Completely unrelated to ores, but my headcannon for how bonemold is made is that the word 'bonemold' is both a portmantaeu and a pun that also describes how it's made. They make a cast for the shape of the armor they want to make, take some powderized bone, add some liquid fungal culture, and fill 'er up. Leave them to mature in a controlle climate for a few weeks, and voilà: somehow the mushroom they use does something to strengthen and stablize the bone into a lightweight form. Like weird cross between kevlar and those mushroom bricks that are still being tested for realworld construction.
Also not to forget the dunmer on Solstheim literally live in giant Limulus/Mesolimulus Shells. Giant horseshoe crab houses. The bonemold shield looks also like a horseshoe crab, i think.
Actually, ESO expands a little on malachite and glass. Buoyant Armiger style (the one that looks like Morrowind glass armor) uses Volcanic Viridian as a style material, even if the crafting motif book for this style is surprisingly useless in terms of describing how this armor is made. Viridian is what the game Morrowind referred to as "Raw Glass", although I don't know what it is in real life. Meanwhile ESO's Glass style, which is described as (in the crafting motif book) being of Summerset style (similar to Skyrim glass armor), uses malachite as a style material. Also, interestingly, even though ebony in ESO is a regular ore you can make leveling armor out of, there is also ebony style, which uses night pumice (kinda like obsidian I guess?) as a style material
I had no idea about this lore! I appreciate the ESO pull. I found it interesting that ebony style used pumice especially since they added crystals to an otherwise crystal-less mineral and just slapped "night" on it. I would even theorize that night pumice by looks is more related to tungsten than actual pumice. Though it's still total fantasy.
I think the best blacksmithing system in a game would have a fairly large selection of various minerals and metals, and like Skyrim's alchemy, give each of them a few properties, like durability, weight, hardness, and value, and then stick them in a sort of fantasy periodic table. Then allow players to combine the materials and sometimes it will fail (like alchemy in Skyrim), and maybe the player will create an armor that has very high durability (lasts a long time before needing repair), light weight (Faster movement in-game), has a lower armor value, and a high money value (being made with several rare materials) Could be pretty amazing if done right
Congrats you’ve given an idea to Bethesda where they can implement Gacha game tropes and cause players to rely on god rolling instead of any definite and meaningful progression.
Underrail is a turn-based CRPG that has a very elaborate and deep crafting system. You can craft items from dozens of different materials, and they will all provide unique upsides and downsides. There is at least four types of metals and alloys for crafting melee weapons and heavy armor that completely change the stats of crafted items. You can craft a shield from a psionic bug's chitin and get a bonus for casting your psi «magic». Add black cloth to your light armor to make yourself stealthier or kevlar for better protection against bullets. There is like more than a dozen types of leather from different creatures, and they all create a different type of leather armor with different uses. I would totally recommend checking that game, if you are interested in cool crafting systems.
Titanium has a similar tensile strength to low carbon steel, but about 40% lighter, aluminium can have alloys with similar strength as stainless steel, but those require zink, magnesium and chromium, but with these metals one could make a titanium alloy that is more than twice the strength of steel. On the other hand, there are steel-nickel alloys that surpass even that. So titanium as magical mineral that is lighter and stronger than steel checks out.
Really enjoying leftover lore. Where do you draw inspiration and choose different topics to deep dive into? Most of the stuff you discuss in your videos have gone over my head as a player. Well done bring new light upon some old games.
When I make a list of possible topics it has the specific goal of being something there is no clear answer in the lore community about it. It usually means there are few people searching for the vid but it makes it fun for me and the other TES nerds 🤓
Mannnn I have nothing much to contribute to the geology discussion, but I just wanted to say that I think atm, there isn't another UA-cam channel out there that I look forwards to uploading as much as yours. This rocked. Keep on keeping on :)
In a similar way to Ebony, Iron is named after Ironwood trees which are known for their hardness. Kinda odd that they name so many metals after plants. Bonus fact: Silver swords in Skyrim are named after Chris Silverwood, an English cricketer. This is because all swords in Skyrim were modelled on cricket bats.
What I love is that you mentioned just how awesome magnesium is for various applications. It's fairly strong and can alloy with an absolute mess of elements.
I always thought of Ebony and Glass armors as being akin to tempered glass, but much more so. E.g. instead of shattering, it would crack and flake, because the cracks don't travel as far or as fast through the material.
I collect elements, the color of corundum is extremely similar to the oxide coating that manganese almost always has (The metal is slightly more reactive than iron and is corroded easily.).
I don't mind imaginary magical/fictional minerals/metals in fantasy, but I do want there to be something believable in the world to make it feel grounded in it's own system. I think Skyrim does an alright job of smithing and its in-game realism. I think coal being needed for raw metals would have been much better to making different tiers of metals (like runescape) since the game needs more gold/item sinks so coal being buyable meterial from blacksmiths would have been nice. The ores' names are all fine, just wish there was more requirements to making the pieces to be more realistic based on the size of the ores. I just wish there was more customization with actually creating a weapon yourself, but that's a different story.
That's a great point! There's really nothing to the smithing progression except for rarity of new materials. It's just as easy once you unlock the right perk. I think you're on the right track with something similar to Runescape, even if it's as simple as needing extra power for smelting.
It just doesn't make sense that two different metals are easily smeltable in the same furnace with just an "ore". Having more sense of accomplishment when making something special would be nice it being more resources or finding the right tools to forge the metal. I don't want the game to be a smithing simulator, but Skyrim's biggest flaw is that all the systems it adds to the "TES formula" is fairly shallow so having a bit of depth in crafting would have been more immersive.
Geologist here. Malachite in Elder Scrolls is not really similar in any way to it’s IRL counterpart aside from being green. It’s not a volcanic mineral and is actually formed secondarily by oxidation of copper sulfides or onto some other surface from fluid that carries a lot of dissolved copper sulfides and carbonates (like limestone).
I went out of my way to change the crafting recipe for steel ingots in Skyrim. See, Skyrim has two forms of the "charcoal" item. One of them is a stick and to my knowledge, the only time it's ever used in the entire game is in the Thieves Guild quest line to get a rubbing of the falmer/dwemer rosetta stone from Markarth. But there also exists a sort of "chunk" of charcoal and I'm not even sure if it even exists in the worldspace. I made it so you can take firewood to a smelter and make charcoal chunks, and you use those with iron ore to create steel ingots.
Since we're on the topic of ore, I figured I'd toss in a question I had. If Ebony is considered Lorkhan's blood in myth, assuming Lorkhan is a unique case, what would Aedric blood be?
My thoughts on the mithril (as used in older ES games) is something closer to a titanium: Lighter than steel and stronger than it under the right circumstances, it would be the perfect identity for a sort of 'lost and forgotten' development of smelting and material working, that in history books would be identified as a singular ore-derived metal as opposed to something we here on Earth had to reverse engineer from its oxidized form.
titanium really has these properties. About 40% lighter than steel and with the right alloy it can have a strength more than twice that of stainless steel. On it's own it's close to low carbon steel and certain aluminum alloys. So might as well be that some ancient blacksmith stumbled upon a way to create a titanium alloy that got lost over time.
I personally prefer the idea that corundum is copper or something along the lines. It’s needed to make locks and other complex creations and is common in dwarven ruins. Which it could’ve been used for it’s thermal conductivity as a cheaper metal compared to dwarven metal (and yeah i know you can find all metals in the ruins. But unless someone corrects me i’m pretty sure iron and corundum show up the most, even in late game saves, suggesting they were common substitutes) and i feel that orichalcum is exactly as the fantasy describes. Sure the real world equivalent was likely a alloy, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for bethesda to be like “but what if it’s not” A mysterious metal that can only be truly unlocked when used with orc smithing techniques. That fits the idea of a mysterious metal that is lost to time
And Dwemer Metal is likely Bronze or Brass, with the added caveat of whatever tonal architecture they did making the metal chemically inert. (Since the metal is untarnished after thousands of years and the only way to get ingots is to melt down the scrap metal)
Dovahkiin: *Searches up Skyrim Ebony Deepthroat* Also Dovahkiin: *Smithing 100* "nice smelter you got there but damn what they doing to that ebony ingot?"
I love how Oricalcum started as exclusive a redgaurd thing and refrence to the Atlantis myth that bethesda used as the basis for a lot of the redgaurd lore. Than come skyrim hey oricalcum kind of sounds like it has orc in it must be an orc metal when morrowind and Oblvion orc armor was just high quality steel plate.
Because silver is used for weapons, and then for armor as well in ES Blades, and it doesn't seem to be used for coinage (unless that's what Dwemer coins are made of), it's likely a harder metal than real-world silver.
Rubies are corundum with chromium and sapphires are corundum with iron and titanium. Emeralds are beryl with chromium and vanadium. Amethyst is irradiated quartz with iron traces. Since we don''t have magic we can't know if TES moonstone is just regular moonstone in a world that has magic. I can believe that quicksilver ore is just silver or iron ore with a high mercury trace. And high iron might either be iron with very useful traces that doesn't need much added or just iron mined at a high place.
For me a perfect smiting system would be one where we could play around with metallurgy to create better or more unique ingots and alloys foe use in weapons
I would like if different materials would have different special properties, that way the decision between different materials isn't just purely Ebony, Daedric, etc. I would also like to have Light Armour, Medium Armour, and Heavy Armour available for each material type. And obviously different visual styles to switch between. Kinda like the motifs from ESO.
My fix, and I did mod the game to make it work (so it can't even be considered head canon), was to make "corundum" into copper and change the recipe for making steel to no longer include corundum (renamed to copper). I kept orichalcum ingots as is, but I changed the ore into coal deposits (can't make orichalcum from its ore (now coal) anymore. However, Orichalcum is now made by combining copper (so what used to be corundum) and steel. Since orichalcum IRL is an unknown/mythical ancient metal, we don't exactly know what a realistic recipe for it should be. But seeing as how it is likely to be copper-based, I put copper (previously called corundum) in there. Steel I added because one theory is that it may have contained a small amount of iron (not even theorized to be the second most prevalent metal in the mix, but the game doesn't have zinc, so I fudged it) but needing steel would give a nice progression gameplay-wise for the crafting material that is supposed to be right after steel. Steel's recipe changed to iron + coal and quicksilver was renamed to chromium. Some armor recipes change a bit too, e.g. gilded elven armor now uses gold rather than chromium (because it says "gilded" usually that means gold) and Steel Plate uses chromium instead of copper (I was going for chrome plated steel armor).
@@LeftoverPat Thanks, I do like trying to rationalize game mechanics so they fit more with RL, but unfortunately I just couldn't make sense of the metallurgy in skyrim (not that I completely fixed it either). Love your videos on TES btw.
Meanwhile, in Russian dub Skyrim, quicksilver is called Pb (Plumbum), ртутная руда. So we have someone somehow making the luquid metal into an ingot...
This is really nice, just a minor correction: hardness of any given mineral does not really impact how easily it can be molten. This is determined by... well, the melting point. E.g. Chromite (Chromium-containing mineral) has a higher melting point than Corundum and is softer.
I may be misremembering this, but I think an npc or a lorebook in Morrowind refers to glass armor as being made from volcanic glass, which may also be the raw glass. Maybe this could mean it was supposed to be a different material entirely from the malachite-glass of the 4th era? The raw glass in morrowind looks different from malachite ore as well
Fun fact about Elder Scrolls ebony: It can’t be alloyed any other metal due to how high its melting point is compared to other metals. An alloy containing ebony is extremely brittle, and thus effectively useless.
As said in the chat your assumption of the ores being uncomfortably pure is almost certainly wrong. Cast iron which has more carbon than steel used to just be called iron up into the industrial age and not only is the iron that was used in the iron but also stayed for larger thingd for a long time as things like church-bells had to be cast and steel would cool too quickly. This iron being both the impure iron ore as well as the iron ignots. Steel is similarly clearly not just iron and carbon as it would be by definition but rather a steel alloy (implying there's iron but not carbon or at least in much lesser degree in corundum) Basically all the ores and ignots are uncomfortably *im*pure which admittedly also makes it very hard to say which mixture of metals any ore has, but which fits great with the low level of technology exhibited in the elder scrolls games (aside from dwemer tech, but I wouldn't count that as they aren't a thing anymore and most of their knowledge is lost with them)
I appreciate this comment. I like how impure ores fit into the TES narrative as well. I had to think about this when writing, because the games did it to a point where the purities felt inconsistent to me. But what you are saying is another level of it - Iron ingots don't necessarily need to be pure in order to be iron ingots. But things like steel are, by definition, always an alloy. But in Skyrim, in goes an iron ore into the smelter, and out pops an iron ingot. Is that by definition pure?
@@LeftoverPat iron ore is by definition impure. Ore means the "pure" (and remember what we saw as pure changed over history as the ancient romans would still have smelted ore to purify it and definetly not reached levels of chemical purity we'd call pure today) form can be extracted/still needs to be extracted. If you just melt modern iron ore you'd get iron-oxide, we mix in carbon during the smelting process to get rid of the oxigen and we can do that so commonly since we have access to a lot of ores which are almost exclusively iron and oxigen like Siderite which is an iron ore where there's actually more oxigen than iron. If we didn't have the global market lots of places would have to resort to other ores and as such have other results when not processing it properly. Sure tamriel is pretty well connected between it's countries but nearly half of our world's iron ore comes from Australia so who's to say that tamriel even has good ore mines and they aren't all in akavir and yokuda?
Reading it again I feel like I worded it badly, I wanted to say: yesn't. it isn't pure by our definition, their definition of pure might be quite different as they wouldn't know better. They are very unlikely to have chemistry like we do (otherwise I'm sure the alchemy would also look very different) so they just wouldn't know of elements and as such see an ore which was cleared of some impurities which create slag as pure
@@theultimatefreak666 Great insight! I'm grateful for how in depth you're able to look into this. Imagine the periodic table of elements in a modern Tamriel....
@@LeftoverPat Saying "pure" metal means >99% of the mass of the ingot must be a single metal element. A pretty impossible task for the tech they use in Skyrim. btw iron ingots in Skyrim are most likely wrought iron. Can't be cast iron because it would be too brittle to make weapons and armor with. Considering the tech, it would have probably ~2% impurities/slag (quite dependent on Smith, time, location, etc.). As wrought iron, it would have less than 1% carbon content (higher carbon content would make it steel). So, an iron ingot in Skyrim would still be ~97% iron by mass. It's not that far from >99%, but you still wouldn't call it pure. UNLESS... blacksmithing 100 + legendary equipment improvement/crafting means your character removes all impurities lol
In some of my playthroughs, I mastered smithing to a degree much beyond legendary. At that point, the material you are using and the armor you make from it cease to matter once you upgrade your items...
Ore is ore, be it one piece or many pieces of thensame type or several different types of ore that differ in presented quantity. *Ore is just ore.* Mouth-breathers are stupid so they pretend ore are "ores," not realizing the phonetic folly of it becoming a homophone for "ours." They do the same with use of verbs that end in the suffix "s" when they misuse those verbs as "plural nouns," ie. fishes, waters, fuels, rapes, salts, peppers, soups, soaps.
@@kaiceecrane3884 it's a false use of the verb as "plural noun," one of the few points of downgrade from england dialects turning into superior aka American English.
id find it hilarious if a game had a very simple blacksmith system up until you get good enough to make decent armor. the better your smithing, the more complicated the mechanic gets it would explain why your gear is getting better
Real metallurgy is so incredibly complex and confusing that I think it would be very counterproductive trying to do it in a fantasy RPG in terms of gamedesign. What we have in most games is alright. You can get a bit deeper into it for some crafting survival games or factory sims. But doing it VERY realistically is only for dedicated simulators I'd say
Obviously take this with a grain [or an entire bucket, your choice] of salt, but I do believe that Mithril isn't even a metal, within the TES universe. I distinctly remember reading about it being connected to ancestor moth silk [hence the complete lack of mithril weapons, post-Daggerfall].
Something like that - Lorkan's heart literally impounding on Morrowind to make Red Mountain, ergo Ebony that exudes from it his blood. Then again, where'd the lava come from? It depends on your view I guess
I keep trying to find the real equivalent for ebony ore in real life and all they keep giving me is either wood or volcanic glass which is not true because in Skyrim it is a black metal stronger than iron
As someone who has gotten his degree in blacksmithing (and welding, assoc.) a lot of these games now irk me somewhat. But I understand not everyone wants to stand over an anvil and beat hot metal correctly, even though it is fun.
This rocks
it's about drive it's about power
jesus, they're Minerals!
rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks rocks
No, it rolls.
Took me until I was 15 years old to learn that ebony was, in fact, both _real,_ and _not_ a metal. Thanks, Todd.
i'm 16 and just found this out..
im 8 i just found dis out
Wait, ebony is not just a tag?
@@teIekid ayo 🤨📸
Lore-wise, it's actually a volcanic glass [deep-lore wise, it's the blood of a """dead""" god!]
Completely unrelated to ores, but my headcannon for how bonemold is made is that the word 'bonemold' is both a portmantaeu and a pun that also describes how it's made. They make a cast for the shape of the armor they want to make, take some powderized bone, add some liquid fungal culture, and fill 'er up. Leave them to mature in a controlle climate for a few weeks, and voilà: somehow the mushroom they use does something to strengthen and stablize the bone into a lightweight form. Like weird cross between kevlar and those mushroom bricks that are still being tested for realworld construction.
This is awesome!
According to an in-game text, Bonemold armor is made using resin as a binder.
Genius.
That's not too terribly far from being the case.
Also not to forget the dunmer on Solstheim literally live in giant Limulus/Mesolimulus Shells. Giant horseshoe crab houses. The bonemold shield looks also like a horseshoe crab, i think.
I would guess that because the world of nirn is 100% a magical creation, then the ore would probably be more pure than the real world ore.
I could definitely take that and roll with it
there are cat people lizard people and magic but ores not being 100% realistic is where i draw the line lmao
Actually, ESO expands a little on malachite and glass. Buoyant Armiger style (the one that looks like Morrowind glass armor) uses Volcanic Viridian as a style material, even if the crafting motif book for this style is surprisingly useless in terms of describing how this armor is made. Viridian is what the game Morrowind referred to as "Raw Glass", although I don't know what it is in real life. Meanwhile ESO's Glass style, which is described as (in the crafting motif book) being of Summerset style (similar to Skyrim glass armor), uses malachite as a style material.
Also, interestingly, even though ebony in ESO is a regular ore you can make leveling armor out of, there is also ebony style, which uses night pumice (kinda like obsidian I guess?) as a style material
I had no idea about this lore! I appreciate the ESO pull. I found it interesting that ebony style used pumice especially since they added crystals to an otherwise crystal-less mineral and just slapped "night" on it. I would even theorize that night pumice by looks is more related to tungsten than actual pumice. Though it's still total fantasy.
I think the best blacksmithing system in a game would have a fairly large selection of various minerals and metals, and like Skyrim's alchemy, give each of them a few properties, like durability, weight, hardness, and value, and then stick them in a sort of fantasy periodic table.
Then allow players to combine the materials and sometimes it will fail (like alchemy in Skyrim), and maybe the player will create an armor that has very high durability (lasts a long time before needing repair), light weight (Faster movement in-game), has a lower armor value, and a high money value (being made with several rare materials)
Could be pretty amazing if done right
I love this comment! I would wholeheartedly advocate for this
Feel like this would be great if done right or really finnicky and annoying if done wrong
Congrats you’ve given an idea to Bethesda where they can implement Gacha game tropes and cause players to rely on god rolling instead of any definite and meaningful progression.
That's just the Tinker's Construct mod for Minecraft.
Underrail is a turn-based CRPG that has a very elaborate and deep crafting system. You can craft items from dozens of different materials, and they will all provide unique upsides and downsides. There is at least four types of metals and alloys for crafting melee weapons and heavy armor that completely change the stats of crafted items. You can craft a shield from a psionic bug's chitin and get a bonus for casting your psi «magic». Add black cloth to your light armor to make yourself stealthier or kevlar for better protection against bullets. There is like more than a dozen types of leather from different creatures, and they all create a different type of leather armor with different uses.
I would totally recommend checking that game, if you are interested in cool crafting systems.
5:50 love seeing those Runescape ore models. Runescape was the only RPG I ever played before I tried Skyrim and really got into the whole genre.
Same! Runescape was my gateway into fantasy
Mithril is a light, silver-coloured metal stronger than steel, that is very difficult to obtain and to melt...
Mithril is Aluminium.
I thought Titanium would be a better comparison but I really don't know much when it comes to metals
@@chadwell69 Titanium can be Adamantium, as I understand, it is stronger han Mithril.
Wasn't Mithril spun rather than melted though? Basically mithril is asbestos.
Titanium has a similar tensile strength to low carbon steel, but about 40% lighter, aluminium can have alloys with similar strength as stainless steel, but those require zink, magnesium and chromium, but with these metals one could make a titanium alloy that is more than twice the strength of steel.
On the other hand, there are steel-nickel alloys that surpass even that.
So titanium as magical mineral that is lighter and stronger than steel checks out.
Oohohohh, looking forward to this
Why haven't I been notified of your new posts. I've missed your videos! Great work man!!
Same here! Pat was left over.. out.. of the algorithm. I'll show myself out
@@palmoftheface4969 *slow clap*
Really enjoying leftover lore. Where do you draw inspiration and choose different topics to deep dive into? Most of the stuff you discuss in your videos have gone over my head as a player.
Well done bring new light upon some old games.
When I make a list of possible topics it has the specific goal of being something there is no clear answer in the lore community about it. It usually means there are few people searching for the vid but it makes it fun for me and the other TES nerds 🤓
I found this video on Hank Schrader's liked videos.
10:10 Diamant is not only "old french", it's actually still the way it's said. Great video, loved it all!
Diamant is also spelled and pronounced the same way in danish. just a little fun fact, not really relevant
Mannnn I have nothing much to contribute to the geology discussion, but I just wanted to say that I think atm, there isn't another UA-cam channel out there that I look forwards to uploading as much as yours.
This rocked. Keep on keeping on :)
I always wondered about the wacky metallurgy in Elder Scrolls
Man, I love this channel. A real hidden gem in the world of video game documentaries.
I wonder what irons real life counterpart is
In a similar way to Ebony, Iron is named after Ironwood trees which are known for their hardness. Kinda odd that they name so many metals after plants.
Bonus fact: Silver swords in Skyrim are named after Chris Silverwood, an English cricketer. This is because all swords in Skyrim were modelled on cricket bats.
@@artyjnrii Please tell me your bonus fact is real
One of my favorite smaller YT channels. Very original, engaging content. Keep it up!
My god, this channel is a pure goldmine for worldbuilding inspiration and info
These videos are so entertaining and well made. Quality stuff.
hell yeah Manganese gang rise tf up
This video was brought to you by Manganese gang
What I love is that you mentioned just how awesome magnesium is for various applications. It's fairly strong and can alloy with an absolute mess of elements.
Yaaaaayyy!!! I like rocks
The ebony of The Elder Scrolls Is Lorkhan's solidified blood.
I always thought of Ebony and Glass armors as being akin to tempered glass, but much more so. E.g. instead of shattering, it would crack and flake, because the cracks don't travel as far or as fast through the material.
I am so hyped!
I collect elements, the color of corundum is extremely similar to the oxide coating that manganese almost always has (The metal is slightly more reactive than iron and is corroded easily.).
I like Plumed Archer easter egg : D
11
Ebony is apparently made from volcanic glass from red mountain
Very good video! I have a few pieces of obsidian and that shit breaks easy lol.
The dragon lair in the centre of Eastmarch is called a caldera, so your theory about a moving hotspot seems plausible!
Been here since your weather system video and love the lore analysis videos. Please keep it up, I genuinely enjoy your content!
That's dedication! Thank you
I never expected I would be this interested in rocks. Thank you. 👏
I think the most toughest ores should be alloys with specialized smithing techniques and technology. Like with Aetherium questline
Hes back!
I learn a lot more from these videos, i think it's because i'm more comfortable and familiar with elder scrolls things my entire life haha
The moonstone is the magical catalyst that keeps Quicksilver from turning into gas😂😂😂
Honestly, my favorite crafting system comes from the Minecraft mod Tinker's Construct, so I'd like to see something similar in future games.
Finally have a chance to give this video the watch it deserves! Glad to see you posting again! Welcome back 😊
Good video
I don't mind imaginary magical/fictional minerals/metals in fantasy, but I do want there to be something believable in the world to make it feel grounded in it's own system. I think Skyrim does an alright job of smithing and its in-game realism. I think coal being needed for raw metals would have been much better to making different tiers of metals (like runescape) since the game needs more gold/item sinks so coal being buyable meterial from blacksmiths would have been nice. The ores' names are all fine, just wish there was more requirements to making the pieces to be more realistic based on the size of the ores.
I just wish there was more customization with actually creating a weapon yourself, but that's a different story.
That's a great point! There's really nothing to the smithing progression except for rarity of new materials. It's just as easy once you unlock the right perk. I think you're on the right track with something similar to Runescape, even if it's as simple as needing extra power for smelting.
It just doesn't make sense that two different metals are easily smeltable in the same furnace with just an "ore". Having more sense of accomplishment when making something special would be nice it being more resources or finding the right tools to forge the metal. I don't want the game to be a smithing simulator, but Skyrim's biggest flaw is that all the systems it adds to the "TES formula" is fairly shallow so having a bit of depth in crafting would have been more immersive.
Could you please do some videos on minerals, usage, properties and history? you make all of this sound interesting to me
id love to travel tramrail to learn all blacksmithing secrets
Great stuff, man. Always a good day when you put out a new one of these.
I love your channel, the topics you talk about seem to me super interesting and curious.
Awesome content as always!
Thank you! love your pfp
They are MINERALS
Ore are they?
@@LeftoverPat mine are
@@gokce9521 👏🤣
Va-jai-n-ore du ore-e-face ore-anne-jiz...
SHUT IT!! NO I WON'T CALL ICE A MINERAL EVERRR
Great video.
Thank you!
@@LeftoverPat You are welcome.
This video is a treasure. Thank you for bringing us this and the dedication put on making it.
Man, if we could mine and smelt Dwayne Johnson it would make an armor stronger than daedric stuff
Dwayne Johnson is the 13th Daedric Prince
Nise to see the work ya put in, good edits too
I really like the production quality in your videos
This is the only es content I need
Geologist here. Malachite in Elder Scrolls is not really similar in any way to it’s IRL counterpart aside from being green.
It’s not a volcanic mineral and is actually formed secondarily by oxidation of copper sulfides or onto some other surface from fluid that carries a lot of dissolved copper sulfides and carbonates (like limestone).
Thank you for this clarification!
Dude I love these videos they are so sick
Actually in the German Version of Oblivion they translated the ebon weapons and armor to ebony wood.
I went out of my way to change the crafting recipe for steel ingots in Skyrim.
See, Skyrim has two forms of the "charcoal" item. One of them is a stick and to my knowledge, the only time it's ever used in the entire game is in the Thieves Guild quest line to get a rubbing of the falmer/dwemer rosetta stone from Markarth. But there also exists a sort of "chunk" of charcoal and I'm not even sure if it even exists in the worldspace.
I made it so you can take firewood to a smelter and make charcoal chunks, and you use those with iron ore to create steel ingots.
I just learned tungsten can be made black when mixed with a special type of titanium😂
Since we're on the topic of ore, I figured I'd toss in a question I had. If Ebony is considered Lorkhan's blood in myth, assuming Lorkhan is a unique case, what would Aedric blood be?
My thoughts on the mithril (as used in older ES games) is something closer to a titanium: Lighter than steel and stronger than it under the right circumstances, it would be the perfect identity for a sort of 'lost and forgotten' development of smelting and material working, that in history books would be identified as a singular ore-derived metal as opposed to something we here on Earth had to reverse engineer from its oxidized form.
titanium really has these properties. About 40% lighter than steel and with the right alloy it can have a strength more than twice that of stainless steel. On it's own it's close to low carbon steel and certain aluminum alloys.
So might as well be that some ancient blacksmith stumbled upon a way to create a titanium alloy that got lost over time.
Thank you
I personally prefer the idea that corundum is copper or something along the lines. It’s needed to make locks and other complex creations and is common in dwarven ruins. Which it could’ve been used for it’s thermal conductivity as a cheaper metal compared to dwarven metal (and yeah i know you can find all metals in the ruins. But unless someone corrects me i’m pretty sure iron and corundum show up the most, even in late game saves, suggesting they were common substitutes) and i feel that orichalcum is exactly as the fantasy describes. Sure the real world equivalent was likely a alloy, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for bethesda to be like “but what if it’s not”
A mysterious metal that can only be truly unlocked when used with orc smithing techniques. That fits the idea of a mysterious metal that is lost to time
And Dwemer Metal is likely Bronze or Brass, with the added caveat of whatever tonal architecture they did making the metal chemically inert. (Since the metal is untarnished after thousands of years and the only way to get ingots is to melt down the scrap metal)
@@Janoha17I'd go closer to "copper titanium alloy" for dwemer metal. Mostly due to it's colour and strength
Dovahkiin: *Searches up Skyrim Ebony Deepthroat*
Also Dovahkiin: *Smithing 100* "nice smelter you got there but damn what they doing to that ebony ingot?"
I love how Oricalcum started as exclusive a redgaurd thing and refrence to the Atlantis myth that bethesda used as the basis for a lot of the redgaurd lore.
Than come skyrim hey oricalcum kind of sounds like it has orc in it must be an orc metal when morrowind and Oblvion orc armor was just high quality steel plate.
Madness ore i want hear about that
Mithril is called quicksilver by the dwarves in toikens books
Because silver is used for weapons, and then for armor as well in ES Blades, and it doesn't seem to be used for coinage (unless that's what Dwemer coins are made of), it's likely a harder metal than real-world silver.
Rubies are corundum with chromium and sapphires are corundum with iron and titanium. Emeralds are beryl with chromium and vanadium. Amethyst is irradiated quartz with iron traces.
Since we don''t have magic we can't know if TES moonstone is just regular moonstone in a world that has magic.
I can believe that quicksilver ore is just silver or iron ore with a high mercury trace. And high iron might either be iron with very useful traces that doesn't need much added or just iron mined at a high place.
For me a perfect smiting system would be one where we could play around with metallurgy to create better or more unique ingots and alloys foe use in weapons
I would like if different materials would have different special properties, that way the decision between different materials isn't just purely Ebony, Daedric, etc.
I would also like to have Light Armour, Medium Armour, and Heavy Armour available for each material type.
And obviously different visual styles to switch between. Kinda like the motifs from ESO.
Totally agreed, how amazing would a more fleshed out system be? More motifs, custom tempering, plenty of errors to overcome...
Super interesting video well done
My fix, and I did mod the game to make it work (so it can't even be considered head canon), was to make "corundum" into copper and change the recipe for making steel to no longer include corundum (renamed to copper). I kept orichalcum ingots as is, but I changed the ore into coal deposits (can't make orichalcum from its ore (now coal) anymore. However, Orichalcum is now made by combining copper (so what used to be corundum) and steel. Since orichalcum IRL is an unknown/mythical ancient metal, we don't exactly know what a realistic recipe for it should be. But seeing as how it is likely to be copper-based, I put copper (previously called corundum) in there. Steel I added because one theory is that it may have contained a small amount of iron (not even theorized to be the second most prevalent metal in the mix, but the game doesn't have zinc, so I fudged it) but needing steel would give a nice progression gameplay-wise for the crafting material that is supposed to be right after steel.
Steel's recipe changed to iron + coal and quicksilver was renamed to chromium. Some armor recipes change a bit too, e.g. gilded elven armor now uses gold rather than chromium (because it says "gilded" usually that means gold) and Steel Plate uses chromium instead of copper (I was going for chrome plated steel armor).
Wow that is cool! The work you did to get there is admirable
@@LeftoverPat Thanks, I do like trying to rationalize game mechanics so they fit more with RL, but unfortunately I just couldn't make sense of the metallurgy in skyrim (not that I completely fixed it either). Love your videos on TES btw.
Meanwhile, in Russian dub Skyrim, quicksilver is called Pb (Plumbum), ртутная руда. So we have someone somehow making the luquid metal into an ingot...
Very interesting stuff!
This is really nice, just a minor correction: hardness of any given mineral does not really impact how easily it can be molten. This is determined by... well, the melting point. E.g. Chromite (Chromium-containing mineral) has a higher melting point than Corundum and is softer.
Orihalk is definitely copper. Even guard in Markath said that Dusnik is founded near old copper mine and ingame we will find there that green metal
Thanks
If Stahlrim is Pykrete was there ever an attempt to build an aircraft carrier out of it in TES?
I may be misremembering this, but I think an npc or a lorebook in Morrowind refers to glass armor as being made from volcanic glass, which may also be the raw glass. Maybe this could mean it was supposed to be a different material entirely from the malachite-glass of the 4th era? The raw glass in morrowind looks different from malachite ore as well
The only thing I can say is that I would love if TES VI makes iron and steel production more realistic. Maybe even having coke coal.
In the german Version they named it Ebony Ore.
Fun fact about Elder Scrolls ebony: It can’t be alloyed any other metal due to how high its melting point is compared to other metals.
An alloy containing ebony is extremely brittle, and thus effectively useless.
As said in the chat your assumption of the ores being uncomfortably pure is almost certainly wrong. Cast iron which has more carbon than steel used to just be called iron up into the industrial age and not only is the iron that was used in the iron but also stayed for larger thingd for a long time as things like church-bells had to be cast and steel would cool too quickly. This iron being both the impure iron ore as well as the iron ignots. Steel is similarly clearly not just iron and carbon as it would be by definition but rather a steel alloy (implying there's iron but not carbon or at least in much lesser degree in corundum)
Basically all the ores and ignots are uncomfortably *im*pure which admittedly also makes it very hard to say which mixture of metals any ore has, but which fits great with the low level of technology exhibited in the elder scrolls games (aside from dwemer tech, but I wouldn't count that as they aren't a thing anymore and most of their knowledge is lost with them)
I appreciate this comment. I like how impure ores fit into the TES narrative as well. I had to think about this when writing, because the games did it to a point where the purities felt inconsistent to me. But what you are saying is another level of it - Iron ingots don't necessarily need to be pure in order to be iron ingots. But things like steel are, by definition, always an alloy. But in Skyrim, in goes an iron ore into the smelter, and out pops an iron ingot. Is that by definition pure?
@@LeftoverPat iron ore is by definition impure. Ore means the "pure" (and remember what we saw as pure changed over history as the ancient romans would still have smelted ore to purify it and definetly not reached levels of chemical purity we'd call pure today) form can be extracted/still needs to be extracted. If you just melt modern iron ore you'd get iron-oxide, we mix in carbon during the smelting process to get rid of the oxigen and we can do that so commonly since we have access to a lot of ores which are almost exclusively iron and oxigen like Siderite which is an iron ore where there's actually more oxigen than iron. If we didn't have the global market lots of places would have to resort to other ores and as such have other results when not processing it properly.
Sure tamriel is pretty well connected between it's countries but nearly half of our world's iron ore comes from Australia so who's to say that tamriel even has good ore mines and they aren't all in akavir and yokuda?
Reading it again I feel like I worded it badly, I wanted to say: yesn't.
it isn't pure by our definition, their definition of pure might be quite different as they wouldn't know better. They are very unlikely to have chemistry like we do (otherwise I'm sure the alchemy would also look very different) so they just wouldn't know of elements and as such see an ore which was cleared of some impurities which create slag as pure
@@theultimatefreak666 Great insight! I'm grateful for how in depth you're able to look into this. Imagine the periodic table of elements in a modern Tamriel....
@@LeftoverPat Saying "pure" metal means >99% of the mass of the ingot must be a single metal element. A pretty impossible task for the tech they use in Skyrim.
btw iron ingots in Skyrim are most likely wrought iron. Can't be cast iron because it would be too brittle to make weapons and armor with. Considering the tech, it would have probably ~2% impurities/slag (quite dependent on Smith, time, location, etc.). As wrought iron, it would have less than 1% carbon content (higher carbon content would make it steel). So, an iron ingot in Skyrim would still be ~97% iron by mass. It's not that far from >99%, but you still wouldn't call it pure.
UNLESS... blacksmithing 100 + legendary equipment improvement/crafting means your character removes all impurities lol
I knew i loved Ebony
In some of my playthroughs, I mastered smithing to a degree much beyond legendary. At that point, the material you are using and the armor you make from it cease to matter once you upgrade your items...
0:15 I dub him Ghimriel, Master of the Forge.
Dwemer metal at least in Skyrim is supposed to be an equivalent of depleted uranium
Tungsten literally means "heavy-stone" in Swedish. Yes, the exact word.
Almost as ridiculous as Superman's neutron star key that's for some reason doesn't sink into the Earth's core😂
Wasn't the island of Roscrea the only source of Mithrail? Also I heard a theory that Ebony is the solidified blood of lorkhan.
quick question what do you study. like i see you have a good understanding in geopolitics, cultures, and metals
Orichalcum came from Yokuda. Yokudans used it before Orcs ever did.
Ore is ore, be it one piece or many pieces of thensame type or several different types of ore that differ in presented quantity.
*Ore is just ore.*
Mouth-breathers are stupid so they pretend ore are "ores," not realizing the phonetic folly of it becoming a homophone for "ours."
They do the same with use of verbs that end in the suffix "s" when they misuse those verbs as "plural nouns," ie. fishes, waters, fuels, rapes, salts, peppers, soups, soaps.
Surprising "fishes" is a technical term describing more than one species of fish
The ending of these words is ALMSIVI
@@kaiceecrane3884 nope fishes = actuvity the fisherman does in order to catch all the fish he can. The fish are never "fishes."
@@linyenchin6773 it's pretty easy to google, and many places agree on fishes
@@kaiceecrane3884 it's a false use of the verb as "plural noun," one of the few points of downgrade from england dialects turning into superior aka American English.
id find it hilarious if a game had a very simple blacksmith system up until you get good enough to make decent armor. the better your smithing, the more complicated the mechanic gets
it would explain why your gear is getting better
Real metallurgy is so incredibly complex and confusing that I think it would be very counterproductive trying to do it in a fantasy RPG in terms of gamedesign. What we have in most games is alright. You can get a bit deeper into it for some crafting survival games or factory sims. But doing it VERY realistically is only for dedicated simulators I'd say
Obviously take this with a grain [or an entire bucket, your choice] of salt, but I do believe that Mithril isn't even a metal, within the TES universe.
I distinctly remember reading about it being connected to ancestor moth silk [hence the complete lack of mithril weapons, post-Daggerfall].
isnt ebony hinted at being the crystalized blood of a god somewhere in the lore?
Something like that - Lorkan's heart literally impounding on Morrowind to make Red Mountain, ergo Ebony that exudes from it his blood. Then again, where'd the lava come from? It depends on your view I guess
I keep trying to find the real equivalent for ebony ore in real life and all they keep giving me is either wood or volcanic glass which is not true because in Skyrim it is a black metal stronger than iron
As someone who has gotten his degree in blacksmithing (and welding, assoc.) a lot of these games now irk me somewhat. But I understand not everyone wants to stand over an anvil and beat hot metal correctly, even though it is fun.
Isn’t like Ebony in Elder Scrolls literally the crystallized blood of a god?