Smelting and refining take a fair bit of time, and if you're trying to process all of your ore involve having to stare at the progress and swap out stacks of materials. For obvious reasons this is a little annoying. It should be possible to just load a furnace / refinery with everything we want to process and have it do everything in order. This would allow the player to go grab a snack or whatever. Since smelting and refining are always 1 input => 1 output (i.e. don't combine materials), you could just change the UI by replacing the 1 slot on the left and right with 4x4 slots like a storage container has. The ores would still only be handled one at a time, so this wouldn't speed up smelting time except for the time it takes the player to replace the ore and remove the finished bars.
You can also just build a second furnace and put it in next to the first. I do that and it lets me crank 2 ores at once. That being said, would be nice to see some kind of upgraded furnace, seems silly to be using a stone furnace to make plutonium rods....
Yeah, try a second furnace or even a third/fourth. I like the idea to need more furnaces for being faster. Like a factory with many furnaces. Without implementing a queue you need more items and this enriches the game. I like it at the moment as it is, would disagree for implementing this. We have about 12 furnaces in a room, which looks nice like a factory. Love it.
I wasn't aiming for making smelting significantly faster. (Except for the tiny speedup of getting rid of checking the furnace, removing what's in there, adding a different ore.) Just to let me do everything in my inventory in one batch without having to check the laptop and juggle ore six times over ten minutes. I.e. it's a "comfort" upgrade, not anything that should completely change the way you play. If you want smelting to actually be done significantly in less time, you'd still have to build more furnaces. You'd also still be free to build with however many furnaces you wish for decorative purposes. (This isn't the Sims after all, despite the interior decoration aspect being prominent, it's not the main gameplay goal as opposed to a fun thing you can do as a bonus.) I disagree that having to build more items just to get out of having to idle in your spaceship staring at smelting enriches the game at all. If staring at progress bars was fun we'd still be using IE6. It's also not consistent with all other crafting being instantaneous. Implementing this suggestion wouldn't affect your gameplay at all, and make me not groan "oh god I have to go smelt now". I'm of the opinion that games, much like any other software, should avoid frustrating the user / player whenever possible. Since games are supposed to be challenging, some amount – or even a great amount – of frustration is necessary. It just has to be the right kind, for the right reasons. RPGs don't have mazes, adventure games don't have death, etc. And Starbound is not a game about setting up an efficient crafting workshop, so I don't see how multiple furnaces are that crucial to its gameplay that I can't be allowed to go pee while smelting and come back to it being done.
I can't really see why you would want this. greymalken and Ponti already have said the solutions: Just build as many furnaces as you have ore. One kind of ore = one furnace. Put the ores in the furnaces and go grab a snack. And you would need more than one output slot with your idea. Can't stack copper and iron bars.
So then you should have no opinion either way, right? You don't disagree with supermarkets selling tomatoes if you don't like tomato either. I think I mentioned that. Basically a furnace UI would be two connected "chests". (Really, "adding slots on both sides" can't be too hard to implement.) All I'm just saying that it would be nice for people who live off their spaceship where space is at a premium. The workaround are a nice alternative for now, but still: a workaround. My question is more: why should there be only the workaround? You usually have a lot more of the lower tier ores. And I wasn't intending for anything about smelting speed to change, but about the amount of clicking around to handle different kinds of ores.
No I mean a higher tier smelter that smelts faster.....or smelts many ores at once but is just bigger
Perhaps you would have to work for such a setup, using the wiring mechanic. eg. have an 'input chest' which you load your ores into, then have pipes or a conveyor belt running into your smelting setup and out the other side into an 'output chest'. The setup could be powered and turned on and off using wired switches. If you've ever dicked around with Minecraft mods this'll sound familiar.
Or vanilla Minecraft nowadays with the Hopper item. And I would rather it be something like this rather than just have multiple reserve slots. Or give us the ability to open all of a specific type of item by activating it while holding Shift. So if you had 4 Furnaces near you and you pressed Shift+E on one of them it would open the inventory of ever Furnace item within your range.
I like and love the discussion and ideas that come up. But I see problems within, too. It may cut the games simple mechanics for one item has one ability. As you may see, you have to pick one flower or one fruit by time, you have to cut one tree by time, you have to dig one area by time. It's all "one item has one ability". Crating items, that merge abilites of items around or that are too powerful in behaviour, not simple would cut game simple mechanics. So I like the way the idea came up, I love the discussion and ideas that flow and grow ( I'm floran, I love all that grow ). But I would disagree to the merge option (see more then one item in a window) or stack option (smelting queue) or complex option (more then one smelter in one oven). I like it as it is. But we're more people with more opinions, so I'm only one voice
I kind of get where you're coming from. There's a bit of a difference in that digging through a wall or cutting through trees is grindy, and I don't mean that in a bad way. You hold your mouse button and move around, don't really need fine aiming etc. You also do both while exploring the planet, which is in and of itself a rewarding activity. (Remember the famous Bartle paper that classifies players of – not only – multiplayer games into: Killers, Socialisers, Achievers, and Explorers.) Now, smelting and refining are the only parts of the game where you actually have to stand around waiting for something to happen. That's the part that I'd like to see mitigated, if only by making this true downtime that lets you walk away from the game. And if you're saying they should be consistent with the rest of the game, why shouldn't they be consistent with all other crafting where you can make any amount of any item instantly? It just seems to me that instead of considering whether it's "good" or "bad" that things work the way they work, you've decided you like the way they work now and are working backwards to find a reason. ======= This is an interesting idea in and of itself, if there was a nonconfusing way to combine this with using Shift-Click on items in your inventory to place ores into furnaces. Maybe only allow opening multiple windows of only one tool type? I.e. if you have three furnaces open, then Shift-E on a container, all the furnaces close, the containers open. This would actually be much more useful for containers. You could open all the chests nearby in the part of your ship that stores looted furniture, and just Shift-Click them from your inventory into any of those chests. (With the item automatically being added to the correct stack if there is one, and a new stack would be created in the first free slot.) This would make a lot of sense for pillagers with upgraded ships, basically you'd have one cargo hold for avian stuff, one cargo hold for apex stuff, or however else you want to organise things.
I'm not sure Starbound is trying to be Minecraft or generally a production chain game. Although, who knows, but so far refining and smelting stand out, unlike in Terraria where everything was crafted almost instantly from the menu. (My gut tells me Starbound won't morph into this, there's still a lot to be done with spelunking and space exploration.) I'd say a simpler solution with smelters with hoppers would be fine. Say, a 2 x 2 hopper at tier 3, a 3 x 3 hopper at tier 4. Maybe more later if the amount of "garbage" ores increases throughout sector X, I'm not that far yet.
