Mods / Smelting Melting
- Tags:
- Author:
- Wahazar
- Side:
- Both
- Created:
- Oct 14th 2025 at 6:13 PM
- Last modified:
- Oct 15th 2025 at 9:26 AM
- Downloads:
- 143
- Follow Unfollow 21
-
Latest release (for Vintage Story 1.20.9, 1.20.12 and 1.21.4 - 1.21.5, outdated):
SmeltingMelting20_12_1.zip 1-click install
Tin oxide or zinc sulfide melted into metal in crucible? Nah. This game deserve some more realistic approach to non-ferrous metallurgy.
Only native metal nuggets can be melted in crucible, like native copper, silver or gold.
Ore minerals, which are compounds like tin oxide or zinc sulfide, needs to be reduced in presence of carbon - this process is called smelting.
Therefore, ore nuggets or whole ore chunks needs to be roasted in firepit, fuelled by coal or charcoal, producing pure bits of metal - these now can be melted in crucible.
Bonus: there is no need to crush ore chunk into ore nuggets with hammer, whole chunk can be inserted in firepit. However nuggets smelting is faster than whole ore chunk (especially with better firepit mod), your choice (but no more fear that last hammer will be lost, pushing player back into stone age :)
Additionally, description of ores is improved, to show composition of given ore, for example Cassiterite (tin oxide).
Smelting temperature is set as 1010 °C (or temperature of metal melting, if higher), therefore wood ore peat is not sufficient, charcoal/coal is needed.
To do:
- smelting non-ferrous ores into metal bloom (similar to iron) in bloomery, instead of nuggets.
- add roasting sulfides into oxides (to get lead oxide for dyes), maybe compatibility with some chemistry mods to get sulfur dioxide?
- compatibility with Geology Addon (and other similar mods)
- description localisation, if requested
Known issues
- due to automatically created description, firepit claims 1x metal bits produced from each ore chunk, while producing amounts same as when hammer is used (see tooltip for proper value)
- another small glitch: ore nuggets are described as 100 metal units (because they are smelted into one metal bit, not ingot, one metal bit equal 5 metal units or 1/20 of ingot, as usual).
Compatibility: this is content mod, I tested it against 4 versions on which I was playing, but should be compatible with older or never ones.
| Mod Version | Mod Identifier | For Game version | Downloads | Released | Changelog | Download | 1-click mod install* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20.12.1 | smeltingmelting | 143 | Oct 15th 2025 at 9:26 AM | SmeltingMelting20_12_1.zip | 1-click install | ||
|
Initial release: smelting ores and nuggets to metal, improved ore description | |||||||
Cool, shall wait for the Expanded Matter and Geological Addon compat, i hate pyrite because it only lets me make 3 iron blooms per bloomery lol.
Currently my plans are to:
Instead of heating in firepit, at least heating in forge would be avesome, but this is unavailable without code patching.
I will be happy if somebody will make some decent metallurgy code mod, for example refractory clay crucibles for melting high temperature alloys.
Wahazar they have given us a sneak preview of a bellows but unsure if it could be used on a campfire. Are you still looking into allowing the use of the bloomery?
Unfortunately I have to low programming skills to achieve code mode with something like Smelting Silo (and I don't want to use AI to produce such mods).
I hope that further version of VS will offer bellows, affecting temperature of campfire. Ancient metalworkings were possible in ordinary campfire, but bellows were require to achieve melting temperature.
I love the concept of this mod and it will be a staple for my playthroughs. I dislike how easy it is to enter the copper age. If I can make a suggestion: one does not simply smelt ores in a campfire. I see you already have thought about adding the ability to the bloomery and for it to make non-ferrous blooms.
I would like to suggest removing the campfire smelting and add a Smelting Silo (reskinned bloomery; a tier 0) made with clay brick and clay (instead of mortar). It will function like a bloomery but cannot do iron blooms. Perhaps only metals that can normally be used up through the bronze age. The product would be metal slag (reskinned iron bloom) that has to be pounded to retrieve the bits. You can add a stone/flint hammer or have us use metamorphic/igneous stones. I would like to see the pounding process be an in world crafting and not grid, but that is my preferance.
Wahazar, yeah I found "better firepit" though that seems to have some issues.
I have been smelting whole chunks, I just said nugget for some reason.
yodal_ Unfortunately, vanilla firepit can't heat whole stack. I recommend "better firepit" mod, where items are heated simultaneously. Also you can smelt whole ore chunks, no need to crush them with hammer.
I like this mod, but it takes a rediculous amount of coal to smelt a handful of copper nuggets. I wish there was a configuration option to either speed up the smelting time or increase the number of nuggets that are smelted at once.
I didn't tested, but both toolsmith and smithing plus are changing different things, thus should be compatible.
i like this idea ! does it fit well with toolsmith/smithing plus etc ?