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[hactar1]

I've been having terrible luck finding good sites with sand.  There should be a product in the mason's shop to make sand-bags from silicate rocks and a bag, without having to find sand just laying around the map.  It's kind of silly to think that my dwarves are living in a fortress made of granite, but can't find any sand to make glass.  Just bash up some of the granite, stupid dwarves!

I tried modding this in via reaction_standard in the smelter, but it doesn't appear that sand is a valid smelter product.

Also, tropical beach sand is typically not silicate-based and therefore no good for making glass.  But in Dwarf Fortress it is!

[Durnheist]

What about all that sandy loam and sandy clay and what not, I'm no geologist so maybe I'm wrong here but isn't it possible to sift the sand out of stuff like that?

[hactar1]

Well, I'm not sure how you'd go about extracting the sand from the clay.  You obviously couldn't melt it out, since clay would harden when fired, trapping the glass within it.  Although it's reasonable I suppose that there should be pockets of pure sand in an embankment of sandy soil.

[Scotty]

i imagine it'd take water, cloth and a bucket to separate sand from loam and clay, mix the sandy clay in water till it's dissolved then strain it through cloth thats a loose enough weave to let the smaller clay particles through but not the sand

[Matias]

Do you even have and idea how hard that is? I'm a geologist (well, okey, a planetologist) and I've been doing my share of sieving and it cannot be done with cloth, because the fibers in fabric tend to move apart which kinda ruins the sieve. If the sandy loam etc. is till (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till) then it is possible to do that, but is going to be a pain in the ass. Tropical sands are often, though not always derived from corals and thus are made of calc (usable for steel). Also in areas with volcanoes many sands are actually volcanic glass, tuff, rock ash which cannot be used to make glass.

On the other hand also some clays can be heated into glass (porcelain), but the quality of the glass is usually too poor (not transparent) for other than decorative (statues, idols etc.) or containers (plates, mugs, jugs etc.).

-Matias

[I3erent]

I make sand sometimes but in a weird way.  In winter when the river freezes channel it out, then make some walls out of the frozen water blocks, then in the spring deconstruct the walls and viola some sand !

[hactar1]

Does that work?  Why do melting blocks leave sand?

[Skeeblix]

It's called a bug. A very retarded bug. Who the hell builds things with water?

Hopefully Toady will make it possible to actually build out of ice instead of chunks of "water" sometime soon. It'd also be nice to see temperature tweaked so that standing on ice for a while wouldn't melt it. I don't know too many people who have been walking on three feet or more of ice and had it spontaneously melt and dump them into the water.