{"id":70766,"date":"2022-04-10T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2022-04-10T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=70766"},"modified":"2022-04-09T09:48:33","modified_gmt":"2022-04-09T13:48:33","slug":"qotd-most-mmorpg-portrayal-of-iron-working-is-incredibly-unrealistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/04\/10\/qotd-most-mmorpg-portrayal-of-iron-working-is-incredibly-unrealistic\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Most MMORPG portrayal of iron-working is incredibly unrealistic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron production from the mine to a finished object, be that a tool, a piece of armor, a simple nail, a weapon or some other object. And I want to stress that broad framing<\/strong>: iron was made into more things than just<\/em> swords (although swords are cool). If you are here wondering how you go from iron-bearing rocks to a sword, these posts will tell you, but they will equally get you from those same rocks to a nail, or a workman’s hammer, or a sawblade, or a pot, or a decorative iron spiral, or a belt-buckle, or any other of a multitude of things that might be produced in iron.<\/p>\n

Iron production is a unique topic in one key way. If the problem with farmers<\/a> is that the popular understanding of the past (either historical or fantastical) renders them effectively invisible<\/a> \u2013 as indeed, it tends to render most<\/em> ancient forms of production invisible \u2013 iron-working is tremendously visible, but in a series of motifs that are almost completely wrong<\/em><\/strong>. Iron is treated as rare when it is common, melted in societies that almost certainly lack the furnaces to do so; swords are cast when they should be forged, quenched in ways that would ruin them and the work of the iron-worker is represented as a solitary activity when every stage of iron-working, when done at any kind of scale, was a team job (many modern traditional blacksmiths work alone, often as a hobby; ancient smiths generally did not). The popular depiction is so consistently wrong that it doesn’t really even provide a firm basis for correction. We are going to have to start over, from the beginning<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In most video games, if you are looking to produce some iron things, the first problem you invariably have is finding some iron ores<\/em>. Often iron is some sort of semi-rare strategic resource<\/a> available in only certain parts of the map<\/a>, something that factions might fight over. Actually finding some iron might be a serious problem.<\/p>\n

Well, I have good news for historical<\/em> you as compared to video game<\/em> you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust<\/a>, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces \u2013 and I mean this very literally \u2013 a billion tons<\/em> (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. And that’s the point<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just so damn abundant<\/em>. Of course iron can be used to make better<\/em> tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was cheap<\/em>. Now, as we’ll see, while the abundance of iron makes it cheap, the difficulty in working it poses technological problems; that’s why the far rarer and also generally inferior (to proper, work-hardened, heat-treated iron or steel; bronze will often exceed the performance of unalloyed iron) copper and bronze were used first: harder to find, easier to work. […]<\/p>\n

Very small amounts of iron occur on earth as pure “native” metal; the term for this, “meteoric iron<\/a>” is an accurate description of where it comes from (there is also one known deposit of native “telluric iron<\/a>“); in practice, the sum total of these iron sources is effectively a rounding error on the amount of iron an iron-age society is going to need and so “pure” iron may be disregarded as a meaningful source of iron.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2020-09-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron production from the mine to a finished object, be that a tool, a piece of armor, a simple nail, a weapon or some other object. And I want to stress that broad framing: iron was made into more things than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,7,41,15,663],"tags":[1299,1457,859,1459,192,678],"class_list":["post-70766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-history","category-quotations","category-technology","category-weapons","tag-bladedweapons","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-manufacturing","tag-metalworking","tag-mmorpg","tag-swords"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ipo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70766"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72921,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70766\/revisions\/72921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}