I am currently leveling up my Engineering (currently 140) which involves a lot of Wyrdwood Planks and Iron Ingots. I was talking to a Company member who had recently hit 200 Engineering and I was complaining about the Charcoal requirement for smelting and how much of a pain it is to chop down endless trees to refine into Timber > Lumber > Wyrdwood and then having to go back out and cut down trees again to make Charcoal and he made a great suggestion:
We currently have a T5 Forge in our Company owned town. It would be a huge quality of life change if the higher tier of crafting station would reduce low level resources to use it. It would make sense that a high quality forge would be well insulated and remain hot, making it unnecessary to contently add charcoal to keep it hot. So here is my suggestion for Smelting that could be applied to the other stations in some capacity:
Tier 1-2 Smelter requires 2 Charcoal to craft an ingot, Tier 3-4 requires 1 Charcoal and a Tier 5 would require 0.
The Devs have already made adjustments to prevent overlapping resource requirements in the last patch:
Please continue to reduce the amount of resource overlap in crafting. I understand that we need high effort\time\money to level up crafting trade skills, but 100% of the people I have talked to absolutely hates the charcoal part of smelting.
Thanks for your time