Bay 12 Games Forum

White gold - 75% gold, 25% nickel silver, requires borax flux (see below). Same material properties and uses as silver but much more dense (16.7 vs. 10.5). White gold blunt weapons sit about halfway between silver and platinum. Whitish color. Material value 25 (worse than pure gold, but better than the sum of its parts).

Nickel iron - 75% iron, 25% nickel. Requires 1 flux stone. Markedly better than iron for both blunt and edge, but much inferior to steel. Slightly more dense than iron, which also helps for blunt weapons. Material value 15. Bluish color.

Arsenical bronze - copper alloyed with small amounts of Antimony and Arsenic. Smelted directly from Tetrahedrite and Tennantite ores (sources of Antimony and Arsenic, respectively). Significantly better than iron, comparable but slightly inferior to dark iron (below). Surprisingly hard to make because the two ores don't usually appear in the same embark. Material value 12. Green-colored. Since you already figured out how to make mercury poisonous, you would also want to add a toxic interaction to arsenical bronze smelting, where repeated exposure causes progressive nerve damage to limbs that culminates in lameness and/or inability to grasp. The metal itself is harmless once smelted, though.

Paktong - 75% arsenical bronze, 25% nickel silver. The strongest known copper alloy, and doesn't need flux. Markedly better than nickel iron for both blunt and edge, but still inferior to steel. Material value 20, greenish-white color. Good luck finding all four base metals on the same embark, though.

Royal steel - 50% normal steel, 40% nickel iron, and 10% manganese (see below). Requires flux, on top of that already used for the pig iron and nickel iron reaction inputs. An exceptionally tough high-alloy steel. Slightly heavier than steel, and significantly better for blunt. Makes the best plate armor in the game (candy is actually terrible because it's too light). Material value 40, royal blue color. Difficult to manufacture because of the extra flux required, and because Manganese is a royal pain to make.

Dark iron - iron with trace nickel and vanadium content. Smelted directly from limonite and magnetite (respectively providing Ni and Vn). Only produces 4 bars instead of 8, but the slag can sometimes be re-smelted to recover normal iron. Hard to make because the two ores very seldom appear in the same embark. Material value 12, dark gray color. Similar overall quality to nickel iron, but with better edge and worse blunt. Also a precursor to Wootz Steel.

Dark pig iron - first half of the crucible steel reaction, made from dark iron and wood ("charcoal will not do"). Requires clay but no flux. 50% loss due to lack of flux (this is true in real life). 

Wootz steel - second half of the crucible steel reaction, made by roasting dark pig iron in a kiln. Produces a low-alloy steel. Same material properties and value as normal steel, but a precursor to Damascus Steel.

Damascus steel - not really an alloy, it Wootz steel that has been through the extensive folding, tempering, and annealing are required to bring out the latent properties of Wootz to produce an exceptionally strong low-alloy steel (Ni+Vn from dark iron, carbon nanotubes from wood-based alloying process). Must use charcoal fuel (magma is too hot) and consumes borax flux. Requires a jug of oil for a soft quench (should really be oil-on-water for a medium-hard quench, but there's no easy way to require a bucket of water in a reaction). The result is a metal with a significantly better edge than steel (only candy is better), and a 40% reduction in the amount of material required to achieve a given toughness (simulated by making it less dense). 3 bars input Makes amazing edge weapons and mail armor, but lousy plate. Material value 40, color somewhere between royal steel and candy. A pain to make because it involves so many steps, and because there is a small net loss of material even after reprocessing dark iron slag and the final density reduction.

Adjusted mineral frequencies to be somewhat reasonable. By default, materials than can appear in lots of places are significantly more abundant than those occurring in more specialized locations (e.g. general sedimentary ores crowd out ores that can only appear in rock salt). A typical vanilla world has unimaginably vast quantities of sphalerite and galena, and vast quantities of gold and tetrahedrite (3-5x more gold in the world than silver... something is broken). Also, hematite no longer appears in in igneous intrusive layers, but both hematite and limonite occasionally appear in soil layers (hematite only in certain sands; limonite in any soil type). Borax clusters can appear anywhere gypsum can, rather than just veins in rock salt. Even then, it's still one of the rarest materials in the game, though---a medium-sized world will probably have fewer than 3 borax clusters in total.

Added anthracite coal to metamorphic layers. It produces 13 coke at a smelter (12 w/o magma). The quantity very closely matches the carbon content of anthracite vs. bituminous and lignite coal. The other two coal were each modded to produce 1 ash in addition to coke, again reflective of their real-life ash content.

All flux-using reactions changed to produce a slag stone, which is usable as building material or a low-value glaze (filling the role of green glass for glazes). Mostly, though, it's just a (realistic) pain in the neck once workshops start to fill up with the stuff.

Manganese can be smelted in the presence of pure aluminum (producing a bauxite stone as slag). It's useless as a material (similar to pig iron), and makes for a very expensive reaction (burns native aluminum nuggets), but it's a key ingredient for royal steel.

Borax can be baked at a kiln to produce 8 bars of borax flux, which is used to make specialized alloys (white gold and Damascus steel).

Sylvite can be baked at a kiln to produce 8 bars of potash. It's a very rare stone (almost as rare as borax), but very nice to have when available.