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[BenKenobiWan]

This might be indicated by the color of your reticle (the little crosshair cursor thingy).  So you get a feel for what shade of orange it should be before you pull it out or whatever.  Pull it out too soon or too late and you've messed up the temper of the metal and may have to go back to a previous point in the process

Here's a link on the subject: http://www.lostcrafts.com/Farm/Blacksmithing-15.html
To temper a piece of steel (I know this from books, not experience), there's two steps:
1. You heat the metal to red or orange, and then plunge it into water. The sudden change of temperature makes the molecules 'freeze' and scrunch up together. This leaves the steel in about its hardest state, much too hard to use.

2. You heat the steel again, but much less. to tell how hot it is, you can polish a bit of it to get the outer coating off. On that spot you will see colors from straw colored, to yellow, brown, purple, blue, and then green. Then you quench it again.

Higher temperatures will result in a softer steel. The amount of carbon in the steel determines how much you want to heat it before quenching, and the use of the tool determines how soft you want it. (softer is better for hammers, harder is better for files, etc. (there are two scales, basically, hard/soft, and tough/brittle))

or melt it all down and start over. For example, if you were a really good black smith then you might be able to put a few swords in the fire at once and just keep track of their temperature from time to time to pull them out when appropriate.

I don't think you melt steel, as it will burn, and so you don't use molds for steel. (less sure on this one)

Hunting is not plentiful (say because the woods is overhunted or because someone burned down most of it) and the wolves start to venture out onto the roads looking for a meal or maybe even heading into to town to steal a chicken or two if they are really hungry. 

psshh, who would burn down a forest... 

[randomprofile]

Lol Déjà vu

Person 1: Did you hear notch was adding TNT, you know how much easier it will be to mine stuff now...
Person 2: Won't people misuse TNT?
Person 1:Pssssh now who would do something silly like that

~~~EDIT~~~
Just read the super long paragraph
Not sure what people's opinion on this is on this subject but I really don't have one.
For those of you who are familiar with the oblivion lock picking system, and for those of you who don't. The oblivion lock picking system is a side view of the "lock" to which you have to push the pins up and click with your mouse when they're at the top (Cuz they drop back down slowly) Now oblivion handles the system well, it doesn't simply make the whole thing slower once you gain more levels, but instead just gives you little perks e.g only one of the pins will fall back down if you break a pick. Regardless I soon found after I played the game for a long time, that when I start a new game I could easily open a master lock... simply because of my fast real life reflexes. So I was thinking for the heating system... lets say you find recipe that says heat the metal to <blank>, ect, ect. So when you heat the metal, the higher your level the more detailed and precise is the meter... since it kinda works like this in real life... a newbish black smith doesn't really know when the metal is the perfect tempature, how ever a master crafts man seeing alot of heated metal in his time.... learns what hue and color the sword is when the tempature is correct... kind of like a guess and check... but in the game you don't actually have to learn that... the game does it itself. so the higher level the more detail you see about the sword as you make it....

[telikos]

i like were these ideas are going more i say mooore

but mainly just because i like to craft and build.