I'm smelting diamonds in a stone furnace? You've got to be kidding. I should have to repeatedly upgrade my furnace in order to smelt higher level ores. The progression could be as follows: Stone-->Iron-->Steel-->Titanium-->Durasteel-->etc. You can only smelt up to the next tier ores in your furnace (ex: An iron furnace could smelt stone, iron, and steel, but not titanium). Other metals (e.g. silver, gold) would fall naturally into this progression.
To feel like you make technological advances, I would suggest they be Stone furnace-> Iron furnace-> "Steam" furnace (like a steel one, with a XVIII century look to it)-> Industrial furnace (more modern-era like)-> Neo Furnace (with screen and keyboard and whatnot)-> Starforge (with a scifi-supernatural thing to it that makes you think "wow the things smelt here have to be quite significant" It would also allow the creation of more dungeons, like an Apex Neo-forge Station, a long-lost-to-all-cultures hi-tech planetary forge ridden with some greedy buddies, or simply a mass-production factory of any kind
That too complex but you should have an upgrade too take less ore to make a bar or multiple ore smelting at once Good idea man
You mean like having 2 or more slots available for smelting ? You could just build another furnace right ?
Honestly I like a lot of the ideas presented. The idea that my furnace might need an upgrade to tackle titanium and diamond smelting sounds good, and the idea of being able to process multiple ores at once also sounds good. As is I have furnaces stacked on top of furnaces just to make it easier on my time.
I'll also second the idea of upgradeable furnaces - I like several of the ideas here and you could combine them by making an "upgrade tree" for the furnace where you had to choose whether you wanted to increase yields, or increase speed, etc.
