There's a mod that stops your people from using coal in houses, but as it's an old mod I'm not sure it won't mess things up. You can find it simply by looking up "coal" in the Workshop here, but I can't really recommend it. I'm not certain it won't file the coal under a category that's just plain wrong meaning it'd use the wrong limits and your blacksmith might not correctly be able to use it.

You could try using Tom's Charburner mod instead. It adds a building that uses firewood to produce charcoal, which can only be used by blacksmiths. It also has the advantage of letting you use mines purely for iron as you can then skipo the regular coal entirely. The downside is that you need a very robust firewood production.
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=919631879

Nice suggestion! I'll try it later. Currently experimenting with colonial charter mod.

Then you should be fine with the coal. We've split the industrial and domestic kinds of "coal" and added a bunch of other options to warm houses. You should have no competition between houses and industries with CC* :)

*assuming you got the last version (1.76 Journey). Older versions could have flag issues since they were made before the last Banished patch.

Originally posted by Vrayna:

Then you should be fine with the coal. We've split the industrial and domestic kinds of "coal" and added a bunch of other options to warm houses. You should have no competition between houses and industries with CC* :)

*assuming you got the last version (1.76 Journey). Older versions could have flag issues since they were made before the last Banished patch.

Are you one of its dev? Kudos to you all! It's really great mod after all which should be in vanilla imo.

I'm one of the testers who bugged them a lot about typos and things not working the way they should, and wrote part of the wiki for it. I'm also in awe of the actual modders and their crazy ideas :)

Originally posted by Vrayna:

Then you should be fine with the coal. We've split the industrial and domestic kinds of "coal" and added a bunch of other options to warm houses. You should have no competition between houses and industries with CC* :)

*assuming you got the last version (1.76 Journey). Older versions could have flag issues since they were made before the last Banished patch.

* I'm using CC:J, but honestly can't remember the version I'm using atm. For home heating, colonists can use bundles, firewood, charcoal and coke AFAIK.

"Coke" is the only coal-derived home-heating resource, correct?

Or, did the newest version of Journey change that? (It's kind of difficult to find up-to-date/curated info on anything "Banished." :))

For my own industries, using the CC:J version I'm using, everything that can use coal-derived Furnace Fuel does and I try to limit house fuel to Charcoal, which seems to be the best "value" overall. There is a lag-point in development when one builds a Blacksmith to get Iron Tool production going that can cause competition, but good expansion for wood sources helps balance that out and getting Charcoal production up and going makes a huge difference in efficiency, overall.

Firewood... is for trading. :) (Herbs, too, since they're generally very numerous.)


* Edit: It looks like the CC:J mod was last updated in 2017. I think I had to have downloaded it since then.

That's the last version of CC indeed. I haven't actually played it in a while, so the fuel names are slightly foggy in my brain now.
I've also found out that the charcoal is usually the most stable way to get both home heating and industrial fuel going.
Firebundles from reeds are also pretty strong, I often have those being produced and sold. It might not be as profitable as firewood, but it's not a drain on log production, and I like the looks of the buildings :P

Originally posted by Vrayna:

That's the last version of CC indeed. I haven't actually played it in a while, so the fuel names are slightly foggy in my brain now.
I've also found out that the charcoal is usually the most stable way to get both home heating and industrial fuel going.
Firebundles from reeds are also pretty strong, I often have those being produced and sold. It might not be as profitable as firewood, but it's not a drain on log production, and I like the looks of the buildings :P

Charcoal for heating homes is probably the most efficient of them all, though it's a sort of early-mid-game kind of thing once one can afford to dedicating a lumber mill and charburner setup/chain for it. (Firewood->Charcoal) Once it's going, though, it's pretty much fire-and-forget after that.

Coke is one of those "fill-in" things one can quickly switch to when/as needed. So, if one is moving a Forester node and/or has a drop in log stocks, a quick switch of an Iron/Coal mind to Coal and a similar switch of a Charburner to Coke handles the temporary drain pretty well. I don't think Coke is as efficient, though. (Trees... grow on trees? :))

I've never done the firebundle thing. I don't have much use for Reeds aside from Survival Coats. I stock them to fill-in on Trades and get rid of them by the thousands... From two Reed producer buildings. They do output a ton of them. :)