Also, to encourage weapon/armor moods, i enabled those to jobs on 50 or so dwarves. I am checking the wiki now and I see that actually they need to be of that profession: so I'll have them craft a shitton of bolts in order to get them the correct profession.
When the game decides a strange mood is going to happen, it randomly picks one "eligible" dwarf in your fortress - this stage includes several profession checks, one to determine eligibility (i.e. CHILD, RECRUIT, or any adult civilian profession) and another to determine probability (metalsmiths/craftsdwarves/jewelers are high probability, carpenters/masons/bowyers are medium probability, and everything else is low). Once it picks a dwarf, it then looks at their
skills (
NOT their profession) to figure out what sort of mood they're going to enter, choosing the highest
moodable skill - for example, a dwarf which is a Dabbling Weaponsmith and a Legendary Farmer will enter a Weaponsmithing mood.
I am mostly interested in weapons and armor, so i put a stockpile in the middle of the forges which can only contain top-level metal bars (as i use the masterwork mod, those are adamantine, iridium, volcanic, slademantine). I am hoping that whenever someone gets a mood and starts creating an armor/weapon, this is what they will take for the base metal.
If a moody metalworker has a personal preference for a type of metal, they may decide that they
must use that type of metal, and nothing you do will be able to convince them otherwise. Back in 40d this could also happen with Adamantine (or any other DEEP metal), though it's not clear whether or not it still happens.