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[Jingles]

Spread them around your fort.  Have a lot of 2x2 stockpiles in the middle of the hallways that store a few metals, and tucked away in the corners of rooms.

This makes me want to try building a fort with no stockpile rooms. Clutter Fortress! Imagine all the stubbed toes!

" 'Ey Morül, wot stockpile did they put in yer room? "
" Tha booze, Dastot! I got all tha booze in me room! "
Dastot Envydrinks, Idler cancels Attend Party: Throwing tantrum
Morül Luckpossessed, Brewer has been struck down.

Erm, back on topic... I usually hoard any metal that I can't make into useful weapons and armour. Unless I have a ridiculous amount of something, I have trouble deciding what to use metal for. Should I make it into statues to boost happiness? Stud weapons and armour for the coolness factor? Sell it? Give it to dwarves I like as a reward? And if I do use it, will I eventually regret it? MAYBE I'LL NEED IT LATER!

Just use it to pave your floors with.  If you really want it again its easy enough to pull up.

[Tanelorn]

I'm even making barrels and bins out of iron and lead

Barrels out of lead ... Have you never heard of saturnism?

I make a point of never using poisonous materials in my fortress. I like colorful workshop, I love the color of cinnabar, but I never use it because of the mercury content - especially not for the kitchen.

For nobles' accomodation, on the other hand ...

[cog disso]

I'm even making barrels and bins out of iron and lead

Barrels out of lead ... Have you never heard of saturnism?

I make a point of never using poisonous materials in my fortress. I like colorful workshop, I love the color of cinnabar, but I never use it because of the mercury content - especially not for the kitchen.

For nobles' accomodation, on the other hand ...

Dwarves, at present, don't have any ill-effects to lead or other mineral poisonings.

One can theorize that dwarves have similar structures to humans, but live on such vast amounts of alcohol and (presumably) hallucinogenic mushrooms that their livers are so specifically evolved to WITHSTAND poisons and toxins that drinking from a lead goblet on a lead table in a lead coated room would have very few effects.

And if they they DID have effects, it's not like we'd notice, as dwarves are pretty stupid and behave brain damaged most of the time anyway.

[Girlinhat]

Dwarves drink mushroom based moonshine, combined with sweetbread, liver, and more mushrooms, which is cooked in a lead oven, and eaten while sitting on microcline.  The damage has already been done, don't you see?  That's why they go after socks so hard, it's their thing.  Their drug and abuse addled minds can only think in terms of "ohshit it's a groundhog run away!" and "hey, hey, hey... these are some, FANTASTIC socks...  I mean, hey..."

[Magentawolf]

... I've paved an entire embark with gold flooring before.

Otherwise, yeah... if I've got a supply of magma, then I'm usually running 8 smelters 24/7 and storing the products away.

[rephikul]

oops, wrong topic.

[assimilateur]

I'm even making barrels and bins out of iron and lead

Barrels out of lead ... Have you never heard of saturnism?

Strictly speaking, I made my barrels out of iron and my bins out of lead; I just wasn't too precise with that sentence. That said, I can easily rationalize that dwarves would respond differently to heavy metals and other poisons than humans. Hell, even in D&D they are, as far as I know, highly resistant to poisons.

[ledgekindred]

The next time I gen a new world, I plan on taking a new approach to metal and stone: Create a workshop that cheats them up at will, and then evaporate all of my rock supplies seasonally. Cheating, yes, but I suspect it will be quite liberating to never again feel the need to save 2500 chunks of marble just in case I find a use for them.

I've built a custom workshop and custom recipe to do this.  I killed two birds with one stone by also requiring it to use big piles of non-economic stone to create a single bar of metal.  The "better" the metal, the more stone it requires.  So I get to use up huge piles of stone and make steel out of it. 

I rationalize it (still admit it's "cheating" insofar as anything insane in DF is cheating...) for dwarves to be able to recover and refine even tiny amounts of a given metal in in otherwise apparently non-ore-bearing rock.

[Girlinhat]

Actually, you're describing conventional alchemy, not the Full Metal Alchemist type.  FMA had alchemists re-arrange things.  They needed some raw material to reshape that into something useful.  Real alchemy is the conversion of material following the rules of conservation of mass.  With enough effort, you could convert anything into anything, with reaction rates depending on the mass of the source and target materials, and the complexity of the material.  This would ideally work with elemental materials, like iron, gold, and platinum, while composites like steel, bronze, and virtually all stone would be more complex, given that it's two or more elements from the periodic table.  For that matter, iron wouldn't be very usable, since pure iron is brittle.  But still, you get the idea.

[EnDSchultz]

I confess to being a hoarder. Especially of rare, valuable metals like gold, silver, and platinum, but also gems. I'll tend to just cut them and then stash them in some vault sealed by my best doors, often with guard dogs chained at the entrance.

[Girlinhat]

You should put them into heavy bins, like lead, so that when/if you go adventuring, those will likely remain in their well-guarded stockpiles and make a raidable fort.

[Borogove]

Speaking of lead poisoning, I used to use all my lead on goblets and toys to trade to the elves. Now I use it for bins, barrels, and buckets - dorfs are dumb enough to wreck the bridge they're standing on to begin with.

In my fort, high-value non-weapons-grade metals (gold, aluminum, platinum) get used for statues and doors. Other non-weapons-grade metals get studded onto crafts and furniture.

[ledgekindred]

Actually, you're describing conventional alchemy ....

For the reaction I actually wanted to create a metal bar plus a stone made of a material that would immediately puff into a cloud of mildly toxic vapor at the completion of the reaction.  Something that would cause momentary dizziness and nausea.  Kind of how classical alchemists had a tendency to go nuts from dealing with mercury vapors.  Eventually my "alchemists" would get pissed off from constantly being exposed to nasty vapours from their work.  But I got frustrated trying to get the reactions and defining the materials that I ended up just requiring a lot of stone to make the metal bars.

There is some pretty good mod crafting info on the wiki, including creating stone that will puff into poison clouds, but I couldn't seem to get it to work as part of a smelting reaction for some reason.  Talking about it though, maybe I'll go back and see if I can give it another go and get it working right.

[Girlinhat]

It's actually quite easy, once you realize that it needs to boil.  The way it works, is that you create a material that has a very low boiling/ignite point, so low that room temperature causes it to evaporate, and that gas form holds the syndrome.  This means that the product of the reaction should be a stone, and this stone will evaporate one step after it's made, causing a puff of vapors.