ChiefArug
commented
3 years ago The entire point of the blast furnace making twice as much SU is because it is so incredibly hard to automate, given its ridiculous output. You can however extract items from the top of furnaces before they finish smelting (there was an issue created and closed as not a bug sometime back about this) meaning the item does not have to be consumed.
You can also re-crush blocks of metals back into their crushed forms, but this runs at a slight loss.
Edit: I am not a dev in any shape or form, I'm just a member of the community who wants to help. Just wanted to make that clear.
ironsnake345
T0RNATO
As it stands, keeping a furnace engine perpetually powered is kind of difficult, since you need to keep the furnace constantly supplied with something it can smelt. I get that this is at least somewhat necessary for balancing the most powerful rotational provider in the game, but it's also rather limiting, since there's no way to "un-smelt" items in Create as a stand-alone mod. While a tree farm producing charcoal works for standard furnace engines, blast furnace engines are an extra-tough situation, being that they specifically need ores, crushed ores, or metal tools in order to work. While blocks of iron can be crushed into crushed iron ore, this process is too lossy; even adding in a stonework generator that washes gravel to produce extra iron nuggets doesn't consistently produce enough iron to keep the engine fed. Not to mention, some packmakers will disable the iron block to crushed iron recipe altogether.
I feel like there should be a way to force a furnace, and especially a blast furnace, to keep burning indefinitely as long as it has fuel to do so, and I have a few suggestions as to how one might go about adding such a feature:
1: The simplest, likely most balance-breaking way, would be to add the ability to simply, say, power a furnace or blast furnace with redstone to make it fire up. As long as a furnace with an attached furnace engine has a redstone charge, it will fire, whether or not it has any raw object to smelt. Alternately, perhaps the redstone power could be replaced with some specialized attachment block which has to be mechanically crafted, to retain a bit of balance; attach the block to a blast/furnace, and it will burn whether or not it has something to smelt.
2: The method which might fit best with the current design of Create would be to add a method to crush/mill metals into some kind of crushed/dust form, aside from crushed ore, which can then be smelted back into a whole ingot. This way, you can feed a blast furnace (or regular furnace) with iron dust, which gets smelted into iron, then milled back into iron dust and fed back into the furnace. It fits with the feel of the mod, and would require minimal development effort, while still needing the player to use a bit of creativity to get everything where it needs to go.
3: An in-between method for these two would be to add some form of item that smelts into itself. For bonus points, it would stay in the furnace's smeltable input slot, but obviously that isn't strictly necessary. Perhaps shadow steel can be smelted into shadow steel, for example? Even if it still needs to circulate back into the furnace, this provides a way to keep the furnace burning indefinitely (provided fuel is supplied.)
This isn't super important, but I at least hope it gets considered. While it's obviously possible to grind iron into dust and smelt it back using blocks from other mods, I hope to see that sort of infinite-smelting loop become possible in "vanilla" Create. Either way, thanks for your consideration!