when you select medium bronze bar with 2 heated small bronze bars and a bronze pick in your inventory you keep the 2 heated bars and your pick turns into a medium bar.
I checked and yes this is by design. The "Auto-Usage-Find" works off of what you have selected. Map items selected have priority. When you selected the heated furnace, it found the Bronze Pick was the only usage and it gives a medium bar so it showed it and melts down the pick if selected. If you had selected one of the heated bars after both were heated, it finds you can combine them to get the medium bar and shows that which is same as a pick on a furnace. It is confusing but the reason the auto-button is long is I want to add the original item to it like "Old => New" so it is clearer.
allows you to take apart a pick near breaking and remake it...
All metal items are re-smeltable back to a bar, even when they break and turn into "Broken Bronze Item" or whatever. So there is no loss of any metal.
there is also a glitch with metal working where if you have both items you're working in inventory(2 heated bronze bars for example) you do the first step of the work then it stops, but if you have 1 in inventory and 1 on the ground you do the whole process.
There is a technical issue that keeps auto-usage going for ground items but for inventory items, it only does it once. It on my list to fix someday. I think I set the usage to have no time limit for now so you can click it as fast as you want.
also large bronze bar...useless item?
No use for large bars yet. They will be for making armor, shields and large solid metal weapons/items like swords. Axe and mace heads, for example, just need a medium bar plus a wood branch for the handle. Spear heads and daggers would require a small bar. That is the basic idea behind the different size bars. I guess someone wanting to make a sword versus a spear would get screwed then since they need 3 ores instead of 1. Maybe I can offset this with lower quality/life on the spear items since the wood would wear out faster.
when making bricks if the stone is on the ground you get 1 stack of 4 and a single beick on the side, if done in inventory you only get the 4
Sounds normal. Luck governs if you get extra items from some usages like carving out bricks or picking apples. So that probably why you got 5 total in one usage and 4 in the other. The thing with adding items to inventory, is auto-stacking. The auto-stacking also applies to doing usage in inventory, at times.
Technically, the usage first changes the focus item to the success item then does a separate adding of success items afterward and that where Luck comes in since that can have a quantity > 1. When it adds the success items, auto-stacking comes into affect.
Thanks for playing and letting me know