I've been thinking about making a mod where the progress of metallurgy has been sidetracked by alchemy. In this mod, the natural availability of metals would be somewhat similar to that in a bronze-age culture. A few of your easier to extract metals would be smeltable (copper, tin, lead), and some would be natively available (gold, silver, copper, a bit of meteoric iron), but, by and large, the really good stuff (large amounts of iron, titanium, adamantium) would only be available by alchemy, and the better the metal and more efficient the reaction, the rarer, more situation-specific, and more dangerous the reagents would be to obtain (for example, you might be able to make adamantium from a few stones of granite, but only with HFS bones as a reagent, giving you reason to actually dig into HFS, rather than cautiously trying to mine out all the adamantium around it).
I've asked a few technical questions in another thread. The point of this thread is to ask for ideas and advice on the idea itself, rather than the implementation. I've got a general broad view of what I'd like to do, but no idea how to make it really interesting or balance it. (For example, allowing the user to make adamantium from sandstone, with soil as a catalyst, would be neither interesting nor balanced).
What are some good metals (or even non-metals) to throw in as products? Things that would have been useful to a medieval culture, but were physically unavailable? I can think of titanium as one. Aluminum might be another, but I can't think of much use for it outside of airplanes and pop cans. I don't think it would really be a good candidate for swords or armor, and thus can't think of much pre-modern use for it except as a decorative metal, and if it's too common, that will erase it's use even for that. Should reactions produce "alchemical waste" that has to be resmelted to produce a reagent (ie, 4 bars of copper and an eye of newt go in, 1 bar of iron and 3 units of copper waste come out, the waste can then be smelted back into copper bars and used again). Should there be many reactions to obtain products that are naturally available in moderate amounts (IE, not rare enough for such a reaction to always be useful, but not common enough to make it totally useless)? For example, a reaction to create small amounts of flux would be useless where flux is found naturally, since it forms layers, but could come in handy where it isn't available.
The second question is what sorts of reagents and source metals I should have, and what relationships I should have between different reactions. Should many reactions share similar reagents? Should reactions use the products of other reactions as their source metals? Should there be reversibility? What seems like the best sort of reagent to have? Personally, I like the idea of lots of animal body part reagents. The idea of sprawling farms that breed hundreds of newts so that there's always enough eye of newt for the alchemists shops and their titanium production just seems very dwarfy to me, especially when the dwarves start tantrum-spiraling because "We've had nothing but *NEWT* on the menu for 3 years straight! I'm sick and @#$%& tired of it! Why can't the alchemists find a use for anything but the eyes?".
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Topic: Bronze age alchemy (Read 521 times)