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[Alastar]

I'd like the ability to make wrought iron or cast iron items, as the materials are sufficiently different.
Short summary: Nature is being a bitch about letting you make steel.
Pure iron is relatively soft, heating and working it in the presence of carbon hardens it enough to be useful - this is wrought iron.
You can't get the 0.2-2% carbon you want easily: continue heating it and you'll reach a jump point where the melting point drops under current temperature and you instantly get a puddle with excessive carbon in it. Cast it and you get something that's nice and hard, but brittle.

Leather is assumed to be clothing-grade stuff that's been treated to stay soft. Leather armour was hardened (soaking, boiling, appying molten wax... the last would tie in beautifully with an existing industry). From what I've seen, more low-grade armour would really enrich the combat system.

And while I've complained about it before... adamantine still makes no sense. Density of average stone when liquid, density of styrofoam when solid... it expands to 13 times its liquid volume when solidifying into an instant marshmallow? Max_Edge isn't rigidly defined, but carrying an edge so much finer than obsidian is physically impossible with adamantine's entries for molar mass and densitym even if we assume it to be perfectly amorphous. Then there's the behaviour under stress: It doesn't deform at all... until it snaps without warning. Dwarves with adamantine sutures would literally cut themselves apart.
Nonsensical magic faery glass is an unsightly blemish on an otherwise very sweet material/combat system that never ceases to amaze me with little details that I hadn't considered. Also, I don't think the current values work too well for gameplay either.

[IT 000]

This can easily be done by modders, I have wrought iron, blister steel, sheer steel, and crucible steel in my mod.

As far as adamantine is concerned, once again, easily moddable. But it's meant to make the player want to dig it. If it was just slightly better then steal, it wouldn't be worth risking cracking open the happy funstuff for.

[Alastar]

Being easily modded is no reason to stop refining the main game.

Adamantine currently makes me want to avoid it, and not only because it doesn't make sense,
For armour, steel is more balanced. While adamantine makes one almost invulnerable to the melee weapons that steel already stops adequately, it doesn't offer much of a benefit against the truly problematic ones and it's the most useless metal against projectiles.
For weapons, adamantine wrecks the subtle balance between different types: Useless for projectiles and blunt weapons anyway, its ridiculous lightness makes bigger strictly better, its ease of penetration (shear strength, sharpness) makes large contact areas almost strictly better.
While at least with armour there's a legitimate choice, I think adamantine makes combat less fun on both fronts.

[IT 000]

Being easily modded is no reason to stop refining the main game.

Yes, but it if Toady spent all of his time on the petty stuff like this, he wouldn't get anything big done and the game wouldn't progress. This is why we have modding in the first place, to fix/add these things. If you want it, mod it! If one person thinks it should be one way there's probably more. Why shouldn't this be left to the modders? It takes five minutes to do.

Adamantine currently makes me want to avoid it, and not only because it doesn't make sense,

Yeah, I'm not buying this. You're telling me, that if Adamantine was just slightly better then steel, you would literally risk unleashing hell itself to mine it out? Why not just make steal then. The only reason it's a God Metal is that the risks far outweigh the advantages if you're to greedy.

For armour, steel is more balanced. While adamantine makes one almost invulnerable to the melee weapons that steel already stops adequately.

This is the temptation, you want to dig it because it is such a great metal.

I think adamantine makes combat less fun on both fronts.

This is the Fun, while you have neigh invincible military, you will never be able to combat the countless demons that emerge if you dig to deep. Especially if they have a syndrome.

-----

Quick question, are you aware what happens if you dig adamantine? If you don't, click the spoiler.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You breach 'Hell' a massive cavern made of undiggable slade that spawns unlimited numbers of demons. Usually in the dozens, but sometimes in the hundreds as soon as you breech it! Even in Adamantine armor you would still last mere seconds due to the toxicity of syndromes and the sheer numbers.

[sockless]

I do like the idea of leather armour. What could be done is that you can get leather armour that has already been made, and then treat it to harden, since I'm pretty sure leather was used untreated as well.

I think until the potential advantages of using wrought iron instead of cast iron, or vice versa, needs to be fleshed out before it could be implemented, otherwise it would just be a couple of different metals, of which one is good for weapons and the other one isn't. Right now, all decorative metals are the same, except for value, making a barrel out of lead is the same as making a barrel out of gold, except gold is worth more, but it doesn't matter anyway, because they're barrels.

[Alastar]

Being easily modded is no reason to stop refining the main game.

Yes, but it if Toady spent all of his time on the petty stuff like this, he wouldn't get anything big done and the game wouldn't progress. This is why we have modding in the first place, to fix/add these things. If you want it, mod it! If one person thinks it should be one way there's probably more. Why shouldn't this be left to the modders? It takes five minutes to do.

'It's moddable, get the details right yourself'. And there goes good game design and consistent lore. Note: I'm not accusing Toady of this attitude... but this mindset keeps many games from reaching their potential.

Adamantine currently makes me want to avoid it, and not only because it doesn't make sense,

Yeah, I'm not buying this. You're telling me, that if Adamantine was just slightly better then steel, you would literally risk unleashing hell itself to mine it out? Why not just make steal then. The only reason it's a God Metal is that the risks far outweigh the advantages if you're to greedy.

I have no problem with adamantine being a powerful God Metal. I have a problem with it being self-contradicting Styrofoam God Glass.

For armour, steel is more balanced. While adamantine makes one almost invulnerable to the melee weapons that steel already stops adequately.

This is the temptation, you want to dig it because it is such a great metal.

Incomplete point quoted. For armour, it's most relevant against the opponents that are already the smallest threat. Goblins wielding slashing blades should just drop them and start wrestling against an adamantine-clad military. Dwarves in clown suits can still be turned into swiss cheese or whipped to death.
Ok, the latter is mostly a problem with whips working exactly as they shouldn't - another thing that could get a crude fix in a minute.

I think adamantine makes combat less fun on both fronts.

This is the Fun, while you have neigh invincible military, you will never be able to combat the countless demons that emerge if you dig to deep. Especially if they have a syndrome.

Without adamantine, most weapon types are worth considering, with defined strengths and weaknesses. If we faced invaders in better armour, even currently pointless ones would come into their own. Slashing attacks dismember those without adequate armour and can cause an opponent to bleed out even if nothing critical was hit, blunt hits and things like daggers/morningstar pokes reliably defeat armour but don't kill quickly, spears are a compromise and very good at reaching the vitals of large beasts.
While I think mining picks are slightly more equal than the rest, things are balanced quite beautifully.

Adamantine axes chop through enemy armour with ease, they can rend beasts apart before organ hits do the trick, and they're still good against the likes of bronze colossi. While strong materials naturally favour slashing weapons, adamantine is actively biased towards them with its extreme density and max_edge values.

-----

Quick question, are you aware what happens if you dig adamantine? If you don't, click the spoiler.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You breach 'Hell' a massive cavern made of undiggable slade that spawns unlimited numbers of demons. Usually in the dozens, but sometimes in the hundreds as soon as you breech it! Even in Adamantine armor you would still last mere seconds due to the toxicity of syndromes and the sheer numbers.

I am... and you mentioned the gist of it outside a spoiler

[Stormcloudy]

While I will agree with your point that its very properties are screwy, I won't claim that it is biased toward bladed weapons.

You could say it's biased toward armor. When forged it has no yield, and weighs nearly nothing. When woven, it is flexible, and even provides some armor (right? It should).

The only thing that it does NOT favor is blunt weaponry, for which silver works beautifully for hammers, and for which copper works beautifully for shields.

If the problem you have is that you can't make god hammers, then maybe we should be asking for minable slade, which would be much harder to obtain, and - even if hammers are their only military purpose - would be drastically more powerful than adamantine.

[Farmerbob]

  If you want a Godhammer, why not allow smiths to create candy-shelled maces and warhammers, with gold on the inside?

  Sort of like creating a giant M&M on a stick to beat your enemies with.

  Gold being nearly twice as dense as silver, it should do very nicely.

  Platinum would be even better - it's about 10% more dense than gold.

[Alastar]

Actually, the whole section about adamantine was more an aside... and its implications on gameplay an aside to the aside. Mostly, it seems a shame to create a very cool material system, and then put in nonsensical placeholders for the most legendary material that are inconsistent with themselves and directly contradict in-game use. That's a bit like creating a legend of an incredibly beautiful women, then casually telling us she has a 1-inch waist and ZZZ-cup breasts and constantly changing her eye colour.

*

@ Sockless: I see nothing wrong with hardening existing leather products, this would be the easiest method. We may want some changes (e.g. no hardenening of shirts or trousers, making hardened greaves available) but keeping it simple would still be less strange than the restrictions of what can and can't be made out of bone.
I'd be surprised if wrought vs. cast iron would be a clear win for either... the material system is quite good at nuances and the differences could be telling (cast iron would be stiffer at the cost of ultimate strength and max_edge... but then, that's 10k for all regular metals at the moment).
It could also be a racial/cultural thing - irl, cast iron wasn't used much in the west before cannons, but important to east asia.