Simple Bit Recovery

<h4><span style="font-family: georgia, palatino, serif;">"Hey you, are you <em>smithing</em> that pickaxe? Haha, why are you doing that? Don't you know you can just&nbsp;<em>cast</em> the same tool for the same metal price and no hammer durability loss? Don't look at that anvil, it's stealing from you. Come back over here and melt some stuff like a real pro."</span></h4> <h4><span style="font-family: georgia, palatino, serif;">~ Big Crucible</span></h4> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>In short, this mod does something very similar to <a href="https://mods.vintagestory.at/smithingplus">Smithing Plus</a> and <a href="https://mods.vintagestory.at/metalrecycling">Metal Recycling</a> in that it lets you get some bits back when you use the anvil. The ways it differs from those mods boil down to basically 3 things:</p> <ol> <li>In this mod, the bits literally fly off the work item as you hammer. You heard that right, with the power of a single JSON patch to scale the bits down a bit and a bunch of absolutely psychotic code that's way too complex for such a small feature, when you split a cube and proc the bit return, your bit will physically pop off the item from the location you struck. If there's nothing directly above it, it might even fly up a little bit. Oh, and it'll be just as hot as the ingot, so it might burn your fingers if you aren't careful.</li> <li>Technically speaking, the amount of bits you get back is deterministic, not random, and configurable (sort of like Smithing Plus but different implementation). On default dettings, you'll get back about 1 bit for every ~2.8 cubes hammered, but you can set that to whatever you like. Anything below 2.1 will absolutely let you dupe though, so don't do that unless you want to really cheat. Also, work items now give back an appropriate amount of bits based on their remaining volume, <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">with a special case to get back the full 40 bits if you somehow plop down a plate and then decide "Nah, actually I'd rather not use this"</span>. <em>Actually, I removed that when I realized it would allow a truly determined person to dupe bits and replaced it with yet another coding horror to scan smithing recipes and return appropriate bit amounts when chiseling.</em></li> <li>The only extra things in here are options to allow bit recovery from iron blooms/blister steel (default:off, see config section), a fix to blooms sometimes having less than an ingot of metal (default:on), and a "fix" to the helve hammer being able to make new metal bits from nothing (default:on). No other new mechanics, no new items, just what it says on the tin and some fixes to make it work right. If you're already using fixes to the other mechanics mentioned, you can just turn the ones from this mod off in the config, no problem. They're really just there in case you want to do some stuff with iron bloom bit recovery.</li> </ol> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>NOTE: If you are using a mod that already does something like this, or allows for adding other non-ingot/plate shapes to work items, it <strong>may</strong> be possible to dupe bits on default settings.</em></span>&nbsp;The exact conditions for this are basically if you can add more than 2.1 cubes per metal bit equivalent (a metal piece with better efficiency than adding ingots) then you can probably use the work item breakdown formula to get small bit gains and will need to adjust the <em>BitRecoveryChiselRatio</em> and possibly&nbsp;<em>BitRecoverySmithingModulo</em> settings to compensate. See config section.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Also, if you are using <a href="https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/29326">Re-Smeltables</a>, you will be able to dupe bits by re-smelting tool heads. You should consider this mod incompatible with that one due to differences in mechanics.</em></span></p> <p>But aside from that you should be good.</p> <p><img src="https://i.ibb.co/JFybqrBc/2026-02-22-5-16-13-PM-1.gif" alt="Bit Splitting Demonstration" width="640" height="360" /></p> <h5><strong>tl;dr Hit metal with hammer, get metal bits.</strong></h5> <p>&nbsp;</p> <hr /> <h2>Config</h2> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Straight from the code, here's the config variables with comments (touched up slightly)</p> <div class="spoiler"> <div class="spoiler-toggle">Spoiler!</div> <div class="spoiler-text"> <p><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// &lt;summary&gt;</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// Effectively the ratio of recovered split bits to ingots times 10. A setting of 21 would allow roughly 20 bits to be recovered from 42 split voxels.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// Default setting of 24 allows for good, but not perfect, bit recovery while smithing.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// Any value below 21 can hypothetically dupe bits.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// Any value below 1 is invalid and the game will assume your config is broken and regenerate it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// &lt;/summary&gt;</span><br /><strong><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">public int BitRecoverySmithingModulo = 28;</span></strong></p> <p><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// &lt;summary&gt;</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// The exact ratio of bits to voxels to recover when breaking a work item down with a chisel.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// Default value of 2.1 allows for 20 bits to be recovered from a full ingot, and 38 from a plate.</span><br /><span style="font-family: 'courier new', courier, monospace;">/// Any value below 2.1 may allow bits to be multiplied through creating work ite