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[Marble_Nuts]

In one of my fort I have copper only and nothing to make bronze out of it... Shit! So I started buying iron items from merchant as fast
as I could to have decent weaponry at least and discovered that not every metallic items can be melt back to bars.

What are the best price/bars items you can buy from merchants?

[gestahl]

The melt page on the wiki has the yields for just about everything. I'm not sure how much prices vary so you're on your own there. Personally I do music items and trap compenents because I won't have any of my own that aren't steel/silver/lead so its easy to melt it all.

[Marble_Nuts]

Ty for the answer. I already red the wiki page but was still curious of what could have been the best import deal, but yea I guess it vary.

Also, on a totally unrelated note, one of my mason just got a leg ripped off by a night creature and immediately got a strange mood after
the fight. He' now crawling all over the forteress to get his reagents and I hope he does not die before he finishes his mastpiece.

Imma make a tomb for him if he dies just after

[StagnantSoul]

Moody dwarves are immune to dying of natural causes. I had one who was "recovering" from losing both legs crawling away from the hospital, only for a nurse to grab him and dragon him back, leaving dozens of pools of his blood on the ground. He even started rotting, and so long as he never made it to a workshop, he never went mad. I thought it was particularly hilarious, so I kept him going for years in game time, about a week irl.

[Larix]

Ores are always the best deal. By ordering with highest priority (find and pick the ore types in the item group "stone"), you can ensure four lumps of a given ore with the next dwarven caravan, for 16 bars of metal.

From experience, the most reliable source of meltable iron are anvils: they're always brought with base quality and have an item value of 10☼, so cost 100☼ for iron, 300☼ for steel and give a full bar upon melting. Musical instruments give one bar (or 0,9 bars?) each as well, also at 10☼ item value, but can have quality, making the pricing a bit less convenient. Instruments come in copper and bronze, too.

If you can import tin, you can use that for bronze-making. If your home civ has access to cassiterite, about 1/4 of all cages they bring will be made of tin. A cage costs 10☼ base (20 for tin cages) and melts down to a full bar. Only cages containing animals are guaranteed quality-less, so that tends to increase the price you actually pay but gives extra "goods" in form of the animals. You could increase the number of cages imported by ordering the cheaper "pets", e.g. cats, dogs and fowl.

When i'm lacking ores, i concentrate on buying anvils and instruments.

Most weapons and armours have considerably higher prices per bar yielded in melting. Especially trap components are extremely pricey (which makes them such a great export good).

Re: below - i concur, if ore is an option at all, concentrate on those. Supplementing bought ores with additional meltable goods is a luxury move.

But in particularly mineral-poor worlds, you can end up with a dwarven civ that has no military ores and especially no iron ones. In that case, ordering steel at max priority only gives four bars (and ordering pig iron is pointless if you have no normal iron to combine it with) at 250-300☼ each per year. Buying all the (steel) anvils and steel/bronze/bismuth bronze instruments the caravan brings is then the most reasonable way to get your hands on _some_ usable metal.

[vjmdhzgr]

I've calculated it before, and I believe if you just order all iron ores, iron bars, pig iron bars, and steel with full priority you can get around 75 bars of steel per caravan, at far cheaper prices than buying iron weapons or anvil to melt down, so unless you want to do something really crazy, just buy iron ore, coke ore, and iron based metal bars.

[Albedo]

Ty for the answer. I already red the wiki page but was still curious of what could have been the best import deal, but yea I guess it vary.

If requesting from the liaison, best would be "Stone: Cassiterite", to make your own bronze - 8 from 1 cassiterite + 1 copper/tetrahedrite ore (directly or via bars). Next would be Bars: Tin", etc.

If melting, best value are musical instruments, which are 1) cheaper than weapons/armour, 2) melt into 1 bar each, and 3) often come in bronze or bismuth bronze. Pray for no or -low- quality.

But if you can afford it, leggings and axes/picks both have a nice return, and are cheaper than trap weapons (some of which have a great return, but are THE most expensive way to go).

[Albedo]

I already red the wiki page but was still curious of what could have been the best import deal, but yea I guess it vary.

...discovered that not every metallic items can be melt back to bars.

Re-read the wiki page. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Melt_item#Yield

1) EVERY metallic item can be melted, but NOT EVERY item produces a bar by itself - some produce < 1 bar each.

2) Melt the same alloy (same metal) at the same smelter - fractions of bars add up, but ONLY at the same smelter.


Also, go for steel over bronze or iron (and silver hammers). Best armour/weapons short of adamantine.