Black Sand

<p>Remember that Primitive Technology video? Of course you do. It was awesome.<br />The guy pulled black sand out of the river and made it into an iron bloom.</p> <p>This mod adds the ability to pan for Black Sand which you can convert into Magnetite through the use of a magnet.<br />It won't let you get iron any sooner game (since you need the iron to make the magnet) but it will give you a good supply of it later.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">This mod adds Black Sand and Black Iron to the game. It's low-quality iron so it's only slightly better than copper, but it's much more commonly obtained from panning. A 50% chance to be exact. (Copper nuggets are 15% for reference. It's 3x as common.) First you get some while panning, then you put the black sand into a bloomery, and after breaking the bloomery to get your bloom you smash it with a hammer and a mold in your crafting grid and you will have some low quality T2 Black Iron tools to play with. This patch is going to be used for ELR to solve the problem of needing lots of copper for cables and not wanting to choose between copper chassis in an already copper-heavy mod or gating machines behing late-game progression. This mod brings iron to the early game, solving the problem once and for all, and more importantly does so without disrupting the game's native balance and progression. Since it's works as a standalone mod, anyone can download or use for their own crafting.</span></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">EDIT: Please note, the recent version is horribly broken and I don't know why or how to fix it. The gameplay still functions but the textures are all missing and the falx is completely missing a model. Eventually I'll get around to finding out a way to deal with that but for now here it is. Older versions had a Stone Hammer and a Wooden Anvil but those have been removed in favor of allowing the player to cast Black Iron directly in the crafting grid.</span></p> <p>I have added the ability to craft a magnet out of magnetite nuggets and a temporal gear. You can use this and 4 black sand to create a single nugget of magnetite. It's not much but it does finally add a renewable source of iron to the game. Because you already need to have found and extracted magnetite (a pretty rare ore in its own right) this option only exists for players who have already reached the iron age. <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Using this method isn't as good durability per material compared to making black iron normally, but iron has better stats and can be upgraded to steel. If you have a means of making steel that kind of blows everything out of the water with its really high stats and 3x durability bonus over iron.</span><br /><br /></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Thanks to <span class="mention username">MCRusher</span> for finding a workaround for the broken textures. It won't fix all of it, but it will fix most of the issues:</span><br /><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">"I managed to fix most of the textures by creating an assets/game/textures folder and then moving the item and block texture folders to that folder"</span></p> <p>The mod has been stripped to its essentials because the old system was overcomplicated, unbalanced and broke a lot. Now you craft a magnet and can extract 1 nugget of magnetite out of 4 black sand. For batch processing you can make a super magnet which can craft multiple times at once but at the cost of only being able to do so 1000 times before breaking. You can recharge it to restore its durability at the cost of 1 temporal gear, but if you let the durability go down all the way you lose the super magnet and have to make a new one. Sadly this is a limitation of the engine. That being said you practically have to be trying to break your magnet with how much durability you have to work with.</p>