I know in earlier version the Ingot Press would give as many as 4 ingots per ore. In my current playthrough I'm only getting 2 ingots for anything I smelt despite having level 7 Smithing (through smithing and clockwork knight). When/did this get nerfed or am I experiencing a bug?
They nerfed it a while back. Now, you get a max of two ingots per ore when you have one point of or .
This was actually a really good change IMHO - I used to horde all my ingots until I had my Smithing up to level 5 - to get maximum benefit. Now I start stamping out ingots right away - makes everything much smoother.
As Mr_Strange said, this was changed a few patches ago in order to make people smelt their ore and maybe even *gasp* make some lower-level gear instead of hoarding all ore until you hit the magical "Now I get 4 Ingots per Ore!!" mark. That said, I'd probably still make it a priority to not smelt anything until you can put a point in Smithing/Tinkering unless you absolutely need to (for whatever reason). That one point does still double your Ingot output, after all. It just can't quadruple it anymore.
I believe you only need the one point of or , so you don't need to put a point into the skill at all!
This is true. So stamp out those ingots at your earliest convenience. I too approve of this nerf. It encourages you to smith sooner and I tend to have a ton of ingots towards the late game, (I've had stacks of around 50 iron.) so I don't think this nerf hurts the balance overall. Especially since a single ingot becomes more useful with higher craft i.e. 1 iron ingot can become just a few iron bolts or a mess of ingeniously scythed bolts. Smithing has similar (though not quite as rewarding) scaling for throwing items.
