Devtober Day #13

Welcome back to Day #12 of Devtober, in which code continues to be written and I hold a lecture on the heat treatment process.

Once again a day of pretty much just coding, but the heat system is starting to take form, step by step. As I mentioned yesterday, items containing metal, such as crucibles, ingots, smithing grids, and metal components will all be able to be heated up, whether the purpose be to smelt, smith, or perform heat treatment.  

Since I don't really have much else new to talk about today, I thought I'd share some insight on how the heat treatment process will work. It will probably be quite a while before it's actually implemented, but I figure that it might make for an interesting read, at the very least. 

Once the basic shape of a blade is formed, the player can either choose to use it as-is, or perform heat treatment on it in order to increase its quality and stats. The heat treatment process consists of 4 steps.

The first step is "normalization," in which the internal stresses caused by beating the metal are relieved, and results in a tougher and softer metal. Normalization is performed by heating the blade to a specific temperature and then letting it cool. This process is repeated three times before moving on to the next step, with the quality modifier being taken as an average of the three.

The second step is "annealing," which is essentially just like normalization but done over a much longer amount of time. To perform annealing, simply heat up the metal once again to a specific annealing temperature, but this time, move it into an "annealing oven" and leave it in there until it's done. Due to the time-sensitive nature of annealing, being able to properly manage and keep track of time will be another skill to master for efficient blacksmithing.

The third step is "quenching," which everyone probably knows as the step where you dunk the red-hot blade into a barrel of water or some other liquid. Quenching is performed by heating the blade to a specific temperature range, and then quickly dunking it in a quenching tank. In reality, this process causes the metal's crystalline structure to "freeze" a certain way that results in a massive increase in hardness, but at a great cost to toughness, essentially making the metal incredibly hard, but brittle at the same time. This is perhaps the most important part of the heat treatment process, as messing up the quenching may very well ruin the entire blade.

And finally, the last step is "tempering," a process that allows a quenched blade to regain its toughness after losing it in the quenching process. Similarly to normalization, tempering involves carefully raising the metal's temperature to a certain range, letting it cool a bit, and then repeating. Once again, this process is repeated three times, with the quality modifier being taken as an average.

So, as you can probably tell from this impromptu lecture, heat treatment can turn out to be quite an involved task. It should also be noted that the player won't have any way to accurately determine the exact temperature of their metal, being able to tell whether or not you've hit the temperature range for a specific treatment step will also be yet another milestone in mastering the art of blacksmithing. As the heat treatment will determine a lot of things about the final product's stats, it might even be more important to master than the smithing process itself!

Anyway, that's about it for now. 'Till tomorrow,

- Ian, Lunarium Works