When I smelted my first items in Bannerlord for some reason I was expecting to learn pieces from smelted items. Imagine my disappointment that it's COMPLETELY random.

With this mod I've added some control mechanics to standard gain of new pieces:

- when you smelt a weapon, you can reverse-engineer technology behind it. You have a chance to discover one unknown piece, used in a design of smelted weapon, equal to difficulty of a weapon design compared to your skill. It's a bonus to normal discovery mechanic, since XP from smelting is pretty small, it would be too... unreliable to gain tech through reverse-engineering from that;

- each time you gain XP, you get a chance to discover a new part from a weapon category you've crafted or smelted, instead of getting a completely random one. Of course, if you've discovered all items from said category, mechanic reverts to base behavior. Chance to discover a new part in selected category gets higher with crafting skill. Chance starts growing above 0% after skill 50, becomes 50% at 200, and 100% at 350;

- with this mod, it supposed to be harder to get higher tier parts with low skill smith. Before it was just 1/(tier*tier). Now it's a combination of piece difficulty compared to smith skill and item complexity compared to smith skill. So generally it also should be easier to randomly get parts for easy templates, like axes, at lower skills (but not really, since there's just way too many sword pieces).

Some small facts about crafting (in vanilla):
- there is a hidden XP bar until you get a next part, and it fills with XP you get in crafting (before multiplication by modifiers). So you can time your crafts in a way so you get a bar almost full with valuable, but cheap item, and then try to get new piece with an item from hard to get category;
- with each new discovered part, you need more XP to unlock a next one. So to not make it hard for yourself, better to target categories of weapons you're interested in earlier. Before it was just a complete luck;
- XP gained is based purely on value of an item you make/smelt. So in order to farm XP it's better to create items with huge combined numbers and smelt them. Value calculation is quite broken, and you can make quite expensive stuff with sticks and mud, so don't be shy to tinker with different combinations, higher tier or better materials doesn't mean a better item.

Of course, all said above is a subject to change, since game is in EA.

How to install: extract to modules folder. Enable.
Was made for 1.3, works in 1.4b, reported to not work in 1.2.