what's wrong with quartz toy hammers and silver nickel beds? Really, the game should ideally let you make pretty much anything out of anything.
Within reason, of course, but yes, generally I agree. But I've reversed my position on copying items made of inappropriate materials: If you have an artifact, say, dog leather short sword, you can go ahead & designate it to be Copied. But if you then tell your Leather Works to "Copy Item", you will get:
Monom Atiramaud, Leatherworker cancels Copy Item: No valid leather item to copy.because short swords can't be made out of leather. You'll get a similar message if you try a Forge instead.
I've changed my mind because the problem would be best resolved by expanding/revising the list of "viable" materials for each item, and forcing
all items, including artifacts, to follow that list. To go by the way I described above, building
whatever crazy shit you want as long as you've got an artifact to pave the way for you first, would be asking Toady to do a lot of work for the sake of little to no real benefit--and that "benefit" would more than likely be nonsensical anyway. Yes, I'm sure that many of us would, at one time or another, like to run a roleplay fort where just about
everything is made out of bones. Or ice. Or soap. Or whatever. But those reactions (
if desired) can easily be added by
mods, thus sparing the player the pain of having to wait for an "illegal" artifact to unlock a hidden reaction so he can begin his roleplay, and more importantly sparing Toady the headache of having to code the game to keep checking to see if the hidden reaction has been unlocked.
Yes, this means that getting an artifact platinum warhammer
doesn't open up the ability to make tons of platinum blunt weapons. But, IMO, that's an option that should be available by default--because, as I said, the list of viable materials for each type of item really should be revised & expanded . . . which is a discussion for a different thread (of which I'm sure there are already dozens).
As for how many copies of a foreign item you'd need to make before your dwarves understood the item type well enough to craft it on your own, I was thinking [ # of originals / 100 ]. (Copies of an item cannot be copied.) So if your fort is awash in, say, goblinmake copper high boots, you need only duplicate 10 of them (the minimum) before you can work them out of steel. But if your knowledge of silver masks is limited to a single example brought in by a human trader, your dwarves would need to study it 100 times before they fully understood which aspects of the item were important to its functionality (as opposed to being merely artistic), well enough to start making their own improvements to the design.
There would also be the danger of taking away the uniqueness of the artifacts.
Ummm . . . since the whole point is
copying items, it's safe to assume that whoever uses this work order does not regard making (those specific) artifacts less unique as being a "danger". Besides, since each copy of an artifact clearly states that it's a reproduction, and gives the artifact full credit, the original work would actually become more like an honored progenitor than some forgotten cousin.