Dwarf Fortress > DF Suggestions

Mixing fantasy and real stuff for profit

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GoombaGeek:
Dwarf Fortress has all these rocks. You have three different ways to get iron. You have about a dozen obscure alloys. It's pretty realistic.

Dwarf Fortress has all this weird crap. You have wood that always stays at zero degrees (or 10000). You have living globs of magma. You have rolling blobs of muscle tissue. It's not realistic at all, except it is, in this weird this-doesn't-exist-but-maybe-it-could way.

Clearly, something needs to be done to reconcile the realms of rocks (pretty much the least weird thing if you don't count slade and adamantine) and weird crap (everything). And if D&D players can be highly annoying in this way ("I toss the first Ring of Teleportation in the dungeon and the second in the ocean") then the dwarves should be way ahead of us. In this case, we'll be shamelessly abusing nether-caps right now. More should follow when I think of it.

Frigid Mercury
"Dude! There are like five other mercury threads!" Yes, fabricated quote, you're right. But THIS one is DIFFERENT! Mwahahaha! Here's how it works.

* Do the standard steps of smelting cinnabar and storing the mercury in a vial. Yawn.
* Go to the craftsdwarf's workshop and extract strands - of nether-cap!
* You now have four-odd "nether-cap filaments" or something similar. Back at the forge, combine the nether-cap filaments with the mercury vial.
* The vial is empty, and before you is one (or more?) bars of frigid mercury, held in solid shape by the nether-cap strands.
* Frigid mercury is only used for awesome and fairly valuable trade goods and furniture, because under repeated strain it could break or melt (melting point should be quite low, only a bit above body temperature)."But mercury solidifies at -38 Celsius, and nether-caps are set at 0! You're stupid!" Damn that fabricated quote! He's right again! Okay, let's pull an explanation out of my ass say that the filaments have more surface area than a log and therefore chill better. If this fails, we can always introduce some other bizarrely cold material.

More nether-cap shenanigans
Now that we can have nether-cap filaments, what terrible things can we do with them?

* Take either a bucket of water or a hunk of ice and string some filaments through them to get Nether-Ice, a magma-safe "metal" (so you can order a nether-ice floodgate instead of forbidding every rock and making rock floodgates) only good for furniture and mechanisms! Trap components made out of it will be absolute rubbish so that it isn't too exploity. This allows for easy and renewable magma-safe material gathering once you breach those lower caverns.
* More, eventually. Ingenuity is key.
Thoughts? Does it not fit? Is it terrible? Is it okay? Only YOU can decide...

Di:
What's the problem in throwing one teleport in dungeon and other at the bottom of the sea?  :P
As for your nethercap obsession, I doubt any of those could exist that way. You see you can't cool one body to a temperature lower than that of the one used for cooling. And I couldn't find any data on its mechanical properties in solid state, so it's not clear whether it could be used in crating at all. And nether ice would be just ordinary ice with strands of wood in it, doubtly a material for mechanisms.

However, regarding the suggestion in general, I think it'd be nice, but it'll take a lot of thought. I guess this stuff was discussed in some magic thread.

10ebbor10:
There has been a Mercury shilling thread. (or maybe a mod). Solid mercury is similair to copper, I believe. Also, more surface area doesn't help. It only increases the speed at which things cool, not the actual temperature it cools things down too.

Nether cap ice wouldn't be magmasafe, as the nethercap can't cool the ice fast enough to prevent the magma from vaporizing it. (Specific heat and stuff.) Also, ice at 0 degrees is barel frozen as it is.

The idea of exploiting magical elements is fine, the implementation is rubbish.

GreatWyrmGold:
Technically, in DF nethercap is one degree too hot for ice to form anyways.

Using nethercap as coolant has neat applications; if nothing else, it keeps alcohol cold.

dei:
Couldn't you somehow mod in nether-cap strands? It seems like it would be plausible. You would have to make some new stuff similar to nether-cap that would be extractable into strands and then find some way to process the nether-cap into that material.

Then again, if someone can make a plant that produces actual meaty bacon I don't see why someone couldn't make a tree that produces metal strands that have the same qualities as nether-cap.

In my opinion this would have gone better being posted in the Dwarf Fortress modding section either way. On a final and off-topic note I prefer to obsess over oak rather than nether-cap, but that's just me.

EDIT - Come to think of it, nether-cap plant fibers would make more sense than nether-cap strands, seeing as nether-caps are still a kind of plant and plants produce fibers. Strands however are more or less related to Fun, though when modded in could easily be used for metals like gold, silver and copper.

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