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[Strato1]

This is a question I'm asking mostly out of curiosity, but also because it might prove somewhat useful if I play both Fortress and Adventure modes in the same world.

If I trade an item (say, a "superior quality" steel short sword) to a trade caravan in Fortress mode, what happens to that item when the caravan leaves my fort?  Does it disappear, do the traders return it to their civilization, or does the caravan hold onto it until they sell it to another site?
Most importantly, though... do items I create and then sell in fortress mode continue to exist in the world, and can I find items I've made in fortress mode as an adventurer throughout the world?

I've tried searching for information about this, but only found info on how to trade, rather than how trading affects the world.

[Quietust]

In older versions of Dwarf Fortress (personally confirmed in both 0.28.181.40d and 0.23.130.23a with Human caravans), the traders would return to a site belonging to their civilization and just sit there, and if you visited the site in Adventurer mode, the first thing you would see was all of the wagons being scuttled, followed by a lot of lag due to the huge number of items lying on the ground.

I'm not sure what happens in the current version, but there's one way to find out.

[Bumber]

In 0.42, I visited a retired fort in adv mode and all the caravans that had ever left were scattered around and making their way out through the caverns again. The wagons were still alive and carrying the traded goods.

It looks like they get offloaded from the map but remain tied to the site.

[Strato1]

Thanks for the replies.  Assuming either one of those explanations applies to 43.05, I suppose there's no real reason to trade high quality weapons in the hopes of making adventure games more interesting.

If trade caravans were made a normal part of the world as a whole, and existed/traded during world generation and adventure mode, I think it would make the world as a whole more interesting (and make it possible to find steel items in other civilizations besides the dwarves).

[PatrikLundell]

Annoyingly (because it shouldn't be so), the gobbos have steel in the last number of worlds I've generated (easier to see when they're decked out in complete armor). However, I don't think I've seen them have steel in 0.40.X, so the full armor fix may have given them steel inadvertently. It should be noted that my worlds are metal poor (scarcity 80000), so it could be they were supposed to have iron instead, but that logic is weakened by the observation that they bring iron as well.
I have to admit I haven't looked too carefully at the humans, but don't think I've seen them having steel.

[Melting Sky]

If I were to hazard a guess, and it is only a guess, the goblins may have picked up those weapons during the conquest of dwarf sites. A good way to test this would be to remove the ability to make steel from the dwarves in the raws and then generate a world and see if it still happens. The game engine as a whole is very much an unfinished work. Often where there are holes in the procedural engine, Toady does a bit of hand waving and cobbles together some temporary code to make things materialize out of thin air to make the game work in the mean time. It could be that to fix the laughably poorly equipped enemies Toady just put in a quick algorithm to randomly generate some believable gear for soldiers which would logically include some steel stuff even for civs that can't generate it. Trade, raiding etc. would disseminate Dwarven weapons and armor into the world in general so it would be odder if you didn't find steel weapons and armor in the hands of high ranking soldiers from other civilizations particularly in older worlds. 

[Weizen1988]

If I were to hazard a guess, and it is only a guess, the goblins may have picked up those weapons during the conquest of dwarf sites. A good way to test this would be to remove the ability to make steel from the dwarves in the raws and then generate a world and see if it still happens. The game engine as a whole is very much an unfinished work. Often where there are holes in the procedural engine, Toady does a bit of hand waving and cobbles together some temporary code to make things materialize out of thin air to make the game work in the mean time. It could be that to fix the laughably poorly equipped enemies Toady just put in a quick algorithm to randomly generate some believable gear for soldiers which would logically include some steel stuff even for civs that can't generate it. Trade, raiding etc. would disseminate Dwarven weapons and armor into the world in general so it would be odder if you didn't find steel weapons and armor in the hands of high ranking soldiers from other civilizations particularly in older worlds.

Is this why elves seem to have divine materials to trade so often? Every elf caravan comes loaded with instruments and stuff made out of divine cloth materials. Algorithm looks for a material to give them off a list, fails and defaults to one of those or something?