Alloys

Steel is easy: iron and carbon, hot enough, some pressure. Invar is fussy: it wants 1,200 to 1,500 K and 18,000 to 20,000 kPa. Whoever misses the window gets slag. A chip that knows the window tells you beforehand what is wrong.

The windows from the game's recipes#

The values come from the furnace recipes in the game data (furnace and advanced furnace). “from” means: open towards the top.

Pure ingots only need a minimum temperature and from 100 kPa – iron from 800 K, copper, gold and silver from 600 K, lead from 400 K. The superalloys (Hastelloy, Inconel, Stellite, Waspaloy, Astroloy) only succeed in the advanced furnace, with even tighter windows.

The carbon for steel comes from charcoal. Instead of carbon, hydrocarbon from coal ore works too, also 3 : 1.

Windows as defines#

Every limit gets a define with Kelvin and Celsius in the comment. Whoever makes electrum instead of invar tomorrow changes four lines at the top and nothing in the body:

define T_MIN 1200 # 926.85 C lower limit
define T_MAX 1500 # 1226.85 C upper limit
define P_MIN 18000 # kPa lower limit
define P_MAX 20000 # kPa upper limit

A hint instead of a red light#

“Outside the window” helps little. A hint about what is missing is better: 1 too cold, 2 too hot, 3 pressure too low, 4 pressure too high. The temperature check stands behind the pressure check and overwrites it – because heating also changes the pressure. Set the temperature first, then adjust the pressure.

Checking the recipe#

If window and mixture are right, the furnace reports the ingot's prefab hash in RecipeHash. On the device it then also shows Mode 1 – but that is only the display, on a dedicated server it is never refreshed. That way you check whether it really becomes invar and not iron from a badly mixed charge:

seq tmp recipe INVAR