![]() ![]() At best, a small chunk of iron could be heated until it was soft and then gradually hammered into shape. The high melting point of iron is far unobtainable with available technology. This casting process can be easily used to mass produce objects like large pots, statues, plating, church bells, etc. Copper (for certain applications), bronze, and the other metals mentioned above can be easily melted down into liquid form and poured into a wax mold of a desired shape and left to cool. Moreover, we need to make a distinction between “Casting” and “Forging” metal. New techniques had to be developed to process it. Using a typical smelter suitable for other metals would result in an unusable product. Compared to the other seven metals of known antiquity: Copper: 1084☌, Gold: 1064☌, Silver: 962☌, Lead: 327 C, Tin: 232☌, Mercury: -38.9☌, we can see that iron is a lot more difficult to process than the other known metals at the time. Iron has a melting point of 1538☌ (2800☏ ). With international trade breaking down, societies were desperate enough to give iron-working (an otherwise useless waste product at the time) a chance. Then the bronze age collapse happened in the 12th century BC. For geological reasons tin and copper tend to not be located in the same region, so advanced trade networks formed. ![]() Iron was seen as a nuisance whose presence would ruin a good batch of copper and would result in a spongy waste product. They eventually discovered how to make bronze using arsenic and later a much less toxic process with tin alloys. So a very abridged story of early human history is that humans discovered copper tools. And the scale of logistics, pricing, and scope of metalworking is a bit off as well.īut I’ll make this post to delve into the details of what’s missing and let the reader decide how much of it would benefit the game. The way we smelt iron ore doesn’t make sense either. Unless this timeframe was the mid-16th century, the way we build stuff in-game out of iron ingots (like using a few hundred bars to make a statue) makes zero sense. Almost every genre from RTS games, survival games, city-builder games, and so forth tend to gloss over an inconvenient truth about Western medieval settings: cast iron hasn’t been invented yet… ![]()
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