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Thanks for the fun guys, but I'm done with this. Please let me know if you're interested in becoming the new maintainer.

http://code.google.com/p/dwarftherapist/wiki/HelpWanted

[flaming removed]

Lately, I've been invading immigrating to pre-built human settlements, because they're always full of stuff I can steal barter for, and their wood houses are easily demolished deconstructible without an axe.

In this particular story, I chose to approach a human military outpost. It was a smallish village of several residences, a couple shops, and an inn, all surrounded by three gigantic (but not very tall) obsidian towers. If you just read that and translated it as "free obsidian at ground level", then know that so did I. Furthermore, the obsidian, unlike the wood houses, was not "constructed". It was natural, diggable, and fully smoothed. Even the squares behind the exposed walls were smoothed, somehow.

I chose to re-christen this settlement: Uristnazush. Daggerbloods, in the low tongue.

I embarked in the center of town, and promptly... shall we say "re-appropriated" the nearest tower for my purposes, followed ultimately by the other two. Before digging down into the sweet Dwarven Earth, I decided to try something new, and make the entrance to my fortress be on the top floors of the three towers, snaking through the walls down each level until I reached the basement. Designating a pattern that could get from top to bottom without needing to build new walls was something of a logic problem, but eventually I planned out routes through all three towers, an example of which can be seen here:


Which brings me to Spugac.


What is Spugac? Well, apparently Spugac is the law-giver. And Spugac is friendly.


Oh, and it goes without saying that Spugac is, physiologically, an eldritch abomination the likes of which mortal eyes were not meant to see without going mad. It has no gender. Even its blood is deadly. Spugac apparently means "gland" in the human language, and I suppose that's a reference to some sort of serious glandular problem that this thing has.

Did I mention that Spugac is friendly? Well, I thought it was, anyway...


For most of the first year, Spugac didn't move. Not once. It just stood there, by the northwestern cottage, minding its own business. I pretty much forgot it was there at all.

Of course, had I remembered my lessons from Nethack, I would have known that a giant ampersand is never friendly, unless it grants wishes. Spugac doesn't grant wishes, as far as I can tell. But Spugac isn't purple, so no alarm bells immediately went off. I left Spugac alone, and Spugac left me alone. All was right with the world.

Then, suddenly, come mid-winter, as if it had been switched on by something, Spugac began a rampage. First it destroyed the door to the cottage. Then it destroyed everything inside. It occurred to me while Spugac was smashing the bed that I should try to wall it in there. Unfortunately, Spugac was too fast for me, and I had to abandon that attempt.

Then, charmingly, Spugac started running towards my population centers.


Spugac apparently doesn't like furniture, and it commenced destroying the contents of the next building it came across, just inside the gate I was planning to build. The gate wasn't meant to protect me from Spugac, but in retrospect I should have hurried the work on that.


Again I tried to wall the abomination in.


Again Spugac was too fast for me.


Then Spugac started to actually cause trouble. First it destroyed my carpenter's workshop, presumably because it thought that was the source of the hated furniture. All that stuff it had already smashed was built by the humans before I arrived, and Spugac was also here before I arrived, but it didn't seem to appreciate such a technicality as that.


Then Spugac destroyed my outdoor still, interrupting the flow of the sweet sweet nectar which races lesser than Dwarves can only drink sometimes. I realized at this point that I might have a serious problem on my hands. While I had stockpiles overflowing with stolen conveniently found weapons of human manufacture, I hadn't yet had a moment to spare to train any of my Dwarves in their use.


Spugac's next stop was destroying my farms. Since I hadn't actually broken earth yet, these above-ground farms represented my entire agricultural sector. I was beginning to suspect that Spugac hated not only furniture, but also the brewing process.


It was at this point that I noticed where Spugac was headed. It did not bode well.


In a matter of seconds, my trade depot ceased to be.


Then, apparently just to get its point across, Spugac also destroyed my wagon before changing direction and heading back towards the tower I had hijacked rented out from the humans for my own use, within which was everything I hold dear.


Just as fast as that, Spugac was inside my tower, heading towards all my precious squishies, and whatever it was intent on doing to them, I knew it wouldn't be good. One only needed to peruse the thing's track record so far to guess that:




Spugac stopped here for a good while, and I thought perhaps it was done with its tantrum, and would go back to its previous state of torpor.


But no, it turns out Spugac was simply pausing to contemplate how much it hates doors, and then it smashed the door to my main food stockpile. At least Spugac can't destroy the stockpile itself.


Then, suddenly, I saw my opportunity.

Spugac was surely going to keep destroying the doors in the southern quarter of my... commandeered tower. After it broke through this door, I guessed it'd head south. If I acted fast, I could wall it in down there while it was busy breaking those other 3 doors.

If it went north instead, I was quite screwed.


Then Spugac went north. I was quite screwed.


Spugac managed to topple my indoor still, one floor above, without ever going up there in the process.


It continued rampaging through the human my tower, destroying doors left and right. I continued my attempts to wall it in. I knew that if it got to my meeting hall (just there to the right), all hell would break loose.

I made preparations to wall off the meeting hall, at least from the rest of the ground floor. It still had its own stairwell, and exit was still possible.


Just then, spring arrived, which I took to be a good omen. Perhaps it meant I would be able to seal Spugac away for a future generation to deal with. I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it: what did those deadbeats in the future ever do for me? Nothing!


I should point out that, throughout all of this, Spugac has always remained "friendly". If this is friendly-Spugac, then I would hate to see angry-Spugac.


Then, quick as a whip, Spugac went back down to where I tried to spring my trap, and I saw my second opportunity. I swore an oath to Armok that I would contain this abomination once and for all, or die trying. I immediately ordered every single one of my Dwarves to masonry detail, and nothing else, to be absolutely sure that the walls would be built as fast as Dwarvenly possible. I would never allow it to be said that a Dwarven colony failed for want of a good stone wall. I canceled the other 167 build orders (I was building a wall around the entire village) so there could be no screw-ups.


The trap was set. All that remained was for Spugac to walk down the corridor, waste time smashing the three doors down there, and the wall would be built behind him. And I swear to Armok, if the Dwarf who builds that wall seals himself in along with Spugac, I am not even going to attempt a rescue.


And in double-quick fashion, my Dwarves proved they were the equals of any Urist who ever lived. I now have a "friendly" rampaging behemoth in my tower, but hopefully it is sealed away forever. Or until I can think of a use for it...

I like the idea of this mod (overhauling metallurgy), and I especially like how wootz steel has been implemented (being called "crucible steel", and extra points for knowing about the vanadium in it), but a lot of the changes are even less realistic than vanilla DF.

Steel from pattern-welding? How does that work? First of all, you're talking about forge-welding, with pattern-welding being a particular implementation of it. Forge-welding was used to combine a high-carbon steel with either a low-carbon steel or wrought iron to get "the best of both worlds": the hardness of the high-carbon steel without its inherent brittleness. You needed to already have steel to do this. In practice, almost all pre-Modern steel weapons were forge-welded products of steel and iron. "Pure" steel was usually not weapons-grade, and was very brittle, either due to too much carbon, or sulfur impurity in the iron. The happy medium was achieved by fusing the brittle steel with wrought iron.

It is possible to take a bar of wrought iron, a bar of cast/pig iron, and get steel from them by melting them in a crucible, if you know how. But this is not forge-welding. Cast iron melts at a much lower temperature than wrought iron, so this process simply cannot occur in the solid state. By the time the wrought iron is hot enough to weld, the cast iron is already molten. This is the method Toady already implemented into DF, which is why the smelter asks for iron and pig iron. It is historically accurate and results in crucible steel, which is a better (as in more homogeneous) grade of steel than cementation steel. You've chosen to take that functionality out of the smelter and put it into a separate "crucible furnace", which is fine, although there's no logical reason why the smelter couldn't do this job: "crucible furnace" and "smelter" are two ways of referring to the same structure.

Steel from a blast furnace? That's not what blast furnaces do at all. They extract large amounts of metal from large amounts of ore, and in the case of iron ores they only make pig iron, not steel. In fact, only cast iron made at a blast furnace is called pig iron, technically, and it tends to be as much as 4% carbon by weight. Also, historically, coke couldn't be used as their fuel, because any impurities in the coke would ruin the iron. It's important that molten iron only be exposed to absolutely pure carbon, if you want it to be worth using when you're done. Blast furnaces relied entirely on charcoal until the early 1700s. Without a way to convert pig iron into steel (e.g. a Bessemer converter), a blast furnace doesn't get you any closer to your goal than a bloomery does, except that a bloomery can actually be manipulated to produce bloom steel rather than bloom iron.

Your blast furnace recipe for steel is also completely imaginary. 6 flux + 6 fuel + 6 ore -> 6 steel ? Wouldn't that be wonderful! The actual weight ratios used in a blast furnace (keeping the output at 6) are: 6 flux + 12 fuel + 24 ore -> 6 pig iron. Not as impressive. Those are weight ratios, of course, and blocks of stuff in DF are not of uniform weight. Also, 5 times the amount of flux (again by weight) worth of air would get consumed in the fire, so if you make one of these underground without ventilation, expect to die of asphyxiation.

Pig iron production doesn't require flux? Pig iron made in a bloomery (which is technically cast iron) wouldn't require flux because the carbon monoxide produced during heating would act as the fluxing agent. But bloomeries aren't actually designed to make pig iron; it's a waste product due to improper heating and carburization of the iron, and was thrown out with the slag. Iron itself won't melt in a bloomery, because it has a high melting point, but if too much carbon gets into it, it becomes cast iron with a much lower melting point, and suddenly you have accidental molten cast iron on your hands, which is useless without a finery forge to convert it back into low-carbon iron. If you're making pig iron in a blast furnace -- which is how it was made on an industrial scale -- then you do indeed need flux. Specifically, limestone. Or, if you really want, quicklime itself, which is what makes the limestone useful. Quicklime can be made by heating limestone in a kiln, and it doesn't require a very high temperature, either.

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I'd like to see Ironworks overhauled to address these issues, and I have suggestions:

First of all, simply remove the blast furnace. It has no place in the Dwarven technology tree, unless you want to give them a Bessemer converter.

Second, remove "pattern-welding", as it currently exists. It can be put back in later, when it's implemented correctly.

Third, consider these ideas:

The bloomery: The oldest (as in prehistoric) way of making wrought iron, and until very recently (last few centuries), the only good way.

A bloomery takes 2 iron-bearing stones and 1 fuel and converts them into either 2 wrought iron, or 1 wrought iron and 1 pig iron, depending on the skill of the furnace operator. Fuel or magma is also needed to power the reaction, though the iron is not molten at any point in the process: it's a solid-state extraction. No flux is needed because the bloomery produces carbon monoxide (a flux material in its own right) from the incomplete combustion of the fuel. However, it's also poisonous (historically called "white damp"), and so the bloomery should go outside for ventilation.

In reality, the bloomery would produce spongy bloom iron, with an occasional accidental byproduct of cast iron. I'm going to abstract and pretend the conversion of bloom iron to wrought iron happens on-site with no additional investment, which is nearly true: all it takes is a sturdy Dwarf literally beating the slag out of it with a hammer. Hard work, yes, but inherently Dwarfy work.

Because the bloomery achieves temperatures as high as 12,000 Urist (the same temperature as magma), it must be made out of a magma-safe material.

If the bloomery is implemented, then iron should no longer be smelted at the smelter at all, and also you can ditch the "finishing forge". In this case, there's no distinction between "iron" and "wrought iron": all in-game iron is wrought iron unless otherwise noted.


The finery forge: Basically a re-bloomery for pig iron. It takes 2 pig iron and 1 charcoal and converts them into 2 wrought iron. In this case, the process does actually melt the iron, so it's not exactly like a bloomery.

Historically, the finery forge wasn't invented in Europe until around the time Columbus was contemplating sailing west to his death (as far as he knew) in the late 15th century. However, China had already known about blast furnaces and finery forges for two millennia by then.

I know it seems strange that taking high-carbon iron and then adding charcoal to it should result in low-carbon iron, but the charcoal is not part of the reaction; it is just fuel. This forge cannot be magma-powered: finery fuel must be charcoal, because the chemical impurities in coke will ruin the molten iron, and magma doesn't actually get hot enough to melt iron.

Because the finery forge gets slightly hotter than a bloomery, and thus hotter than magma, magma-safe material won't suffice to build this forge: you will need refractory bricks. See below.

Case-hardened weaponry (aka cementation aka carburization):

Rather than making steel at a smelter or crucible furnace and then turning it into a weapon, a weapon already forged of wrought iron can be hardened with a steel shell at a forge by packing the blade in an airtight refractory box (see below) with charcoal, coke, hooves, or horns (but not bones: too much calcium), and heating it to around 12,000 Urist for several hours. This gives you back the original weapon, except it's made out of hardened iron, which is intermediate in quality between wrought iron and steel. If you case-harden iron long enough (with a box designed for longer use), it becomes cementation steel all the way through. If you case-harden it for too long, however, it becomes brittle cast iron. A good weaponsmith will produce fewer accidental cast iron weapons, which are useless in combat. Note however that only the cementation steel process can result in accidental cast iron: the hardened iron process always succeeds, and weaponsmithing skill simply makes it faster.

This method can also be used on wrought iron bars to produce steel bars, but it is done at the smelter (or crucible furnace, whichever), and the skill check is furnace operation rather than weaponsmithing, and works like (actually is) the cementation steel process: it can accidentally result in cast iron with low skill.

This isn't the sort of thing a Dwarf would want to do indoors: if the box leaks, you will die of "white damp" poisoning just as with the bloomery. In fact, what is inside the box basically is a little bloomery.

Refractory bricks:

Ever wonder what those forges are actually made of? Ever find it suspicious that you could make them out of any "fire-safe" rock, even ones with melting points lower than iron? The answer is refractory bricks.

Refractory bricks are made in a kiln, as they are basically ceramics. There are several types of them.

Glass furnaces can only be made out of high-grade refractory bricks, because glass-making actually requires higher temperatures than metal smelting: in excess of 13,000 Urist. High-grade bricks can only be made out of adamantine (if you have some lying around...), or dolomite, or periclase. Historically, periclase (magnesium oxide) was used for this. Corundum would also work, but it's not in the game except in the form of ruby and sapphire.

Finery forges, smelters, and crucible furnaces can be made out of high-grade or low-grade refractory bricks. Low-grade bricks can be made out of alunite, bauxite, calcite, chert, chromite, dolomite, kaolinite, obsidian, olivine, periclase, petrified wood, platinum, quartzite, rutile, and sphalerite^*.

^*Note:
For the purposes of steeling weapons already made of iron (and because there's no other way to abstract the difference, as far as I know), the kiln can also make hardening boxes and steeling boxes, though I'm not married to those names. These boxes are basically large hollow refractory bricks, and can be made out of anything the other bricks can be made out of. The hardening box will just harden the iron, while the steeling box will attempt to turn it into steel, with a chance of failure. The steeling box can also be used on iron bars, while the hardening box can't (it's pure post-processing). In reality, there's no physical difference in a box used for one or the other: it's just a matter of waiting a longer time, which can't really be implemented into DF as such.

Also just for clarification: cast iron and pig iron are the same thing, so there's no reason to implement a totally separate "cast iron" into the game for these purposes. Technically, pig iron is cast iron which has been poured from a blast furnace into packed-sand moulds which have a characteristic shape: a long thin spine with short fat ingots running off of it. Because it resembles a sow suckling piglets, the ingots are called pigs and the metal is called pig iron. That's it. That's the only reason there's a difference in terminology at all.

I'd sure like to see this mod merged with Herman's Plant Mod http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=60995.0 . That would make extensive above-ground farming worthwhile.

Wouldn't that be nice. Then everyone could have all hauling turned on safely, like they do by default. A menu to rank a Dwarf's active labors by priority.

My expedition leader / broker / record keeper is probably about to get mauled by wolves. Apparently when he saw them, he thought it would be a good idea to run in panic towards the wolves, thereby leaving the proximity of the fortified tower which leads back underground.

If the map were actually playable for more than one person, it would be epic.