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[thompson]

With Toady looking like he’ll be occupied with the Myth and Magic release for the next few years, I fear metallurgy may not see much change anytime soon. In the interim, I’m considering modding in a few changes to skew things more to my liking.
The mod, which will probably be released progressively over the next 3-12 months, will be divided into 4 modules. The first will focus on a simple rebalance of metal values, while adding a few processing steps for iron and steel working that adds some difficulty to producing weapons and armour from those metals. This module won’t change the game balance significantly.
Module 2 will be a more comprehensive addition to DF metallurgy which will include many anachronistic additions to dwarven metalworking such as advanced alloys, ceramics and metallurgical processes, such as stainless steels, tungsten, aluminium alloys, and oxide-dispersion strengthened alloys. This will change game balance, and is probably merely self-indulgence on my part, but gaining access to these powerful alloys will require complex supply chains and many different raw materials that will need to be imported. The idea is more to make more metals interesting (I’m looking at you, nickel), with a significant reward for players that can pull it off.
Module 3 will be a DF hack plugin that will cause brittle metals to (occasionally) break when used as weapons and armour. If possible, I’ll also add quality levels to steel bars (etc) so higher quality steel breaks less often than inferior steel (for instance). I’m not sure on the implementation on this part yet, but it should be doable.
Module 4 will just add some megabeasts and underground critters that make use of the additions from the other modules.

Detailed breakdown of current plan is described below. Suggestions welcome, but please be aware that I’m a little time-poor at the moment so I’ll try and keep version 1.0 simple for now.



Module 1
-   Smelting iron will produce “raw iron”, which will need to be “worked” at the forge to transform it into “iron”. “Iron” will work as normal. Similar thing will happen for steel. “Raw iron” and “raw steel” can still be used in weapons and armour, but will have lower value and weaker material properties.
-   Base value of most metals will be increased by 1-2 dwarfbucks, increasing value of metalcrafting.


Module 2
-   New buildings:
o   Ball mill – used to grind ores and metal bars into a fine powder. Used for powder metallurgy.
o   Reverberatory furnace – a high-temperature furnace where fuel is separated from the metal, improving alloy purity and ultimate performance.
o   Powder metallurgy workshop – allows the production of tungsten bars, and oxide-strengthened alloys.
-   New ores
o   Wolframite (“raw tungsten” and “raw iron”)
o   Chromite (“chromium”x0.5 and “raw iron”)
o   Anatase (milled to form “anatase powder”, the oxide I’ll be using for oxide-strengthened alloys)
-   New metals and alloys ((s) if produced in smelter, (r) for reverberatory furnace, (p) for powder metallurgy workshop – note that powder metallurgy reagents must be in powder form) <reagents in triangle brackets>
o   Aluminium-copper (p) <aluminium x4, copper> Note: lightweight, but not as strong as steel
o   Ultrapure Iron (r) <iron>
o   Ultrapure Steel (r) <steel>
o   Stainless Steel (r) <steel x6, chromium, nickel>
o   High Steel (p) <steel x6, chromium, nickel, anatase>
o   Dwarven Steel (p) <steel x5, chromium, nickel, tungsten, anatase>
o   Tungsten (p) <tungsten>
o   High Tungsten (p) <tungsten, anatase>
o   Fibre-reinforced Dwarven Steel (p) < steel x5, chromium, nickel, tungsten, candy (in thread form)>
o   Fibre-reinforced Tungsten (p) < tungsten, candy (in thread form)>
-   Notes:
o   New alloys are roughly ordered by how effective they are. Whether you consider tungsten or steel being better depends on the application – tungsten warhammers will be excellent, but steel armour better, for instance


Module 3
-   Need to flesh out the details, but most metals will have quality levels which determine how durable they are. Brittle metals will be more likely to break than ductile ones. Not perfect, but I’ve got a lot to learn here so I’ll start with a grossly simplified system and work from there.


Module 4
-   I won’t spoil it.

[Fishyfire]

hmm... interesting.

But is it dwarf do-able?

[thompson]

Well, if you can use magma in a forge, a reverberatory furnace should be easy. Powder metallurgy can be hand waved away as well as all you really need is a furnace, mould and powdered metals. The dwarves don't need to understand WHY it works.

I see this mod as a first crack at something bigger. Longer term I'd like to implement a semi-randomly generated metallurgical tech tree which would require trial and error on a player's part to develop new alloys and processes. Also, I'd like to use DF hack to make it easier to create higher quality goods with alloys like pewter and brass, while penalising difficult to work metals like nickel. For now, I'll be aiming for the low-hanging fruit while getting some ideas for how to make the bigger stuff work.

[lagduck]

I've had an idea for such a mod for a long time. Lore is that dwarves are really good at metals, compared to humans for example, but vanilla offers only steel as upper bound of dwarves' tech tree, that seems so very primitive approach. Metalworking for dwarves should be really more detailed in such a game, and we have all of the instrumets to do so. Goblins probably should have some "shaman iron" iron, close to steel, with some unusual production, including some bone ingredients or another historical "steel-close" technology. Humans probably should be able to make ordinary vanilla steel, but for much of the cost. And dwarves should really be able to produce some advanced metal alloys, using some rare materials/gems and complex technology cycles to produce such (and steel should be very xheap and basic in all metalworking technology tree). For example, that ballmill to open powder tech should require some very hard materials, such as diamond to start with, probably, and tungsten alloys when you advance into metalworking tech tree.

[thompson]

I'm starting to lean towards having different grades of iron and steel for the first pass, with dwarves being the only ones to gain access to the highest grade.

For iron working you'll have a choice between bloomery furnaces, blast furnaces, and magma crucibles, which will produce iron of different quality levels/ carbon content. Carbon content can be adjusted in a finery forge. I'm also thinking of adding different grades of iron ore, and allowing some low grade ores to be found in igneous rocks. Iron ores will need to be ground before smelting in an ore mill, which will be a slow reaction that can be vastly accelerated with power. Everything will still be a little abstracted, so don't expect ultra-realism, but it will bring things a little closer to where they should be.

All in all, iron working will be much more resource and labour intensive (because it was), but should be reasonably simple for players to pick up. I'll try and write an installer for it as well as I'll need to touch a lot of files in many places. Non-ferrous metals won't be touched on this first pass, except to slightly increase their values.

After that, it'll be on to DFhack.