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[gurthang]

Even if I embarked in a square with flux stone present, there seems to be none of it - no hematite, magnetite or limonite. I explored my dungeon's underground till the 12th level and only found gold veins and commonplace minerals.

Is this possible or I am missing something? 

[mightymushroom]

The three stones you listed are iron ores, shown on pre-embark under the catch-all of Metals if present. Flux stones are calcite, chalk, dolomite, limestone, marble: if your site has any of those five, the indicator is working normally.

[Telgin]

Also keep in mind that your embark may overlap multiple regions / biomes, so you may need to explore underground on multiple sides or corners of the map to get an idea of what is available.

[gurthang]

The three stones you listed are iron ores, shown on pre-embark under the catch-all of Metals if present. Flux stones are calcite, chalk, dolomite, limestone, marble: if your site has any of those five, the indicator is working normally.

But I can't smelt calcite etc. into iron bars, can I?

I thought 'flux stone' meant I could start an independent metal industry...

[Ulfarr]

I'm afraid you got it wrong, flux is just an ingredient for steel. You need some source of iron (ore, bars or iron items* that you could melt) to make iron bars and with those plus flux you can then make steel bars.

*Since you have gold, you could make golden trade goods and then use them to buy iron/steel items from the caravan. Alternatively you could always melt down weapons and armor from dead/captured enemies.

[orius]

Gold might mean you have an igneous biome, especially if you have veins of gold like I run into all the time I embark on an igneous map.  Steel ingredients are typically found in sedimentary layers but igneous layers occasionally have hematite.  Dig deep enough and you might get some marble, and since that is metamorphic, you might find it under the igneous layers.

[Schmaven]

I had an embark where there was only 1 type of flux stone, and it was a small pocket of it right on the edge of the map.  Very easy to have missed it.  In fact I did miss it for over 30 in game years thinking the flux indicated at embark was a false positive. 

Exploratory mining may be needed.  The Dwarf Fortress Wiki can help.  It has good information about the different layer stones, and what can be found in each.  Marble is the only flux stone that can also be a layer stone iirc.

[Starver]

Just to add that the various Prospector things (LNP/DFHack tools) can probably tell you what can be found (but I couldn't tell you what the exact method of doing that is).

If you need iron, you need those iron ores (or possibly take dribs and drabs of smeltable ores or meltable items from complient traders, but that'll be slow). If you want steel then you additionally need the flux stones (and/or a trader source, and/or steel things to melt) - that's more or less the steel industry, if you ignore bessemer converters and such...

Non-ferrous metals don't need the flux, just the particular raw ores/meltables (of all necessary types if you're wanting the derivative alloys) and copper could be a reasonable fall-back of last-resort (I've rarely had no copper ores) though can probably be improved-upon for various different purposes when you find other non-ferrous resources. There should be a full ingredient/product flowchart on the wiki (or it's explained in longhand text), and that or the weapon/armour pages should be able to suggest good/better/best rankings for various weapon types and armour, based on in-game density/malleability/etc vs what is best.


(There are also 'tricks' to take a small amount of metal and magically expand the resources, but get a hang of the basic industry first, because it's more useful in general.)

[PatrikLundell]

Spelling out what other have said:
- Iron ores (the three have been listed above) are required to produce iron.
- Flux + coal + iron is required to produce steel.

- Iron can be gotten either from ores or from the melting of trade goods and invader equipment (and things stolen from visitors).
- Coal can be mined (2 different kinds, if I recall correctly), or made from logs (as charcoal), with the latter the most common alternative. Logs can be cut, but can also be brought by caravans (elves bring logs if you have a very low amount of logs). Note that cavern trees produce logs, so you can usually get logs even if the surface doesn't support trees.