New to Dwarf Fortress in the last 2 months and loving it. I’ve been really impressed with the depth of features in addition to how both unforgiving and rewarding the game can be. So you can imagine how stoked I was to start crafting my first weapon artifact and even more excited when the Weaponsmith asked for Steel Bars! Soon I had it Otikasol, “Sheenseizure”, a Steel Short Sword the entire fortress could rally behind. Overjoyed, I assigned it to my best sword wielder and then started really looking into the stats. I'd just barely even figured out where to look for that kind of thing when I noticed something odd, the sharpness was 50% of iron. Puzzled I searched around the forums and wiki but couldn’t find anything to explain the discrepancy unless the game thinks the blade is made of something other than steel...
Did a lot of screenshot snipping to get these on one page. As you can see the Artifact has identical stats to a masterwork steel short sword except the sharpness is listed as half that of iron.
The wiki indicates Artifacts are supposed to be the same sharpness as their base material (in this case steel = 100%) plus a quality modifier, is that quality modifier added in after the sharpness listed because then it could be a wash *crossing fingers* and this still be a better weapon than the masterwork short sword it replaced on the right. Because this appears to be some sort of bug I’ve even thought of modifying the weapon stats manually to bring them in line with Steel but I don’t know if that’s even possible without digging deeply beyond DFhack options. Thought I’d throw this out there to the kind folks on these forums to see if I’m reading this wrong. Otherwise it’ll pry be a bad day for the poor Sword Dwarf it was assigned to and might end up an excellent trap / royal bed room decoration if I can recover it when he falls.
In the meantime an elven caravan just sold me a Grizzly Bear and much to my surprise they can be trained for war! There will be much rejoicing throughout the fortress of Enolinen, aka “Grizzlyhills,” now that our ranks can be filled with the ferociousness our Ursine brethren. The besieging goblin forces of the demon queen Ayara Dentwebs the Willful Cut shall come to fear their bone crushing might in the battles ahead.
P.S. I also figured out how to use Legends Viewer last week : )
Thanks in advance for the responses and for already being such a great and helpful community.