Steelmaking Expanded

An industrial-era iron and steel production chain for Vintage Story, built as a set of multiblock structures and network blocks. It adds horizontal progression past the vanilla cementation furnace: you smelt iron in bulk in a blast furnace (Stage I), then refine it into steel in a Bessemer converter (Stage II). Gas pipes move air, blast and exhaust between the machines, and molten canals plumb the liquid metal to molds and bulk storage.

Wiki

Now wiki is available for current mods that shows up to date information (video guides are now mostly stale but still usable as general showcase), so please read this if you have issues understanding what is happening in the mod: current mod wiki

Note: There are also pages for preview of what I was working on all this time but still wasn't able to finish because of irl stuff, you can look through preview if you are interested to see where these mods are going!

Compatibility

• Game version: built for Vintage Story 1.22. Legacy 1.20 and 1.21 builds are on the GitHub releases page.
• Multiplayer: works in singleplayer and on dedicated servers.
• Requires: Expanded Library (exlib) and Pipes and Power Expanded (ppex). Install both before updating.
• Languages: English, Russian, Ukrainian.
• Save safety: safe to add to an existing world. Removing it leaves the placed machine blocks behind, so break them first if you uninstall. Updating from before 0.9.0 runs block migrations automatically; replace any leftover unknown blocks in creative.

Quick start

The iron line, in order. Each step has a full handbook article ("Steelmaking:") in game.

1. Build the blast furnace: place the door block, hold Ctrl + right-click for the build outline, and fill in every highlighted block until it reports complete.
2. Set up steam power (see Pipes and Power Expanded), then an Air Blower sub-machine, a pair of Cowper Stoves and a Smoke Stack. Pipe air through the blower and a cowper into the tuyeres, and pipe furnace exhaust through the cowpers out to the smoke stack.
3. Load the Reinforced Hopper with crushed iron ore, crushed coke and lime. The Bell Hopper below fills the shaft on its own (dropping is on by default).
4. Ignite the blast mix with a torch and close the door.
5. Charge one cowper stove on exhaust while the other blows hot blast in, swapping them with valves as they cool. Hold the furnace above about 1482 degrees Celsius and it begins to melt iron.
6. Open the Molten Metal Taps to drain iron and slag down canals into molds or barrels.
7. For steel, pour molten iron into a Bessemer converter and refine it - that is Stage II.

Commands and config

• .exmod network hi / unhi - highlights every networked block, a separate colour per network, so you can see where a run is continuous and where it is broken.
• .exmod measure metric / imperial - switches display units on machines and network blocks. Display only; the simulation is unchanged.
• /exmod molds <plate|ingot|rod|all> <on|off> - enables or disables this mod's tool molds (admin).
• /exmod config smex - view or change any gameplay value live, applied immediately with no world reload (admin).
• /exmod recipes smex <normal|cheap> - switch the crafting and construction cost level; applies on the next world reload (admin).

Two config files are generated under VintagestoryData/ModConfig/ on first run:

• smex_values.json - the gameplay tunables (melt temperatures and timings, how much blast mix a charge needs, canal and barrel cooldown rates, salvage drop ratios). Editable live with /exmod config smex.
• smex_recipes.json - the per-recipe and per-construction cost numbers for each level (normal and cheap). Pick the active level with /exmod recipes smex and fine-tune the numbers in this file; changes apply on the next world reload.

How it works