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Author Topic: Native gold- Too heavy?  (Read 1078 times)

Wiles

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Native gold- Too heavy?
« on: November 06, 2007, 11:37:00 am »

My dwarves mined out some native gold and the gold nugget weighed in at 5796. I haven't encountered any other ores that heavy, so I'm guessing it's a bug?

[ November 06, 2007: Message edited by: Wiles ]

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Chthon

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #1 on: November 06, 2007, 12:11:00 pm »

Nope, it seems dwarven strength is up a bit as well.  Think of the nugget as a giant dwarf sized lump.
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Wiles

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #2 on: November 06, 2007, 12:20:00 pm »

Really? any other ore I've run across have been in the 800 weight range. That is a lot lighter than the gold I've found. It takes my legendary blacksmiths a very very long time to lug one of those up from the bowels of the fortress.
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Mechanoid

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #3 on: November 06, 2007, 01:20:00 pm »

Then put a stockpile of the stuff next to your smelter and disable stone hauling on your smelter /metalsmith dwarves to get some other poor grunt to do the work.

Also, the weight of gold is correct, because in real life pure gold is denser then pure lead (in fact, gold is denser then uranium, weighing ~0.2 grams more per cubic centimeter)

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Wiles

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #4 on: November 06, 2007, 01:34:00 pm »

Ok, thanks. Learn something new every day  ;)
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RPB

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #5 on: November 06, 2007, 02:08:00 pm »

quote:
Originally posted by Mechanoid:
<STRONG>Also, the weight of gold is correct, because in real life pure gold is denser then pure lead (in fact, gold is denser then uranium, weighing ~0.2 grams more per cubic centimeter)</STRONG>

Except veins of native gold are not, in real life, anything like pure gold. Realistically a large chunk of rock quarried from a vein of gold is still mostly rock, with small bits of gold embedded in it.

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Mechanoid

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #6 on: November 06, 2007, 02:09:00 pm »

True, but it would still be heavier then an identical peice of rock with all the gold replaced with lead.
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RPB

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #7 on: November 06, 2007, 02:51:00 pm »

True. The oddity is that the veins of native gold have the same density and value as bars of pure gold, which implies that in the world of Dwarf Fortress, gold is mined in giant solid gold nuggets ~5 feet across, whereas in our world a nugget 5 inches across is pretty massively huge.

It's good to be a dwarf.  ;)

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axus

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #8 on: November 06, 2007, 04:30:00 pm »

It makes sense if the smelted bars are near the same weight as the starting product.  Technically you could say that the ore should weigh even more from the rock that's being discarded.
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Turgid Bolk

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #9 on: November 06, 2007, 05:00:00 pm »

Perhaps Toady should make the mined ore contain only 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/10 the total gold for a bar. That way it would be a more reasonable chunk of rock, weighing less, but you'd need a few units of it to get a full-size solid gold bar. (Bars seem to be pretty big in DF, bigger than a typical real-life gold bar. It only takes 3 to make a barrel, for instance.)

In real life it takes a lot of digging to get enough gold for a bar, and it mostly comes out of the rock in little bitty nuggets and flakes. This could be applied to other metals as well, particularly precious metals.

Edit: Started a thread at the suggestions forum: http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=5&t=001666

[ November 06, 2007: Message edited by: Turgid Bolk ]

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Griz

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #10 on: November 06, 2007, 10:49:00 pm »

on a somewhat related note, a piece of magnetite ore is heavier than an iron bar.
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oolon1

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Re: Native gold- Too heavy?
« Reply #11 on: November 07, 2007, 10:02:00 am »

I posted a while back that platinum weighs over 6000, and this is "realistic" in that platinum has a higher density... but would you really mine out that much platinum at once?  It's like 5% of the world's supply of platinum, IRL.
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