. Others, like me, like to explore. I completely cleared 2 smaller towns, tons of wilderness POIs, but didn't see any bookstore yet. I am far away from being able to build bronze tools. Also I don't have enough resources to build them. And there are people who like mining, building etc.

Each player type would tell you completely different aspects where progress needs to be faster.

[fiery trench]

i'm not saying progress ought to be faster really, just aligned with other aspects of progression. Like, having a forge available around the time you need to use it to make things, etc. I had a forge way before I could use it to make anything from it, and I have simple recipes that need a workbench that's way far off. There just seems to be a rather mismatched alignment of progression

[shy schooner]

Mods are upgrades to items to make them more efficient. But items also work without. So, imo there is no urgent need to be able to craft them from the beginning.

[fiery trench]

There’s no urgent need at any time with that logic. Why even have them in the game in that case?

[shy schooner]

As an improvement later on for continuous progression.

[fiery trench]

That’s why the mods have different recipes that require different materials if they want to limit when you should make them. The simple mods are intended to be used early.

[unique wharf]

so i was talking about this in my playthrough with a few friends. it is kinda crazy how the workbench is needed for simple things like bicycles but at the same time, it felt rewarding to get one workbench at your base. you have to continue beating up the paper boxes

[tawdry cairn]

yea the mainpoint in almost all the talks about "workbench earlier" is the bicycle

and we do agree on that

thats why redbeard is thinking about where else to ad the assembly for it

[shy schooner]

Imo crafting the pieces in the forge could make sense. And to put everything together you don't need any extra tools.

[tawdry cairn]

yes that too came up

[modest oar]

for bronze ingots we need the ceramic crucible, for stel the advanced, maybe for iron a "normal" crucible that requires bronze ingots to be made will fix the iron being available too early problem
other idea: make coal mineable properly by at least a bronze pickaxe, stone only gives extremely few coal

[tawdry cairn]

thats to much crucible crafting no? they are very expensive to craft but the progression from bronze to iron / iron to steel does not really feel long enough to justify another crucible ? i agree that it would be a way to gate things though

the idea to softlock mining progression behind tool material seems viable though

stone/scrap for up to bronze, bronze for iron, steel for the higher tiers

that would make bronze a milestone too

[modest oar]

but iron can be atm easily obtained by smelting scrap :/

[tawdry cairn]

if you have coal to burn yes, but coal would fall into iron tier ores

so you would need bronze tools to mine notable amounts of coal

ofc nothing would prevent you from bruteforcing things by mining coal with a stone pick for maybe 1/5th of the yield

you could still get the ores and make iron bars (if no iron tier crucible) but it would a LOT of effort

[modest oar]

coal is imo almost abundant through being readily available in forest biome, if it got moved to at least snow ....

on the bicycle part, if we could repair or craft a shopping cart to push around before we got the bike i think most people would be very happy

[tawdry cairn]

yes and something like that was talked about

like many many other things xD

but time is limited :\

and 1.0 standing in the room

it´s safer to add things only after updating to 1.0

[modest oar]

bronze could be made better than iron, its a bit of a read but interesting, found on reddit
Bronze is better than iron. Mostly.

See, Bronze is harder than Iron which means that if you're going to be hammering at someone's armor all day long, you want a bronze sword and not an iron sword because your iron sword is going to dull.

Bronze is made up of copper and tin and both of those melt at much lower temperatures than iron. Early metalworking would have trouble reaching the temperatures necessary to melt iron. Melting copper, however, was much easier. That's why the bronze age comes first.

From copper work it is a short step to bronze, since all you have to do is add tin.

When fire technology reaches the point at which iron melts metal workers discover that cast iron is pretty brittle stuff. While iron is abundant, if you had the choice between Bronze and Cast Iron you'd choose Bronze every time. Indeed, the Romans did exactly that -- their officers carried bronze swords while the average solider got an iron one.

But iron was common stuff and not everything that one makes with metal needs to survive on a battlefield. Once iron work became possible -- once metal workers could sustain the high temperatures needed to work the stuff -- iron began to supplant bronze for more common uses. While more difficult to work, the ease of finding it made it more economical.

From there it is just a matter of volume. Bronze was better stuff but the ubiquity of iron made iron working a widespread trade which, like most trades, saw steady improvement. As iron working technology got better the product it produced did as well, first catching up to Bronze and then surpassing it. Cast iron gave way to wrought and then forged iron and finally steel.

[fiery trench]

the last bit about cast iron isn't entirely accurate - iron from bloomeries is notoriously difficult to work with, though the carbon is usually very low (wrought iron). The start of the industrialization process of making steel produced cast-iron before being further refined into steel through a second process to remove the carbon. If we want to get more realistic with steel crafting, we would need things like blast furnaces and flux materials to draw out the impurities often added through the initial smelting process.

[lime cape]

interesting read, thx

[warm crown]

Although early iron was worse than the established bronze, iron was better in regard to holding an edge, even against how brittle it could be at times.
While bronze blades weapons would last you longer, they also needed substantially more maintenance to hold sharp edges when compared to iron.

So it’s a bit of a trade off. Durability over damage.

[fiery trench]

here are a few videos if you're interested in learning more about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E__zqy6xcw

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF2ClQze0p8

[shrewd nova]

perhaps make some things give bronze instead of iron? like scrap metal should give bronze and a lil bit of iron or something

[lime cape]

the idea is scrap metal is assorted metal you find around the place, but because bronze is not used in modern times i thought it wouldnt make sense for scrap to return bronze

[shrewd nova]

what i mean is that scrap metal is usually a hunk of twisted metal so treat it like a loot box of metal in that you can get any metal from it just the higher tier metals are rarer

[lime cape]

it already does that, it just doesnt include bronze

[shrewd nova]

oh it does? but why not bronze? isnt bronze used in some stuff? or am i thinking brass?

[red frigate]

Bronze is a very common bushing material in modern day. It's used in car transmissions and higher end power tools for that purpose.

Specifically because it's porous enough that the metal can be impregnated with oil to create self lubricating bushings

Look up oilite bronze for an example, it's awesome stuff

[shrewd nova]

there ya go a reason bronze can be gotten from scrap

[eternal pagoda]

I am in my first playthrough, 8k pregen map, spawned in woods but managed to find city with ~40 POIs. There were some cement mixers / workbenches there but I got just like halfway towards workbench. It was clear that for reasonable exploration / getting to another city, I would need at least a bicycle. I had to harvest almost all paper boxes and other paper stuff to get enough paper to craft forge-aheads to reach workstation / bicycle.

[red frigate]

you'll want to restart.

Pregens dont have the proper stuff with the mod

you'll need to make a new RWG map

[eternal pagoda]

Oh no, I managed to take over abandoned trader's compound and spent bazillion of cobblestone to make it zombieproof. Well, at least I built some know-how 😃

[severe quail]

The books are perfect, the beautiful thing about this is the slow progression, and also with sense, because if something like this happened, who knew how to do all those things in 20 days? ... The only thing it lacks in my opinion is Fire 🙂

[shy schooner]

I also like the fire mod.
Would even make sense to have campfires spread fire in case they are placed on top of or next to wood.
But this can be really dangerous, especially as upgrading your base beyond wood is really expensive here.

[lime cape]

gotta be honest i just find the fire mod too janky to use it