furnaces

Following the changes to the way furnaces work (and other things it seems) by FacePunch, I’ve gradually discovered LOTS of problems with plugins interacting with each other to cause strangeness and I’m still not totally convinced I’ve found all of them.

So, pre wipe I was using PowerSmelt for smelting things and it’s worked fine to speed up smelting times since I bought it. After the wipe I discovered it now wouldn’t play nicely with camp fires after the protocol change, so I removed it and of course smelting went to shit. With a lot of trial and error today I finally worked out it was one setting that caused the food cooking problem. It was the ability to cook meat in furnaces. I’ve now removed that very nice ability.

“Cook In Meat Furnaces”: false,

However, while trying to get smelting working at higher speeds, I purchased another plugin, Oxidation’s Smelting Controller. That is now currently the plugin controlling smelting as of 6.00pm GMT/BST today. I’ve tweaked and tested and compared it against PowerSmelt until it’s working in a very similar way. Fast smelting of everything (x10 furnace etc multiplier) plus short cooking times, and longer smelting of Sulfur. Yeah don’t argue, we’ve always done it like that because PvP servers are x10 and too much easy to access boom-boom means 1 or 2 players raid everybody and clear the server of other players. (Also see offline raid protection to help prevent that – it seems to be working in most cases.)

You may need to restart your furnaces / campfires / barbecues to get the faster speeds.

While this has all been going on over the weekend, in an attempt to make the furnaces work like they used to, I also purchased the FurnaceReturns plugin despite the dev saying it needed PowerSmelt (or similar) to burn multiple stacks at once. Which seemed a bit strange to me as there’s nothing in the PowerSmelt config that implies it does that. So today I’ve been testing that out with the PowerSmelt plugin on the Clans server.

I can’t get it to work – it’s a different interface (like the old one) but it still only burns one stack at a time. I feel there’s probably another plugin interacting with PowerSmelt and FurnaceReturns preventing it from working properly. I’ve raised the issue with the dev of FurnaceReturns and I’m waiting for him to get back to me.

So… this is all ongoing furnace related stuff and it’s not a final answer. I have the feeling if enough players F7 report a bug and complain in forums, then FacePunch might do something about it and make it so that multiple additional slots are available and they all burn at the same time again. I don’t have a lot of confidence in this, but it might happen.

Just know that I am trying to make things better again. 🙂

There will be additional test, tweaks and changes until I’m satisfied.