Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Argonnek]

I was thinking about how to get some starting crafts, and considered making metal ones since I have an aquifer blocking the stone. I then noticed that I had run out of fuel for the forge. Well, I then remembered that copper is really soft and malleable. You don't really need a large fire to shape it.

So, I was thinking that you could optionally have your dwarves make crafts out of soft metals without fuel - maybe with another option in the forge window. This would naturally take a hell of a lot longer than if you had fuel, but would make is slightly easier to obtain metal crafts in low-fuel areas.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Maybe not as much as you could do with a hot forge, though. This seems reasonable enough.

[Astramancer]

How are you getting copper without getting through stone?

In any case, you can decorate with metal (even steel) without fuel.  So you can make wooden earring studded with copper and lead, with hanging rings of gold and silver, and spiked of aluminum if you want.  And then decorate it with green and clear glass, and whatever other random things you have lying around.

You can make some preposterously valuable (and gaudy) crafts through crafting.

Or just sell prepared meals, those things go for a ton!

[Argonnek]

I always bring along some metal ore or other. And I didn't think of decorations...

[Bytyan]

perhaps this could be a different workshop, and small mineral deposits at the bottoms of rivers could outfit the highest elven nobles and greatest elven heroes in copper, silver and gold.

[dwarfhoplite]

you have to smelt the ore first to actually get the metal in usable form

[peskyninja]

yes, but using soft metal bars to make crafts without fuel sounds good to me.

[orius]

You can kind of do this with native gold already, craft stuff out of gold nuggets at a craftdwarf shop, and it's worth the same as stuff forged out of gold.

[peskyninja]

But you have to do a gigaload of micromanaging. (Stockpiles,locking doors and this kind of stuff.)

[FallingWhale]

Well, I then remembered that copper is really soft and malleable. You don't really need a large fire to shape it.

Yes, yes you do.
Having worked with the stuff I assure you that you need a fire to make anything with copper.

[tsen]

Pure copper is *relatively* easy to shape... if it's a wire or a thin piece. However, to be in that form it probably has been smelted, molded, or shaped via heavy industrial machinery. Or some combination of the above. So really it's less that it's easy to shape and more that it's easy once 75% of the work has been done for you beforehand. Also it work-hardens VERY quickly, so you'd need (again) have most of the work done for you before you finish.

[acetech09]

Honestly, I don't know why you think copper is easily malleable without a fire. Actually, I think I do. Playing around with copper wire sculptures all day will give you that impression that a larger hunk of copper is malleable.

Notice the pressure that it takes to simply bend a piece of copper that thick.

Now, lets see you do THIS with a candle and your bare hands.

Sorry if this comes off arrogant, but I admire the realism of DF, and... meh... this is a bit to game-y of a change for me to agree with.

[peskyninja]

Gold and silver maybe?

[FallingWhale]

Gold and silver maybe?

No.

[tsen]

The trouble, inherently, is that pretty much anything small enough to be worked without a smithy setup would have required a smithy setup to make the raw materials in the first place.