Bay 12 Games Forum

There's not a linear hierarchy, so it's impossible to definitively set everything down in a simple way.
Very roughly you can order them in a heirarchy by shear yield (edge/armor) or by weight (blunt) which is why Meph gives those two tables in the manual

Mithril is light. 
Wolfram is heavy.
pattern-welded stuff is improved obviously, so pattern-mithril is excellent for blades or armor, pattern-wolf for blunt.

Deep bronze is superior for weapons and armor, but heavy
Orichalcum is similar to patternmithril, not as light, but superior impact resistance
Meteorite better than iron/bronze, worse than steel
cobalt similar to iron/bronze

Iridium and Volcanic are mythical uber-materials, somewhere below adamantine but well above the rest
(ed.  iridium is not good for blunt)

all from memory so apologies if i got something wrong

So Shear yield works for both edge attack and defense? What about piercing?

Question about the libraries/scriptorium: What's the difference between books and textbooks, and is there a way I can get a specific dwarf to read stuff rather than just whoever wanders on by?

Hey, if I catch the vampire, who says I'm not going to toss the two into an arena together and see who comes out on top?

Provided I do actually have one, and it's not the werewolf's doing?

Dear Urist McMerchant,

Okay you dumb bugger. There are two stacks of goblin crossbowmen sitting right outside my fortress gate. I know you want to leave, but if I lower the drawbridge, not only will you and your entire caravan die, but they'll easily be able to rush straight into my fort and cause untold damage.

Seriously. I think you can put up with living inside my walls for a while. I have plenty of food, booze, and pretty much anything you could possibly want. I'm not attempting to kidnap you. Believe me, I would -gladly- let you wander out and die if it didn't mean I'd likely lose a a few dozen of my citizens. Going berserk and attacking everyone in sight isn't helping matters. Quit it.

Yours truly, Overseer.

Don't you just hate it when you've got a nice big fortress up and running, all the industries going, everything is sailing along smoothly, and then you slowly realize you haven't seen a scrap of iron the entire time? Oh, you've been digging up a ton of copper and silver, but you gradually come to the realization that there may not be a single chunk of any other metal on the entire map. So you frantically dig downward, searching for a sedimentary or igneous extrusive layer, hoping and hoping to find hematite, magnetite, lignite, bituminous coal...anything that's better than chunky ol' copper. But no, you discover too late that for hundreds of Z-levels downward, all that you can find is galena and tetrahedrite. No iron. No gold. No platinum. Not even any tin to make bronze.

So much hate. I really need to learn to use dfhack to reveal and prospect the whole map before actually starting my fort. -_-

Exactly how much depth does a magmabottle (3000) fill?

Augh. Welp. Guess I don't really need that magma for smithing, since there go all my soldiers. The manual says Warlocks (Wizards?) don't do ambushes, but I just got ambushed by three groups of them right outside my fortress walls. :c

From a glance at the raws, it looks like there is no problem with the item, so you're probably experiencing the custom reaction pathfinding glitch.  If possible, try having the manager run the reaction, that often clears it up.  (check give/take orders, locked doors, burrows of course, etc.)

Ah. Wasn't covered in my burrow. That'd do it.

Also, seems that the spawn point has to be deconstructed for the magma to spawn? Isn't that a bit...well, dangerous? Namely killing the dwarf that goes to deconstruct it?