vintage engineering now adds the ability to craft metal blocks with 4 plates
why 4 plates?
because 6 plates makes the riveted kind, and 4 plates is 8 ingots which is an O around a crafting grid which seemed fine.

1200 isn't all that much really, in the scheme of things tbh. Don't forget it's a solid meter cubed of metal, if anything 12 ingots isn't enough to fill that volume.

Main thing it means is you just need to go and mine more, which isn't so bad.

Too bad, I guess metal is always going to be out of reach for chiseling anything larger than a thimble. Perhaps some amazing moder will make a metal plating mod or something so we can make blocks with the metal textures for chiseling. Problem is, it's not even realistic in a lot of areas. I mean, if I want to add steel hinges to a door I'm making in the real world, I wouldn't need 12 ingots to make those hinges. But since you have to use a block when adding to chisel those hinges, you do.

So this is equal to the cost of a vanilla riveted metal block, its the same as the 6 plates to make that. But, it's much faster to make in general. It also supports a lot of materials vanilla doesn't, including a lot you'd need a side mod to melt down to use, such as iron and platinum. I think the rivet add/remove and recycle recipes are a bit bugged right now, so I'll fix that soon.

I'm not sure how this is implemented, but if done right it could be huge fore chiselers like me. For ages, I have wanted to add metal to my chisel projects, but the cost of a metal block is just too hi for it to be feasible. So I wind up using knock offs like yellow clay for brass or slate for steal. And thanks to Tels and bricklayers some of the opaque glass colors make good substitutes. But I would love a more doable recipe that allowed adding real metal blocks to chisel projects.