Metal prices are quite broken now

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csk1d

Recruit
Metal prices used to be quite high, but to be fair its still quite balanced compared to present one.

For example to make a unit of steel needs 2 iron, or equivalently 4 wrought iron or 4 crude iron or 2 iron ore.
And it takes 2+4+2+1=10 charcoal to make, without any skill the total cost of steel would be:

32*2+20*10=264

Assuming the lowest price for iron ore and hardwood I usually encounters(32 for 1 unit of iron ore, 10 for 1 unit of hardwood)

And the best price you can sold now is around 100-120, even counting the crude iron we have as a by product, and lets say we always have the highest price for that(which is around 20), we still only get 120+9*20=300, which means not only is it nearly non profitable (remember its impossible to always have these prices), but its also time costly.

I can understand why crude iron is quite inexpensive, but consider the fact that iron and steel making are more time costly and labour extensive, it would be an utter nonsense to give it such a low price.

To me a more reasonable method of balancing is to introduce coke as a level-2 fuel which can be produced from charcoal, and its the required fuel for steel making, thus increase the opportunity cost of steel making and it would be even more costly to make, but the result would be a high enough steel prices (and to be fair, the present weapon price means you cant hardly make a profit by simply melting weapons, the only problem is smelting, but you can set up a system where there is a loss of material when smelting, and you need a perk for obtain more material so that it won't be exploited that much, you can even make coke as a required fuel for smelting high tier weapon so to further increase the cost of smelting), we can also put coke and steel making in a higher level so it is not very easily accessible.

For example, we can set the required fuel for steel/fine steel/thamaskane steel as 1 units of coke, which required 2 charcoal to make, this means the amount of hardwood required now is 22 assuming no perks, the cost would be 304, with the adjusted price the profit would be 335, but due to the increased time needed to produce coke, it would not be very profitable compared to merchant thing.

If you further increase the level requirement to learn coke making(for example lv50 for coke making, lv 75 for steel making 1), the cost would be further increased.

Another fun idea of mine is to add a thamaskane method as a perk, by doing so you are able to produce a unit of fine steel and steel from 1 unit wrought iron and 1 unit crude iron, but it would require 275 skill level to learn (actually I want to add a mysterious master smith npc and you need to learn the perk from him, and he will only teach you with high learning fee, say 35000 to even 100k and 275 smithing skill) so that it won't affect the late stage balance that much.
 
Also on the iron prices, I would support a price range of 150-300 as a acceptable price range, with most of the prices lies on around 200-250, so that it won't be too profitable but still okay to be a smith.

Another thing I would like to see is the disjoint between metal prices, so that you won't get a price drop of iron when you sell steel, theoretically there would be a drop in product prices when the supply raw materials is adjusted by import, but the fact is market reactions does not happen that quick, and that's why its more profitable to increase output in short term when inflation is observed.
 
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