Right- but what I was really asking was how do you communicate that effectively- to your players especially! A few years ago, I couldn't- not specifically enough at least. Even now I only have a vague idea of how to express this baseline. Obviuosly the game doesn't need a dissertation on historical advancements in metallurgy but...
Note that although Creation
has steel, it's the steel of traditional Japanese smithing techniques. It makes good swords only because it's a belaboured and drawn out process that focuses all the best qualities of the steel where it needs to go while spreading the flaws as evenly as possible, that way making a sword that is actually useful, instead of a disaster waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, while this steel is good enough for swords after
tons of work, and lower grade steels are used for armour, trying to use this steel for any pressure containment vessel that's actually
useful has a habit of resulting in a load bang and flying shrapnel.
This is mostly because, well, while real life has very high quality mundane steels that make most of the older steel alloys look weak, Creation has viable alternative alloyants; the magical materials. And quite frankly, if you are tossing any of
those into the mix, you might as well go straight for direct essence manipulation, as that lets you do things like 'breaking the laws of thermodynamics, including the conservation of mass and energy.'
To Creation, any steam engine they can build is a
vastly under performing fire-to-Essence-to-work converter.
