Difficulty (medium); Land requirement (medium); Versatility (high)
Prepare to live in a cave my friend and forget the warm feeling of the sun on your face. You are about to empty the belly of this world to make wonderful machines and buildings. Every profession is important, but smelters are key players to rise from a primitive tier 1 society to one with hope of defeating the asteroid.
Many players of Eco will tell you smelting is a hard job, but it is actually a medium one in my opinion. The difference lies primarily in how individualist or cooperative you play you role as well as the design of your smelting infrastructure. Any job is hard if you keep everything you produce for yourself and spend days placing dirt ramps down to bedrock.
Friendly word of advice : I will add without resentment and in full honesty that through the years, the world of smelters is where I found the most emotionally challenged and self-centered players. Seriously, you will meet a lot of decent and nice people in Eco but the worst stories of aggression and bullying I got are from smelters/late engineers. If you are new to the game, take good care not to settle too close to other smelters because many will not react in a good way.
In any cases, smelter is a useful profession for the entire duration of the game and puts you in the best position to contribute to late and fun industrial projects.
Planning your location is important. You will need a lot of iron and it is found safely in the desert. You may also check for mountains nearby since they are good source of copper and gold : claim 2 lands near your planned entrance to communicate your intentions. Flat desert surrounded by forest is also prime space for a town, which reduce transport for everyone and increase your chances of support. Lastly, you want to install your factory close to water and without farms nearby since your blast furnace will need access to water and inevitably contaminate the water for a while. The smog caused by the blast furnace needs to go out somewhere and, again, you need to plan where it will be released before settling.
Hint: check for the best prickly pear sites and avoid them if you can.
Claiming a 4x4 is often enough for few days depending on how many hours you play per day and the population of the server (and upgrade modules!!). It is tempting to claim huge land space, but it may also spook many useful partners away, including chefs who can really help you cut down on these long mining hours. Take time to see where iron is found in your biome, because there might be more than what you see at first sight.
Smelting usually begins with the mining skill. Your bloomery and anvil need advanced upgrade modules to be efficient, which means pottery and glassworking skills. This is later in the game, although I must admit the most common route seems to be mining, then smelting. You may pick basic engineering as it allows you to craft your own mining equipment, cart and decent items for trade. Other smelters go with masonry and make their own bloomery and most furniture. Masonry is also useful to make your underground infrastructure.
An uncommon path is to delay smelting and work to get glass. Glass will get you access to tier lvl 2 buildings and be a good output for your excess crushed stones later in the game. It also help you make advanced modules. So you can see there are lot of paths, but also a lot of opportunities to trade and work with other players.
After these alternative choices, most smelters will attempt to pick the advanced smelting skill at some point. They might take mechanics for themselves and continue on the engineering path, although getting most of the engineering skills (royal flush) is risky if you don’t want to end up alone.
You will find here few ideas about your role at each era. Of course, Eco is a simulation and a sandbox game, so I encourage you to experiment other paths.
There is practically no need for iron during this era and the next one: most players focus on getting a home. Picking mining is handy since you improve right away a core skill, prepare your infrastructure and sell excess stones in exchange for food and mining equipment. Sand found in the desert and stones will be needed by early masons and they can help you to make mortared stones for your home. You may crush some ore and stockpile them. If you pick masonry or basic engineering, you may want to follow the masonry guide or the engineering guide.
Your role is to provide iron but again, the tier 1 era doen't need much of it. In fact, the most early useful item that requires iron is the hand plow. Later in the tier 2 era, you might want to make some tools available. But please hold your horse a bit since there are no upgrade module to smelt effectively yet and you will be spending from 3 to 5 more time and lands than necessary. If you picked mining, you may get carpenters to sell you basic upgrade modules 3 at a decent price. The modules will lower tailing production and increase sand output. Crushed stones and/or sand help road construction and mortar production and are great assets to collaborate with an engineer.
Your best choice often remains to stockpile crushed ore early on. In fact, patient and efficient teams avoid iron production altogether at this point, except maybe for one primary iron tool for every team member. They focus on pottery, glassworking and other projects. You may work on your house, your tailing pit and add a little tool repair shop that won't take ages to manage. Also, keep in mind that facilitating a lumber rush without upgrade modules often leads to ecological disasters and is likely to favor only the carpenters early on. The same goes for chefs who may work very fast to get cooking, but may not have the resources to sustain the server anyway. Again, only them might benefit from the XP as long as efficient farmers AND hunters/butchers are not ready to provide. Briefly, smelters hold a key to the tier 2 age and opening the door too soon or too late will have impact on your community. This is a general scenario, of course, and each server has it's own story. In fact, it is common to see at least one dedicated smelter produces iron at day 2 and attempt to sell it for a high price: it does work very well with noobs carpenters.
Drilling equipment can be very handy to help your community find hidden coal and limestone. Some players have fun hunting for minerals and you are the only one who provide this equipment. Speaking of currency, tier 2 buildings are coming and other people will expect help from a smelter and miners for the mint project. You have both skills…
Your community can greatly benefit from iron tools so this should be your first priority once you get advanced modules. This is particularly true for the switch from campfire food to tier 2 food. Resources needed in these recipes cost a lot more. Along with the tailor (some clothes reduce calories spending), your role is to reduce calories spending so that every players can afford better food and we avoid famine. This being said, don't be shy to share these nice advanced modules 3 with others.
Next, iron is an important resource and other players will expect you to have a steady production of it, including some iron pipes. If you have not done it yet, it's your chance to play an entrepreneurial role and hire players to pick stones and dig a tailing pit. If you picked glass working, basic engineering or masonry, make sure your still do your job and allow people to get access to these skills if need be.
Your role continues until the end of the game: iron, steel, copper and gold. Sell a lot of iron pipes and continue to provide tools, especially steel tools when you can. Hopefully you settled at a good place and installing your blast furnace will be quick. Speaking of which, you might want to do mechanics yourself or work with another player and focus on advanced smelting instead. In both cases, you will have to keep iron production high and include copper and gold in your planning later. Get access to the nearest assembly line because the cement kiln and some cool tools are there for your skill. Look at your blast furnace too and make sure every item is available to others, especially the modern upgrades. Lastly, look for corrugated steel items and flat steel at the rolling mill (industrial table).
Here, many players who work alone find the game increasingly difficult and grinding, mainly because they want to keep iron and steel for their own projects. But the wheel of Eco turns better if you keep in mind the flow of resources: allowing others to buy your products, making contracts and hiring fairly is not only a way to make your job easier, but also a way to keep people around you active and motivated. Estimate how much time a task would take you (without a skill) and it’s cost in calories. Give it to anyone with a good reputation. Have people build, transport, install pipes, get coal, etc. Make sure you collaborate with other miners, since complementary level 6 perks are gold (and they can actually get gold and copper as well). Resist the urge to make people work for you instead of with you and this will go well. Basically, your role is to keep things running in the metal business until the end.
A lot of iron is needed and some players have spare time because of their profession (in Eco). A community mine helps to keep these players busy, speed up industrialization and help reduce the cost of iron-based items for everyone. A community mine can take less than an hour to set with the mining skill: all you need is a cute entrance, stairs or ladders, a tiny stockpile to allow people to transport resources to their cart at the surface and mortared stones at the ore level to indicate where the floor ends.
This community project aims to get all the gold ore needed to set up the mint and banks. When done properly, it is a particularly rich project to foster cooperation on the server. Copper found can be fed to mechanics research. Your mining skill is obviously useful here and you can make the drills to increase chances of success.
As a smelter, you own a lot of iron that mechanics want. The problem is that once a mechanics make his private assembly line, others tend to disappear from the server. The remaining players who do not have access to these machines will have concerns if the players who holds all the means of production for the industrial era has not been particularly open to collaboration before. An easy solution is to convince a mechanic to make the machines for you (or the government buys them) and then install them in a public workspace so that every player can use them.
The same community approach can be used at each era for other skills/machines. Players who use the public space bring their own resources (hum... the iron you sell them) and make contracts so that players with specific skills add their work. Read about the Fab Lab project for more.
This project is rare as it needs several industrial players to be close together. If this happen, you may invite your neighbors to work collectively on a water treatment plant. You may then share the burden of the pipe infrastructure, machines and electricity.
It is a good idea to own a tool shop where people brings you used tools and get repaired ones. However, there are risks in having this kind of shop when a common currency is in place. The alternative is to have a separate shop which uses a barter system. Buy broken tools for 0.01 credits, iron bars for 1 credit and sell repaired tool for 0.01 credit plus the amount of iron used to repair the tools. Then, sell iron bars and new tools at your regular shop nearby.
Use ladders and cleverly spaced stockpiles and you will use efficiently every plot of land you own. Basically, dig vertically instead of laying down ramps and take advantage of stockpile distance to move your stuff. Note that there is often more than one vein of iron in the desert. Every time I dig a tailing pit near bedrock and find generous iron layers, I know it will be a good game.
Place your foundry underground and design effective setup using stockpiles. Underground blast furnace can be easily linked to water through the iron layer closest to water and there will be no ugly tube on the surface. Strategically placed stockpiles above and under your foundry can yield and automatic store which sells iron on the surface and distribute tailing deep below. If there is a public mine nearby, you may even build and underground store to make things easier : the dwarven city.
Other players can be handy source of iron too. This is especially true for farmers and carpenters who own lands in grassland region where small iron deposits are frequent. Allow them to bring iron and crushed iron to your shop so they have an extra job, they can contribute to your industry and they will lower the price of their iron tools (allow them = fair price) .
Offer neighbors a link to your pipe system for a price. Other players players need pipe infrastructure, much like your blast furnace. Offer them a one shot link and gain back a significant part of your investment. This is another good reason to have players near your base.
Avoid taking every late engineering skill. It is tempting to sit on your iron stock and move to mechanics, industry, etc. Yes it gives control and allow you to do everything alone, but alone is exactly what you will be. If this is your thing, why not playing a solo game instead and come back later.
Your blast furnace produces smoke, but there are many ways to use this animation in a funny way. Use your imagination: this game is more than just trading for virtual money and working in the mine.
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