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[Lord Darkstar]

Why don't you just consider the fact that dwarves are ALREADY using magical means to do their forging? Let's face it--- dwarves are DEFINATELY using magic when they construct stuff--- you can build a solitary STAIRS Up at the highest point on your embark, put a stairs down on top of it, and roof over the entire map. And the whole thing can be held up by that one lone stairs made of almost anything--- like soap!

Dwarves are magical creatures. They can grow any plant underground without light! (although sometimes they need to "pull down the surface" or expose it to the sky to be able to grow oak trees and wild strawberries 200 feet below the surface, under 20 or more stories of other construction). They can make any physical construction merge. They can mine out sheer tunnels that takes us YEARS with multi-billion dollar equipment in just a couple of seasns using 1 dwarf and 1 pick.

They can take a bit of rock, turn it into a "bat-device" and have it work a complex mechanical device from the other side of the map with no batteries or power source of any kind, and no physical connections.

They attract other magical creatures that are completely unknown to science, such as dragons and giant damsel flies that breath out poisonous fumes.

I truly just don't see complaining about an ultimate magical metal in their world being "unrealistic" in what it does, or in how they utilize it. It is just part of their natural magic.

[CapnMikey]

Hahaha, I am totally on-board with everything you just said XD

I specifically meant an explicit magical means for forging adamantine, just so it's more challenging/interesting and different from "normal" forging.  Like maybe you need to capture a live SoF, and use it as a construction component in the dreaded Demon Forge, where you harness its magical demon fire to work with adamantine.

[Alastar]

Dwarf Fortress is unrealistic in parts, but one thing that sets it apart from other games is simulating many things where most others would have hard-and-fast rules that are meant to cover game mechanics and nothing else. Maybe I'm being unreasonably pedantic, but going 'Magic, don't ask' in the material section makes things less interesting: it cheapens one very very cool aspect of the game.

As it is, it'd make more sense of thinking of adamantine as 'divine glass': It's perfectly brittle (yield = fracture, no elasticity) and amorphous (implied by the edge value, although it's too extreme even then). Metals simply don't behave that way, we may as well call it 'divine water' and justify its properties 'because the gods say so'. Can't refute divine fiat, but it may still make no sense.

[Olith McHuman]

As far as working with adamantine, what about using thermite reactions? Those can get up to about 4500 degrees F in open air. Put that reaction in an oven and you could semi-realistically claim that the temperature would be high enough to soften addy (it melts at 15,000 degrees, but you don't want to melt the metal when making, say, a sword).

Plus, thermite reactions require powdered iron oxide (basically rust) and aluminum. Requiring a bar of iron and a bar of aluminum to make something from addy might be an interesting mechanic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite for those who are interested.

[Alastar]

Interesting and very dwarfy tidbit... but generally, Toady voiced a desire to cut off technological process at some stage and remain firmly rooted in fantasy rather than steampunk. According to the site you linked to, thermite reactions were discovered in the late 19th century and used for welding only a few years later.
Solving the melting point issues still doesn't address the problem that adamantine is currently a glass rather than a metal in all but name.

[NW_Kohaku]

As far as working with adamantine, what about using thermite reactions? Those can get up to about 4500 degrees F in open air. Put that reaction in an oven and you could semi-realistically claim that the temperature would be high enough to soften addy (it melts at 15,000 degrees, but you don't want to melt the metal when making, say, a sword).

Plus, thermite reactions require powdered iron oxide (basically rust) and aluminum. Requiring a bar of iron and a bar of aluminum to make something from addy might be an interesting mechanic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite for those who are interested.

Sorry, but not even close.  First off, how are you going to build an over that would be a perfect insulator so as to trap all that heat when you are trying to hit temperatures that will melt an object that takes several times more heat to melt than any other material you could possibly make that oven out of?  (And if you say "make the oven out of Adamantine, too!", how would even shape it, if this thermite oven is what it takes to even start shaping it?)  That's not even touching the fact you simply can't concentrate that much heat without having much of it leak out of your oven that is almost certainly now in a state of plasma, (and potentially giving nearby fluffy wamblers or knuckle worms enough radiation to turn them into 50 foot megabeasts).

[thijser]

perhaps you could make an over in such a way that it ends up floating inside magma with some kind of magnatic system (metalworking and mining are the most dwarven things out there (perhaps competing with beards) so these things might be somewhat more reasonable then for example gunpowder and engines) 

[NW_Kohaku]

If we're talking about generating magnetic/plasma forcefields capable of preventing heat loss through radiation, we're not even talking steampunk anymore.  That's more akin to Star Wars.

[Mel_Vixen]

Maybe the adamantine fibres can react with say carbon or something which creates a formable material and after that the carbon gets burned out so the you get raw adamntine again.

[NW_Kohaku]

That would have to be something fairly uncommon.  If it were just carbon or simply some kind of acid, you could render adamantine armor into a squishy mess by just throwing charcoal or citrus at anyone wearing it.

[scira]

Woah woah woah, we are talking about creating more semi-realistic ways to smelt it now?
Why not just suggest the values be altered to be more plausible?

[Mel_Vixen]

That would have to be something fairly uncommon.  If it were just carbon or simply some kind of acid, you could render adamantine armor into a squishy mess by just throwing charcoal or citrus at anyone wearing it.

Well unless its a endothermic reaction as in it reacts only as long so and so much energy is applied. 

[Cotes]

They are dwarves, and by god, if there's a metal they can melt it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Woah woah woah, we are talking about creating more semi-realistic ways to smelt it now?
Why not just suggest the values be altered to be more plausible?

Umm... that was the original suggestion.

[Alastar]

Woah woah woah, we are talking about creating more semi-realistic ways to smelt it now?
Why not just suggest the values be altered to be more plausible?

That's what I was getting at. Of course, a fictional material can have any properties the author wants... but who of us thought of adamantine as ultra-tough glass with the density of balsa wood and a melting point above 8000°C (for comparison: iron boils at 2900°C) before looking up the values? I certainly thought of something that behaved like a metal and could be smelted and forged with good old dwarven craftsmanship.

I'm all for testing out an alternative form of adamantine; currently I'm looking for interesting materials to lift values from for an 'ultimate metal'. So far, I've got Tungsten, Titanium, some high-performance steels and am contemplating a few others. If someone with more knowledge about exotic metals could make some suggestions or, even better, point me at a site where I can get all the data in an easily accessible format, I'd be very grateful.