Rewrite (again) High Oven's special smelting registery

[Toops]

The High Oven's smelting registry for things like steel and pig iron needs a rewrite. This rewrite should be capable handling what will become variable steels. As it stands, everything is arbitrary - steel is made from a small, set of items with no wiggle room. Instead, each registered component item needs to be able to know what materials it can be smelted into, and additional properties for future expansion so that the properties of variable steel can be put into place with little effort.

[wisthy]

Do you already have idea of the future expansion? At least a direction? Because without that, it's a little be too abstract for me at the moment

[Toops]

I have a loose idea, but at the moment it's going to take a little more time to really make it solid and presentable. I think I may need to commit it to paper first. Everything I work on tends to turn out much better when I actually write it down and draw out diagrams by hand.

With that said, I think it will lead to the first total rewrite of not only the aforementioned special smelting methods (the non-TCon ones) but also much of the High Oven's logic in itself, especially in regards to containers and inventories. It should have one inventory for ores/smelting items, one inventory for compound items, and one for fuels.

So fuels would obviously be 1 one-slot thing, no biggie.

Ores would be pretty much the same as they are now (IE bigger the oven, more slots).

Compound items (oxidizers, etc) will be expandable like the ore slots, albeit a bit differently. Oxidizers, reducers and purifiers will be standard, but additionally, other slots might come available when specialized blocks are added to the structure. Dopant compounds may be a necessity; such is the process used to make cobalt steel among others - think of a dopant as adding flavor to the steel, rather than simply processing it. Another example of potential slot expansion could be for things like filled tanks and buckets - which could have a large variety of uses - primarily, I'm thinking a (seared) tank/bucket full of water may be a better solution to producing steam - though, then again, perhaps simply dropping one of these in an ore slot would make more sense. In any case, another slot to fit under compounds would be to place certain mundane casts (ingots, tool rods, plates, etc), in which if present, the oven would attempt to autocast metals as these if possible and use the solid output methodology - and if a tank or bucket is present in this casting slot, it would attempt to fill it instead.

Anyhow, I went a bit off topic, and I need to sleep. So I'll do that now. :P