Bay 12 Games Forum

Fairly early in my first few test fortresses I noticed huge piles of mussel and oyster shells, because I had not yet learned to turn off the default Fishing Labour when I have enough food.

This got me thinking about a use for all those shells (other than crafts), the same as it does in real life.

So I present: Shell Lime; a way for your dwarves to crunch all of those shells up and get access to that precious precious Calcium Carbonate. As I say on the release page, this mod:     

• Allow shells to be ground into shell-lime at a Millstone
  
• Allow shells and shell-lime to be burned to produce quicklime (same as limestone)
  
• Allow shell-lime and quicklime to be used as a flux material in pig-iron and steel making
  

https://rockario.itch.io/df-mod-shell-lime

I initially thought it would be a fertilizer, but further research turned me away from that idea. Lime is definitely used in agriculture as a soil conditioner, but that's different than what vanilla potash fertilizer does. I immediately knew an expansion of the fertilizer system was out of my scope for my first "learn how to mod DF" project, so instead I stuck with ground-shell as a substitute for the already existing lime products; i.e. flux stones as they are used in steel-making

So now your dwarves can have a substitute flux for when they are in a wetland but have no access to flux stone!