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Author Topic: Melting Materials  (Read 1252 times)

Yiab

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Melting Materials
« on: May 12, 2010, 12:07:14 pm »

So I've been having some very controlled fun with magma (not FUN, just fun), resulting in my paying great attention to the list of magma-safe materials on the wiki. I was looking for a material I could use for cages that would stand out in my giant list of animals so I could distinguish which animals I had just captured and hadn't yet shuffled into the appropriate place. Clearly, since I need to make (lots of) cages from this material, I need to use a metal since you can't make stone cages and glass isn't magma-safe.

I tried using iron, but it was far too similar to the appearance of various chains and ropes. I never actually tried running magma over my iron-occupied cage traps.

Next thing I tried was nickel silver - being bright white, it stood out quite well on my animals list. Unfortunately, I just ran some magma over cage traps and it melted all the cages. It left the cage traps themselves intact as I made them out of magma-safe mechanisms, but all the nickel silver cages melted.

Anyway, is the wiki's listing of nickel silver as magma-safe incorrect? Do cages in cage traps always melt? Am I missing something obvious?
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Ilmoran

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Re: Melting Materials
« Reply #1 on: May 12, 2010, 12:16:57 pm »

Looking on the wiki, it seems like the magma safe materials list might be wrong.  You can check by going into your raws folder and opening inorganic_metal.txt, finding Nickel Silver, and checking the [MELTING_POINT:#####]; the number in it needs to be at least 12,001.  Looking at the copy of the raw on the wiki, Nickel Silver has a melting point of 11,620.  It also says "german wiki" after, and the bottom of the raw says "temperature values unknown, used copper".  Checking the raws for copper on the wiki shows copper is not magma safe, so my guess is the magma safe list is wrong.
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gtmattz

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Re: Melting Materials
« Reply #2 on: May 12, 2010, 02:04:02 pm »

glass isn't magma-safe.

But green glass IS magma safe...

And before you jump in all like "OMG BUT I HEARD THAT IN DF2010...", well I heard the rumors too so I went and did some !!science!! and put all kind of green glass doodads in a room and pumped it full of magma (with a green glass pump even) and everything survived just peachy.
« Last Edit: May 12, 2010, 02:14:49 pm by gtmattz »
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Quote from: Hyndis
Just try it! Its not like you die IRL if Urist McMiner falls into magma.

Quietust

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Re: Melting Materials
« Reply #3 on: May 12, 2010, 02:19:53 pm »

Looking at the copy of the raw on the wiki, Nickel Silver has a melting point of 11,620.  It also says "german wiki" after, and the bottom of the raw says "temperature values unknown, used copper".  Checking the raws for copper on the wiki shows copper is not magma safe, so my guess is the magma safe list is wrong.

The "temperature values unknown, used copper" is a comment regarding Billon, and it only shows up because of a quirk in the regular expression used to isolate the raws for a single material (in the raws, billon comes immediately after nickel silver). In 0.28.181.40d, nickel silver most definitely was magma-safe, but it appears to have been changed in 0.31 (and most damningly, I was the one who forgot to remove it from the list when I created the article based on content from 40d, so this one's entirely my fault).
« Last Edit: May 12, 2010, 02:30:04 pm by Quietust »
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Ilmoran

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Re: Melting Materials
« Reply #4 on: May 12, 2010, 02:25:33 pm »

Looking at the copy of the raw on the wiki, Nickel Silver has a melting point of 11,620.  It also says "german wiki" after, and the bottom of the raw says "temperature values unknown, used copper".  Checking the raws for copper on the wiki shows copper is not magma safe, so my guess is the magma safe list is wrong.

The "temperature values unknown, used copper" is a comment regarding Billon, and it only shows up because of a quirk in the regular expression used to isolate the raws for a single material (in the raws, billon comes immediately after nickel silver). In 0.28.181.40d, nickel silver most definitely was magma-safe, but it appears to have been changed in 0.31.

Ahh, that makes sense.
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