Smelting

Smelting turns ore into metal bars at the furnace of a province smeltery. Smiths forge the bars into weapons, armour and tools, and the settlement uses them for its buildings and fittings. The ore comes from mining.

Where to smelt

A province has one smeltery. To smelt there you need Trusted standing in the province, which you earn through missions; council members qualify automatically. A plaque in the main room lists what you can do, and furnace takes you to a furnace, where a sign explains the work.

The smeltery's tier decides which furnaces it has, how many bars one charge pours and how fine a bar can be:

Smeltery	Furnaces	Bars per charge	Finest bar
Restored	smelting pot	1	standard
Improved	smelting pot, simple furnace	5	fine
Advanced	smelting pot, simple furnace, compact furnace	10	exceptional

What each furnace makes

Furnace	Metals
smelting pot	tin, lead, aluminium, copper, silver and gold; bronze and brass at an Improved or Advanced smeltery
simple furnace	also iron and nickel; steel at an Advanced smeltery
compact furnace	also platinum and titanium

Bronze is smelted from copper and tin ore, brass from copper and zinc, and steel from iron, zinc and coal. Zinc ore goes only into these alloys. Some metals take more than one piece of ore for each bar. smelt on its own lists what the furnace you stand at can make now and what each bar needs.

A damaged furnace runs cooler and may refuse the hotter metals; repair furnace mends it with stone.

Getting the ore there

The furnace smelts your own ore from the smeltery's racks. Bring it from the mine in a handcart or wagon and wagon unload <n> <ore>, or carry it in and deposit ore. In the main room, bin shows your own ore and bars and storage everything the smeltery holds.

Most metals also burn coal from the province's coal pool, the rarer ones much more. Coal reaches the pool when miners sort rubble and from the province's charcoal pits, and you can add coal you carry with deposit coal in the smeltery's yard or at the storehouse yard. Coal does not change how fine a bar turns out.

Smelting

Command	What it does
smelt iron	Smelt one bar from your own ore.
smelt 5 iron	Pour a charge of several bars at once, up to the smeltery's limit.
smelt iron from premium	Use only your premium pile (or from rough); see sort <ore> under Mining.
smelt iron from pool	Council members only: use the smeltery's shared ore.
pump bellows	Work the bellows while the metal melts, for a finer bar.

A charge runs through several stages. On every furnace but the smelting pot, the bellows call for you at moments shown on screen: pump in time and the bar improves, miss and it suffers a little. The smelting pot has no bellows and pours plainer bars. Stay until the pour: leaving spoils the whole charge. The ore and coal for every bar must be in store before anything is used, and each bar keeps the purity of the ore that went into it, so mixing good and poor ore does not give every bar the same quality.

A furnace stays warm for a while after a pour, so the next charge started soon heats up faster.

When the pour is done, the bars go to your place on the racks. withdraw 1 iron bar in the main room takes one, and wagon load <n> iron bars loads a cart.

What makes a fine bar

• The ore's purity is the ceiling. Fine ore leaves room for a fine bar; poor ore never makes one.
• Your skill decides how much of that purity you keep: knowledge of minerals, your mastery of the metal, earned by smelting it, and your smelting prowess, which grows with every smelt. A beginner keeps about half, a master nearly all. Knowledge of ores helps in the mine, not at the furnace.
• The bellows add a little more when you pump in time.
• The smeltery sets the finest bar it can pour, as in the table above. Fine ore smelted at a Restored smeltery still comes out standard.

While your knowledge of minerals and your mastery of the metal are low, a bar can also come out a little contaminated. That stops once both have grown.

The Professional Refiners teach the smelter's craft, and they and the Professional Miners both teach knowledge of minerals. masteries refining on the artisan toolkit shows your masteries.

See also

• Mining, where the ore comes from
• Forge, what becomes of the bars
• Crafting
• Province buildings