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[jubba]

I was so excited to find some nice veins of bituminous coal and lignite to start smelting in my first real fortress... After several hours of reading the wiki, convinced I was missing something (there is a steep learning curve after all), I was very sad to learn that I had tripped over a bug, it seems.

Bug:
I can't smelt bituminous coal or lignite into coke via a smelter, nor can I schedule the task via the manager.  Additionally, Lignite and BC don't appear in the Status->Stone menu.  Weird errors appear when scheduling via the manager.

Steps to reproduce:
Embark into a new fortress with the expertise to build and run a smelter, as well as charcoal, BC, and lignite. 
Build the smelter.
Try to schedule the task, and notice it is missing from the smelter menu.
Attempt to schedule via the manager, only to receive odd messages like "<dwarf> cancels Make coke from Bituminous Coal: Needs indigo tourmaline"
Cry, for your dwarves will never know the glory of forging your own steel. 

Additional info:
I can't smelt bituminous coal into coke via a smelter - the action doesn't appear.  I have in my stocks both charcoal and bituminous coal, and I can smelt other materials using charcoal to make bars as appropriate.  I attempted to schedule the task via the manager, but the message appeared "<dwarf> cancels Make coke from Bituminous Coal: Needs indigo tourmaline".  For lignite, it was "needs more blue garnet".

I had seen a reference somewhere that someone was having problems smelting because bituminous coal was flagged as economic, so I took a poke at trying to allow the stone.  Oddly... it didn't even show up in the list, so I couldn't even flag it one way or another.

So I started digging here in the forums, and found other references to similar problems (here and here), but it didn't seem like it a resolution existed that I could apply on my own.

I dug a little further, grabbed 40d for Windows, copied my save games over, and ran it in Wine.  It ran just fine (though a literal order of magnitude slower: 6-9 FPS vs 100+ in native Linux), loaded my game, and bam!  I can smelt coal.  I didn't try 40d9 for windows, though, so it could be a version problem... but my gut tells me it's a Linux-specific problem.

While digging around, I did notice that several (if not all - I didn't check them all) of the files in raw/objects are encoded with Windows line endings, and not Unix line endings.  This may or may not be related...

I just downloaded 40d2 for linux, to see if maybe it has the same problem...


If you need any more information, please let me know!

[jubba]

Update: 40d2 also has the problem, at least from my copied save.  I didn't try a new fortress.

[Kanddak]

Additional info:
I can't smelt bituminous coal into coke via a smelter - the action doesn't appear.  I have in my stocks both charcoal and bituminous coal, and I can smelt other materials using charcoal to make bars as appropriate.  I attempted to schedule the task via the manager, but the message appeared "<dwarf> cancels Make coke from Bituminous Coal: Needs indigo tourmaline".  For lignite, it was "needs more blue garnet".

That sounds like the kind of crazy stuff that happens when someone's raws are messed up and it throws off the indexing. That line-endings thing sounds like your best bet.

[Untelligent]

Delete everything in the data/objects folder (NOT the raw/objects) and start a new world.


If that doesn't work, try a fresh install. Do not unzip over your old folder.

[Variance]

I had a similar problem where my make pig iron bars/make steel bars jobs would actually use silver bars to produce electrum bars under the stones menu; according to Footkerchief, it was the same problem, an indexing issue. I would just do a fresh install and move the save over to the new DF, like Unintelligent said. The reason that your jobs need weird things like indigo tourmalines are because the game is reading the spot where the steelmaking job there, and even though steelmaking has been moved elsewhere in the raws, it still thinks what it's reading is steelmaking. So, in my case, it was reading "Make electrum bars" and thinking it was steelmaking, and in your case, its reading something with gems.

[jubba]

Damn.  I was afraid of that.  I was really liking that fortress, too. 

Ah, well.  Thank you for the information and support, all!

As a followup - what can cause the broken indexing, and how might one such as I prevent it?

[Variance]

The broken indexing comes from adding or subtracting any entries in your raws, especially the reaction_standard raws. To prevent it, I would imagine that you should only add entries to the very end of the file, after the last entry. There's no real workaround for subtracting things, so I would just advise to never take away reactions that come with DF. You shouldn't really need to anyway.