Casting

Casting is where the melt becomes items. Molten metal fills a mold from the canal run, the cast cools in place, and a plain right-click hands over the finished piece. The rules that catch people are the two either side of that: a mold under an open pour does not cool at all, and a mold holding liquid metal burns you and spills the moment it leaves your hand.

The molds

This mod adds three ceramic molds, clay-formed and fired like any vanilla tool mold.

mold	units to fill	yields
plate ceramic mold	200	1 metal plate
double ingot ceramic mold	200	2 ingots
quad rod ceramic mold	400	4 rods

Vanilla tool molds work too: any toolmold-* block sits on a pedestal and takes 100 units unless its own definition says otherwise. The two large molds, the anvil and the helve hammer, do not fit a pedestal; they go under a Molten Canal (Tap) instead, and the game says "This mold is used with the mold pedestal." or "This mold will not fit on the pedestal." when you try the wrong one.

An admin can switch any of the three added molds off; see Commands and config. A mold that is switched off stops yielding a casting at once, even one already placed and full; its clay-forming recipe and its in-game handbook entry go on the next world load.

Filling a mold

On a Molten Canal (Mold Pedestal):

1. Sneak and right-click with the mold in hand to place it. Sneak and right-click again to take it back.
2. Sprint and right-click to start the pour. The pedestal severs itself from the run while it is shut, so nothing fills behind a closed pedestal.
3. The mold fills from the pedestal's own cell, which fills from the run, until it is full or the run runs dry.

On a Molten Canal (Tap), for a barrel or one of the large molds, the keys are the same: sneak and right-click to park or take the barrel or mold, sprint and right-click to toggle the pour. The tap drains 20 units per second.

Cooling

Every unit that lands in a mold arrives at the temperature of the cell feeding it and restamps the whole cast to that temperature. A mold under an open pour therefore does not cool: it sits at the canal's temperature until it is full, until the run empties, or until you shut the pour. Only then does the clock start.

Cooling itself runs on the item stack, so it keeps running whether the mold is on a pedestal, under a tap, in your hand or on the ground. A cast is finished when it is hardened, below 30 per cent of the metal's melting point: 445 C for iron, 451 C for steel.

That is the whole of the answer to why a canal-fed cast takes so much longer than a crucible pour. The crucible pours a fixed amount of metal at crucible temperature and stops; the canal keeps topping the mold up at furnace temperature, which takes it from about 3 minutes to cool by crucible to around 70 real minutes fed by canal. Stage a run's molds in advance: count them before you tap, not after. Taking a mold off its pedestal and setting it on the ground takes it out of the pour and gets it cooling.

Getting the casting out

• Full and hardened: right-click with an empty hand. You get the plate, ingots or rods and the empty mold stays where it is.
• Anything else: right-click picks up the mold itself with its contents. A mold holding liquid metal comes up only into an empty active hand, and the game says "The metal is still liquid! Take the mold with an empty hand." otherwise.

Carrying a filled mold

Two rules, both enforced once a second on the server:

1. Metal above 200 C burns you at 1 health per second while you hold the mold, unless you are wearing heavy leather gloves or a blacksmith's gloves. Tongs do not help; a mold is held in both hands.
2. Liquid metal only rides in your active hand. A mold with liquid metal in any other slot, a backpack, a chest or a mold rack loses its contents at once: The molten metal spilled out of the mold! Switching to another hotbar slot spills the one you just left.

A cast that has cooled past liquid is safe to stash; the spill rule only looks at metal that is still liquid, and the burn rule only at metal over 200 C.

What goes wrong

The mold burned me. No gloves. Heavy leather gloves or a blacksmith's gloves, in the hands slot.

The metal vanished out of the mold. It was in a slot other than the active one, on a rack, or in a container. Carry a liquid mold in your hand and set it down.

The mold will not go on the pedestal. It is an anvil or helve hammer mold, which is cast under a canal tap.

The mold sits under the tap but never fills. The pour is off, or the tap's own cell has frozen. A tap keeps filling a barrel whose contents have set, but it stops filling a mold that has hardened, because a hardened mold is a finished cast.

Right-clicking gives me the mold instead of the casting. The cast is not both full and hardened yet, or the mold type has been disabled on the server.

Ceramic molds are the route in 0.9.8.