I think that’s fair for Creo rituals, but not reasonable for Rego Magic.
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After yet another night to sleep on the applications of craft magic I believe that I have another use for craft magic or temporary charcoal: The production of lime. Lime is necessary to make quicklime, which in turn is an ingredient in mortar. Lime is made by burning certain types of rock in a fire. Which requires a lot of fuel, especially if you are building a large stone building, such as a castle for a covenant. IIRC Lime also has other uses.
It seems plausible to me that a covenant that wants to could have its entire mundane population housed in stone houses made by renting out items that work craft magic or otherwise replace the resource intensive parts of stone construction. Of course that presupposes that a covenant is at all interested in improving the quality of life for its covenfolk.
I love how the magic-assisted craftsmen in your saga snub their noses at normal craftsmen for being muggles yet the magic-assisted craftsmen have no magic of their own either. I am not saying it is unrealistic just funny.
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Making lime, yes, good use for temp fuel. Though IIRC lime was generally used right away, because lime will absorb water from the air over time (so it has a shelf life, so to speak - even modern cement has this problem), and quicklime is caustic. But for on the spot use, great use of Craft Magic.
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Hmm, for extracting a rock you plan to cook down anyways perdo might even be applicable...
even if you plan to use the lime right away it is still smart to cook it with conjured charcoal because it means you can build a large building without deforesting the area you live in.
@silveroak I think the problem is that cooking rock down into lime is IMO an improvement of the rock since you are making it more useful and as such it is hard to argue that Perdo is the technique of choice. Though I am not totally impervious to what you are saying since Perdo can also be used to excavate highly useful caves.
Yes, you can use perdo to excavate the caves and rego to craft it into quicklime, or creo to create the fuel to cook it down. The fuel route is probably the most efficient since an enchantment to create fuel on a regular basis is more flexible than an enchantment to cook quicklime, but the rego method would be faster and require less manpower, so it is of course a tradeoff.
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Another great use for industrial magic is brickmaking. Fairly simple as Craft Magic goes (single step from clay to finished bricks), and ruined bricks can be ground up and recycled (with more magic) almost trivially.
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Would there be any difference when crafting items if they were described mathematically rather in terms of a manufactured product? Instead of using ReTe craft magic to make a stone block of an approximate specified size, as if cut by a skilled worker, the spell would shape the provided stone into a rectangular solid with precise dimensions.
I suspect that the caster would need Hermetic Geometry and a Cr requisite, but the Finesse check would go entirely away, every block (or brick, plank, ingot, &etc.) would have identical dimensions to the rest. Additional spells would still be necessary to season the wood, check for flaws in the stone, and so on, but the actual shaping could be reliably done by an unskilled peasant with a lesser enchantment.
The only real answer here is YSMV- I can certainly see an argument for the stone being a natural substance that you are simply creating in a simple shape, in fact if you had an appropriate sigil it wouldn't (to my mind) even be a question. On the other hand some SG may see a rectangular block as something that requires crafting to get just right, which also brings up questions of what's your six sigma (roughly speaking tolerance for variation)
One of my players came up with an ingenious solution to this:
Just casting rock of viscid clay repeatedly to fill Standard wooden proofing troughs during the day, and using these standardised blocks for construction.
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We did something very similar in an old (2nd/3rd ed) saga.
MuTe(Aq) can fill molds as well...
Yes Rock to Viscid Clay in an amazingly useful spell. Make bricks, make mortar (better with a Sun duration version for mortar, but still good) out of otherwise useless, unworked rocks. Fill the space between coursed stone with solid stone. Stone bowls, stone jars, stone tables - heck, stone tunnels without nearly as much backbreaking work.
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if you can add the Aq component it gets easier- have holes in the top of the mold for the liquid rock to pour into, viscous clay just makes it moldable with your hands. Rocks to water lets you form cast stone without the heat you would use for metal processes...
I have thought about this too.
IMO it opens up a whole different style of construction since you can cast "Rock of viscid clay" transport the now clayified rock and throw it down where you need it, maybe even cast "Rock of viscid clay" on the site where you want to deposit your clayified rock so that you can fuse two bits of rock together and that way build a structure out of solid stone. No masonry, no mortar required, no seams or fault lines just one solid block of rock. This would open up some possibilities for magical architecture that are simply not possible for mundanes.
Building like this would also be much easier since you can give a laborer a basket and throw as much clayified rock in the basket as the laborer can reasonably carry and have them haul quarried stone bits at a time where a mundane quarry would have to quarry large blocks and use teams of laborers and sleds/wagons and pack animals to move large rocks. Kind of like an ikea set but for a large masonry block.
Unless you can use target:part this is going to eventually result in buildings melting under their own weight or the spell failing due to target size. Essentially you would be replacing craft;masonry with craft:pottery
conveniently "Rock of viscid clay" happens to have target:Part.
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Convenient, neh?
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Bit of background. Current game is centered on a Covenant located in a Regio on Levant Island. When we founded it, we started the "Landen Trade Consortium" that used the island as their base. This provided a cover and easy way to bring supplies in. Now just over 100 in game years later, Landen is a large village with the consortium, docks, shipyard, and a massive trade inn (more of a resort hotel type thing). The area south of Landen is taken up by a large walled garden (with entrance to Regio), orchards, paddocks & barns, and a man (err... magic) made pond where lots of fresh water delicacies are raised (eels, crayfish, river crabs, snails). In other words, things that are vermin.
Background done, on to the magical industries, or more precisely the magically augmented industries. Also we tried to avoid craft magic and finesse issues.
The walled garden and surround areas (pond, orchard, animal paddocks) are actually for providing support to Landen rather than for trade. The orchards have a wand that bring trees from seed to mature in a day, used to replace dead trees and help expand. The walled garden has an enchanted device that causes all plants growing within it to be healthy. The pond has an invested device that summons varies materials from which the desired vermin spawn every day. All minimal but effective.
Trade is our largest money maker, but does not really use much direct magic. However, the ships themselves are build by the highly magical shipyard and have their location tracked by arcane connection in our Covenants map room. Additionally there is communications capability between the headquarters and larger ships by enchanted slates. You write on one in chalk and it appears on the arcane connected twin. They do have two magic cranes (Zeus Arm from TtA), lots of Unseen Porter items for moving things, warding against rot & vermin, and three of our "Landen Portals", one each in their three large warehouses.
Now the shipyard and its support is where things get wonky. Like the trade, they have magic cranes and unseen porters. They have a whole ton of tools that produce a Herbam variant of "Rock of Viscid Clay" (with unlimited daily usage and 2 minute duration). This allows them to produce hulls that are basically a single laminated piece of wood, as well as easily patching and upgrading ships. They have enchanted items to produce variants of 'Ink of Noblest Metals', two which work on brass (used to paint the under hull of the ships) and two which work on quartz (used to paint from the brass up). They also have a few tools with variants of "Rock of viscid clay" that work on brass, which are use when making and modifying the fittings & rigging. Their wood comes from a grove grown with those seed to mature wands. This gets around the stuck on a (large) island limit of woodland.
The sail and rigging manufacturing uses two magical effects: a Rego powered wheel (as seen in Hermetic Projects) with the work is done by actual craftsmen and more of those modified "Rock of viscid clay" effects to make the sails/rope one piece rather than a weave (and connect ropes directly to the sails).
The varies wood and brass working tools allow the creation of the complex mast found on some of their ships, which are a crab claw design with multiple spars.
Without digging up the actual files, there are mid-high 20s enchanted devices used in the shipyard and its supporting operations. The ships produced are much closer to modern day fiberglass/metal hulled sail boats in performance then sailing ships of the era.
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I have noticed that city and guild does not have a bulk price for stone, even though stones frequently were shipped from one place to another due to differences in quality of stone (for example Croatia has a particularly nice limestone which is nearly marble that was highly desired with a great deal going to Venice...)
It seems like quite an oversight. I understand the reflex of "stones, just go pick them up" but that was, simply speaking, not ho it worked then any more than it is now, with large quarries and markets for types of rock.
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