SmelterUpgrades

Smelter Upgrades

Your workbench and forge get better when you build things next to them. Your charcoal kiln, smelter and blast furnace never did — they are exactly as slow on day 400 as they were on day 1, they hold a queue you cannot see, they happily accept the wrong ore, and they must be hand-fed forever.

This mod fixes all four, and gives your spare Surtling Cores something to do.

Upgrade pieces

Build these near a kiln or smelter and it gets better. The station's level and active bonuses show in its tooltip, and a spark stream connects each upgrade to the station it feeds — the same way a chopping block connects to a workbench.

| Piece | Station | Effect | Cost | Built at |

|---|---|---|---|---|

| Kiln Vents | Charcoal kiln | +25% speed, +15 wood | 5 Bronze, 10 Copper | Workbench |

| Wood Rack | Charcoal kiln | +15 wood | 15 Fine Wood, 5 Iron | Workbench |

| Smelter Bellows | Smelter | +25% speed, +6 ore | 10 Iron, 5 Troll Hide, 2 Chain | Forge |

| Ore Hopper | Smelter | +10 ore, +20 coal capacity | 10 Silver, 10 Obsidian | Forge |

| Furnace Tuyeres | Blast furnace | +25% speed, one coal a bar instead of two, +6 ore | 10 Black Metal, 10 Iron, 2 Chain | Black forge |

| Charging Ramp | Blast furnace | +10 ore, +20 fuel capacity | 20 Fine Wood, 8 Iron, 5 Black Metal | Black forge |

| Stoker's Chest | — | Feeds nearby stations | 10 Black Metal, 10 Linen Thread, 5 Iron | Forge |

Every upgrade raises its station's capacity as well as doing its own job. Build both kiln pieces and the kiln goes from 25 wood to 55. Build both smelter pieces and it holds 26 ore and 40 coal. Build both blast furnace pieces and it holds 26 ore and 40 coal — and burns half the coal getting through it.

Only one of each type counts per station, so you cannot ring a smelter with five bellows.

Recipes are deliberately spread across biomes — Black Forest through Plains — so upgrades are earned rather than free on your first day.

Lock a station to one input

Press N while looking at a smelter, kiln or blast furnace to cycle what it accepts: unlocked → each valid input in turn → unlocked. A smelter can be pinned to Copper Ore, a kiln to Fine Wood.

A locked station refuses everything else, and its item menu only offers what it wants — no more dropping tin into the iron smelter, or feeding your good wood to the charcoal pile.

You can see the lock from across the base. The ore's own icon floats at the spot you feed the station, so a row of smelters tells you what each one is set to without walking up and hovering every one. ShowLockIcon, LockIconSize, LockIconHeight and LockIconRange tune it or turn it off.

The key is rebindable in the game's own controls menu. It was G until the Deep North update took that key for the radial action wheel — if you had already rebound it yourself, your binding is kept.

Surtling Cores as fuel

Smelters and blast furnaces accept Surtling Cores as a high-grade fuel. One core is worth 4 coal and doubles smelting speed while it burns. The fuel tooltip shows how much core fire is left.

Cores also buy portals and smelters, so burning them is a real trade-off rather than free power.

Fuel is one pool, so once cores and coal are mixed the boost runs until the core fuel is spent rather than tracking individual cores.

See the queue

Hovering a station draws its input queue as item icons under the crosshair, grouped as icon x4, so you can tell what is actually in there without emptying it.

Stoker's Chest

A chest that quietly tops up every kiln, smelter and blast furnace in range with fuel and ore from its own inventory. It respects the ore lock and never overfills, and its Stations setting decides which stations it serves.

Configuration

Everything is configurable in BepInEx/config/zl.smelterupgrades.cfg — every bonus, every range, the core fuel value and speed multiplier, the feeding interval, and the hotkey.

Each upgrade piece also has a ModelPrefab setting if you would rather it wore a different model, and UseVanillaShader dr