Results of cutting stones at a jewlers:
90+% == stone cabochon
>5% == stone craft
>5% == large stone gem
I'm quite certain that this isn't correct. I've cut thousands of stones and never got anything other than cabochons. Looking through the stocks in a fort that hasn't traded for nigh on twenty years now and has cut close to a thousand rocks and never ordered stone crafts made, i find exactly zero large gems made from rocks, and the five fortress-produced stone crafts are all artefacts.
Cutting stones has two main purposes - train jewellers and produce ornaments from cheap ressources. Decorating furniture with rocks is an easy way to meet room requirements, boost the value of rooms without needing to cram them full of *gabbro chest*s and to increase the happy thoughts from admirable furniture in highly frequented areas. Basically, the same thing encrusting with gems does, just from cheaper materials and at somewhat smaller effect (because the materials are cheaper...).
Metal ores can be cut to cabochons as well, but processing them and then ordering your metalcrafter to 'stud with metal' is more profitable: the material multipliers are as good or better and you get at least four bars per boulder instead of a single cabochon. Raw adamantine only produces one wafer per boulder and can take extremely long to process, so you could just cut to the chase and order the block cabochonned and used for studding if you absolutely want to decorate with bluemetal. The value multiplier is slightly lower for the raw stuff, but it's still by far the most expensive encrustation job possible (and studding with the finished metal is the most expensive decoration bar none).
and because each pass is multiplicitive, even though the multipliers are low, you can end up with a radically valuable item.
(Eg, 10* stone pot, x 2* stone, x5* stone, x2* stone, x5* stone ends up at 1000*, with only 24* of input materials. If those are all just "hanging rings", "spikes," etc, then you come in with an x50* gemstone, to put the image on, you now have a 50,000* stone pot. Empty, not counting the skill level bonuses applied.)
There's quite a bit wrong here, i'm afraid. Decorations only add to item value, there are no additional multipliers.
You can only decorate with a material if it's not present in the item yet. A gabbro pot cannot be adorned with gabbro, a marble throne with one gabbro decoration cannot take _any_ other gabbro decoration.
An exceptional stoneware pot (stoneware has x5 material, right?) is rated at x5 quality x5 material for 250*. Each decoration _adds_ its own value, nothing else. Adorning it with five types of common stone, if each of the decorations is again exceptional, adds another x5 quality x1 material 10* decoration, bringing the sum to 500*. An exceptional yellow zircon decoration adds x5 quality x50 material 10* decoration for an extra 2500, bringing the total to 3000*. With base quality, that'd be no more than 600* (not 50 000), the pot with the stone decorations but without the gemstone would be worth 100* (not 1000).
Edit: whoops, yellow zircon is only x20 of course. So that's 1000* for the exceptional decoration itself, sum total 1500*, 300* without any quality modifiers. Which gemstones have a x50 modifier anyway? I think those are only the special types of ruby, sapphire and diamond; and you're unlikely to have ten of those on an entire embark, if you have any at all (not very likely). At least you can import them.
I like decorating with stone and do it a lot; it's an easy way to remove uninteresting rock and add moderate value to furniture, but to get some really blinged-out stuff, you have to go full-tilt and glue on dozens of valuable gemstones. Decorated items worth 100K and more are possible, but you can expect to spend well over a hundred cut gems, all of different types, on such a job, i.e. _on a single such item_.
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Topic: Stones cut at jeweler's workshop, how do they compare? (Read 11077 times)