Hardcore metalurgist here (please god someone listen, im sacrificing alot of carpel tunnels i could spend on Minecraft)
Iron, with the addion of anything, but most prominantly carbon, makes steel.
When carbon steel is heated up, it forms iron carbide. This breaks down if its not cooled quickly, though additions of small amounts of chromium lengthen that time up, and large amounts taint the steel with the formation of lesser carbides.
Cooling freezes these carbides molecularly.
Carbon levels are measured in weight. 0.6% is common for a knife, 0.95% is a file. At least now. In the old days people took better care of their tresures of iron and alloy, and they were made with much higher carbon levels.
One carbon bonds to three iron atoms, and the weight of carbon in iron carbide, i believe is about 1 of sixteen. Every one percent carbon makes 16% iron carbide.
Cast iron is extremely high in carbon, as well as heavily crystalized and quite weak therin. It is not to be hardened, and can become explosive hardening in water, for reasons hard to explain... due to that iron carbide has a lower density then iron and carbon seperate, and in most carbon steels, the hardness is on the surface.
Pig iron contains even more carbon, and a large amount of silicon. It extremely weak.
Though the true strength of steel is its forgemaster. One made could make a brittle file from one percent, another man could make a good knife. The soul of the steel.
Hardcore metalurgist here (please god someone listen, im sacrificing alot of carpel tunnels i could spend on Minecraft)
thanks Dirge, you rocked my world
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Gladosexe »
(this is a public service message brought to you by the PAIIWTCLLPWTCD (people against immature idiots who think creepers look like penises when they clearly dont)
Hardcore metalurgist here (please god someone listen, im sacrificing alot of carpel tunnels i could spend on Minecraft)
Iron, with the addion of anything, but most prominantly carbon, makes steel.
When carbon steel is heated up, it forms iron carbide. This breaks down if its not cooled quickly, though additions of small amounts of chromium lengthen that time up, and large amounts taint the steel with the formation of lesser carbides.
Cooling freezes these carbides molecularly.
Carbon levels are measured in weight. 0.6% is common for a knife, 0.95% is a file. At least now. In the old days people took better care of their tresures of iron and alloy, and they were made with much higher carbon levels.
One carbon bonds to three iron atoms, and the weight of carbon in iron carbide, i believe is about 1 of sixteen. Every one percent carbon makes 16% iron carbide.
Cast iron is extremely high in carbon, as well as heavily crystalized and quite weak therin. It is not to be hardened, and can become explosive hardening in water, for reasons hard to explain... due to that iron carbide has a lower density then iron and carbon seperate, and in most carbon steels, the hardness is on the surface.
Pig iron contains even more carbon, and a large amount of silicon. It extremely weak.
Though the true strength of steel is its forgemaster. One made could make a brittle file from one percent, another man could make a good knife. The soul of the steel.
This just makes me wish I was a blacksmith. . . Old school, makin' it with hammers and those air pumps. Oh how the mind longs for it. . .
One thing though. Could the smelted iron in MC be counted as steel?
:smile.gif:
Well, i will help you in both ways.
Firstly, technicly, no. The furnace is too small to make steel conventionaly, though it you are a pyromaster, you can figure out ways to get fire ridiculously, brick-meltingly hot, though ive only managed to melt iron and rust, amongst a buncha lesser things. With wood charcoal none-the-less.
See, air is only 20% oxygen, and oxygen is heavier than carbon, and it takes 2 oxygen for each carbon... thats 93 degrees for every 100 air is preheated. Maybe just a wood pitfire and an old radiater.
a one-yard fire with coal, blown sufficiently can reach 4000f, enough to turn iron to soup. Coal, under these heat, at least to a degree turns to coke fuel and burns hotter. with pre-heating, you can boil iron in your back yard. In theory, just like my theroretical devices of destruction, weight destruction, and mass destruction (old, olde, ancient, primeval, or maims and kills)
BTW, if you want to get a fire going faster, toss in a few handfuls of miracle grow. its an oxidizer. Might be able to mix it with diesel. Wont make a bomb. Thats a different fertilizer.
Now, in honest truth, even in minecraft, it is possible to make steel in that thing, but its a bit of a beast. One, it'll turn to a liquid, and ya have to blow air up from under a couple tons of steel. you need alot of furnace insulation and a high-torque, low-output pump, or a clydesdale.
For what its worth, lets call it steel. Worst case, the iron will be carburized and be simply a realy... chunky steel.
for what its worth, furnace insulation is how i got that heat. I unsulated it with dirt, which carbon and sand, turned to air-bubbled silicon. Magestic. If you become a blacksmith, you gotta learn to love dirt. You gotta take the sweat off ya with dry, dusty earth, and it gives you a loam smell, which people can barely critiqe.
You can make rocks into swords. If you can become dirt, you can become king of the earths beneath your feet.
I designed a high volume pump you might like. its a box, with a solid thin piston in it. Its enclosed on both ends, and both in the instroke and outstroke blows. size from a foot to a yard.
And to summarize for all:
I would say.... yes, steel.
I find this thread quite interesting, I love to learn new things, and metallurgic is really interesting.
OT: Maybe make the aluminum tools be recyclable. Maybe get scraps once they break, and 3 or 4 scraps can be crafted into large scraps and this smelted back into aluminum.
You know what the koolest thing about everything you just said Dirge? I understood it.
Quote from Tuqui »
I find this thread quite interesting, I love to learn new things, and metallurgic is really interesting.
OT: Maybe make the aluminum tools be recyclable. Maybe get scraps once they break, and 3 or 4 scraps can be crafted into large scraps and this smelted back into aluminum.
That would definetly convince me to mine with aluminum instead of steel/iron (since some folks are gonna call it iron anyway). But I'm iffy about how durable aluminum actually is. I think it should just be for the other crafts like someone else said (I do that a lot, forget peeps names. . .). Aluminum buckets, compasses, and minecarts, that there is freeing up a lot of iron for steel tools.
Here's another question for the metalurgist! How come I can crush an aluminum can with my hands but it is really hard to for me to dent a car? Does that got something to do with the carbons too?
I think Steel is higher on the priority list (smelting iron with coal would probably net steel), then copper for some sort of electrical system or perhaps with tin to make bronze, then perhaps aluminum.
However, i think the whole electrolysis process would need some sort of special forge that uses electricity or something.
I'd much rather see an increase in uses for the already existing materials (gold for example) before we start adding new ones...
i'll second that opinion as well.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Gladosexe »
(this is a public service message brought to you by the PAIIWTCLLPWTCD (people against immature idiots who think creepers look like penises when they clearly dont)
I don't really see the point of adding too many different types of materials, especially when they're so similar to ones already in the game. I'd much rather see an increase in uses for the already existing materials (gold for example) before we start adding new ones and eventually end up with a complicated mess of lots of stuff with only a few uses for each one.
So far we have five different ores, two are commonly used and the other three are rare and have limited uses. Out of the two commonly used ores one is used as fuel, the other, iron, has way too many uses. It is an overused metal. Adding a second common utility metal would not over complicate anything; it will give each of the metals distinct uses. e.g. iron for tools and aluminum for minecart tracks.
Quote from foszae »
a couple things:
iron is hardly a rare metal. you can find it sticking out above ground, and the average cave system is positively riddled with it. try spelunking instead of branch-mining and you'll have iron overflowing. oh, and try stone tools for general digging. if you just chew up iron tools on endless empty corridors (a la branches), you'll run out of iron pretty fast. i know, not the way people like to mine, but...
Yeah... except that's not nearly enough for large scale minecart tracks. Anyway you slice it it is a pain in the ass to acquire the amount of iron needed for minecart tracks. Plus the prohibitive cost of minecart tracks stop you from using iron tools (as you stated), that is stupid. Why do we have to use shitty tools all the time? Another metal to construct minecart tracks with make high quality tools within the reach of common man.
the other thing. minecraft is sort of a fantasy game people. notice how your weapons are swords and bows? primitive smelting that produces iron but not steel? minecarts instead of bucketwheel excavators and longwall grinders? aluminum is a modern technological metal. you may as well ask to mine uranium and get a nuclear powered furnace
Yet we can make glass, powered minecarts, and TNT.
For all you steel vs iron people:
If steel was introduced into minecraft you would basically be putting iron ingots through another furnace, then what purpose would iron serve? It would just be a useless middleman.
There are three resources people are going to fight over in SMP, coal, iron, and diamond. Coal has two uses, smelting and torches. Everyone is going to need torches, but with four torches per coal it shouldn't be a problem. Wood can also be used for smelting, the poorer class will be using wood while the upper class will be using coal. Coal will have a high demand, but it is abundant enough that there won't be a shortage. There will be a shortage of diamond on the other hand. Everyone will want diamond tools, this high demand will drive costs very high. Only the rich or the people with established mining operations will be able to afford diamond tools, and in turn, mine obsidian. I predict that obsidian trading will be a very lucrative business given the high value of obsidian and the high starting costs. Iron will also have high demand. The supply of iron will fall short of this demand however. In an SMP environment large quantities of iron will be difficult to come by, as the best way to find them is exploring caves. If some kind of land ownership thing is implemented then cave exploration will be near impossible. If land ownership is not implemented then almost every square inch of cave will be explored long before you arrive. Along with being used in buckets and minecart tracks everybody will need an iron pick to mine out the higher tiers of ores. The ridiculous resulting price will make minecart systems unattainable.
Aluminum will alleviate these problems. While Common Joe will have little use for aluminum he will mine a lot of it, and sell it to the shops. Lord Bob on the other hand will needs lots of aluminum to connect his towns together by minecart. If aluminum was not available to build minecart tracks Lord Bob would quite literally have to drain the local economy dry of iron to fuel his project. Because Lord Bob does not have to do this Common Joe can trade his aluminum in for nice shiny iron tools, and everyone wins.
I think that the only metal ore deposits right near the surface should be copper and tin. You find copper and start using copper tools, tin buckets etc. Then you start smelting the copper to make bronze implements. Eventually you dig deep enough to find iron and start using that. Going right down to the bottem you work up to diamonds and gold.
The copper would be useful in many things that require iron and take the burden off it. It would be an inferior substitute but still useful. I think that the difficulty in processing ores into aluminum makes it too much of a stretch for the "man stranded on a fantasy island" thing. Even if it's anachronistic as I'd like it to be, aluminum is too much.
Hrm, well, im not going to say thats a bad idea, since oncely, it follows history, but copper and tin are actualy rare, just take much less heat to 'reduce' from ore. Iron makes for 5% of the earths crust, or so ive heard, whereas copper is somewhere in the... sub-one thats for dang sure. I'd guess in the .1 to .01 region myself.
Anyway, just some info.
For ref, the temp to refine iron well is the distance past white hot, that is the distance between red hot and white hot. Red hot, white hot, another step and thats iron. The game should make it a coal-only opereration.
Well, I'm getting in on this post a little late, but I want to put my voice in on a few more ore sources and Aluminium (or bauxite ore actually) is one of the ones I would like to see added. I would never use Aluminium for a tool but I would use it as part of a building design - for a different visual effect.
Iron, with the addion of anything, but most prominantly carbon, makes steel.
When carbon steel is heated up, it forms iron carbide. This breaks down if its not cooled quickly, though additions of small amounts of chromium lengthen that time up, and large amounts taint the steel with the formation of lesser carbides.
Cooling freezes these carbides molecularly.
Carbon levels are measured in weight. 0.6% is common for a knife, 0.95% is a file. At least now. In the old days people took better care of their tresures of iron and alloy, and they were made with much higher carbon levels.
One carbon bonds to three iron atoms, and the weight of carbon in iron carbide, i believe is about 1 of sixteen. Every one percent carbon makes 16% iron carbide.
Cast iron is extremely high in carbon, as well as heavily crystalized and quite weak therin. It is not to be hardened, and can become explosive hardening in water, for reasons hard to explain... due to that iron carbide has a lower density then iron and carbon seperate, and in most carbon steels, the hardness is on the surface.
Pig iron contains even more carbon, and a large amount of silicon. It extremely weak.
Though the true strength of steel is its forgemaster. One made could make a brittle file from one percent, another man could make a good knife. The soul of the steel.
Echos Steel
Night and Moon
thanks Dirge, you rocked my world
This just makes me wish I was a blacksmith. . . Old school, makin' it with hammers and those air pumps. Oh how the mind longs for it. . .
One thing though. Could the smelted iron in MC be counted as steel?
Well, i will help you in both ways.
Firstly, technicly, no. The furnace is too small to make steel conventionaly, though it you are a pyromaster, you can figure out ways to get fire ridiculously, brick-meltingly hot, though ive only managed to melt iron and rust, amongst a buncha lesser things. With wood charcoal none-the-less.
See, air is only 20% oxygen, and oxygen is heavier than carbon, and it takes 2 oxygen for each carbon... thats 93 degrees for every 100 air is preheated. Maybe just a wood pitfire and an old radiater.
a one-yard fire with coal, blown sufficiently can reach 4000f, enough to turn iron to soup. Coal, under these heat, at least to a degree turns to coke fuel and burns hotter. with pre-heating, you can boil iron in your back yard. In theory, just like my theroretical devices of destruction, weight destruction, and mass destruction (old, olde, ancient, primeval, or maims and kills)
BTW, if you want to get a fire going faster, toss in a few handfuls of miracle grow. its an oxidizer. Might be able to mix it with diesel. Wont make a bomb. Thats a different fertilizer.
Now, in honest truth, even in minecraft, it is possible to make steel in that thing, but its a bit of a beast. One, it'll turn to a liquid, and ya have to blow air up from under a couple tons of steel. you need alot of furnace insulation and a high-torque, low-output pump, or a clydesdale.
For what its worth, lets call it steel. Worst case, the iron will be carburized and be simply a realy... chunky steel.
for what its worth, furnace insulation is how i got that heat. I unsulated it with dirt, which carbon and sand, turned to air-bubbled silicon. Magestic. If you become a blacksmith, you gotta learn to love dirt. You gotta take the sweat off ya with dry, dusty earth, and it gives you a loam smell, which people can barely critiqe.
You can make rocks into swords. If you can become dirt, you can become king of the earths beneath your feet.
I designed a high volume pump you might like. its a box, with a solid thin piston in it. Its enclosed on both ends, and both in the instroke and outstroke blows. size from a foot to a yard.
And to summarize for all:
I would say.... yes, steel.
Echos Steel
Night and Moon
OT: Maybe make the aluminum tools be recyclable. Maybe get scraps once they break, and 3 or 4 scraps can be crafted into large scraps and this smelted back into aluminum.
Portal Corruption suggestion
That would definetly convince me to mine with aluminum instead of steel/iron (since some folks are gonna call it iron anyway). But I'm iffy about how durable aluminum actually is. I think it should just be for the other crafts like someone else said (I do that a lot, forget peeps names. . .). Aluminum buckets, compasses, and minecarts, that there is freeing up a lot of iron for steel tools.
Here's another question for the metalurgist! How come I can crush an aluminum can with my hands but it is really hard to for me to dent a car? Does that got something to do with the carbons too?
However, i think the whole electrolysis process would need some sort of special forge that uses electricity or something.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/876554-4th-paradigm/page__p__11221405__hl__4th paradigm__fromsearch__1#entry11221405
Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron...
i'll second that opinion as well.
So far we have five different ores, two are commonly used and the other three are rare and have limited uses. Out of the two commonly used ores one is used as fuel, the other, iron, has way too many uses. It is an overused metal. Adding a second common utility metal would not over complicate anything; it will give each of the metals distinct uses. e.g. iron for tools and aluminum for minecart tracks.
Yeah... except that's not nearly enough for large scale minecart tracks. Anyway you slice it it is a pain in the ass to acquire the amount of iron needed for minecart tracks. Plus the prohibitive cost of minecart tracks stop you from using iron tools (as you stated), that is stupid. Why do we have to use shitty tools all the time? Another metal to construct minecart tracks with make high quality tools within the reach of common man.
Yet we can make glass, powered minecarts, and TNT.
For all you steel vs iron people:
If steel was introduced into minecraft you would basically be putting iron ingots through another furnace, then what purpose would iron serve? It would just be a useless middleman.
Jimbo needs a hand.
Echos Steel
Night and Moon
There are three resources people are going to fight over in SMP, coal, iron, and diamond. Coal has two uses, smelting and torches. Everyone is going to need torches, but with four torches per coal it shouldn't be a problem. Wood can also be used for smelting, the poorer class will be using wood while the upper class will be using coal. Coal will have a high demand, but it is abundant enough that there won't be a shortage. There will be a shortage of diamond on the other hand. Everyone will want diamond tools, this high demand will drive costs very high. Only the rich or the people with established mining operations will be able to afford diamond tools, and in turn, mine obsidian. I predict that obsidian trading will be a very lucrative business given the high value of obsidian and the high starting costs. Iron will also have high demand. The supply of iron will fall short of this demand however. In an SMP environment large quantities of iron will be difficult to come by, as the best way to find them is exploring caves. If some kind of land ownership thing is implemented then cave exploration will be near impossible. If land ownership is not implemented then almost every square inch of cave will be explored long before you arrive. Along with being used in buckets and minecart tracks everybody will need an iron pick to mine out the higher tiers of ores. The ridiculous resulting price will make minecart systems unattainable.
Aluminum will alleviate these problems. While Common Joe will have little use for aluminum he will mine a lot of it, and sell it to the shops. Lord Bob on the other hand will needs lots of aluminum to connect his towns together by minecart. If aluminum was not available to build minecart tracks Lord Bob would quite literally have to drain the local economy dry of iron to fuel his project. Because Lord Bob does not have to do this Common Joe can trade his aluminum in for nice shiny iron tools, and everyone wins.
Whatcha think?
Jimbo needs a hand.
The copper would be useful in many things that require iron and take the burden off it. It would be an inferior substitute but still useful. I think that the difficulty in processing ores into aluminum makes it too much of a stretch for the "man stranded on a fantasy island" thing. Even if it's anachronistic as I'd like it to be, aluminum is too much.
Anyway, just some info.
For ref, the temp to refine iron well is the distance past white hot, that is the distance between red hot and white hot. Red hot, white hot, another step and thats iron. The game should make it a coal-only opereration.
Echos Steel
Night and Moon
-Martyr