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[Arkenstone]

Spoiler: original OP (click to show/hide)

There was some discussion on another thread about these two metals which reminded me of them, and how they aren't very faithfully represented in DF.

First off, the only "Native Aluminum" I was able to find that wasn't grown in a lab came in tiny little flakes near mud volcanoes, hardly enough to smelt.  Besides, it would most likely be mistaken for tin by a culture that did not already know of the metal.  And IRL, it wasn't discovered until the 1800's.

Second, Native Platinum contains other platinum-group metals in it that makes it too brittle to work with; the only way to use it was to alloy it with gold.  Also, I see nothing about it that would make it more valuable to a preindustrial society like our dwarves have than bismuth.  This can be supported by the fact that while the natives of Central America knew about the metal, they didn't use it as much as gold (information limited on the subject, mainly from Wikipedia).

So, my suggestion is this:

• Remove aluminum entirely.
• Make native platinum (renamed 'Platina') only smeltable by alloying with gold (to make white gold), or remove it entirely.
• Make 'white gold' less valuable than gold (roughly equal to electrum), and native platinum the same as native silver or less.

Of course, this would be a pittance to mod; but I'd like to see it in the official version.

So, after much debate there doesn't seem to be much opposition to the notion that "native aluminum" is unrealistic.  My suggestion is now to remove it from the game entirely.


MAJOR EDIT:
Sardice was great enough to actually go out and find a book describing a dwarf-doable means of refining impure platinum. 

• The stone 'platina' should be found as small clusters in chromite, hematite, native gold, serpentine and olivine, and as veins in olivine as well.
• Platina itself is unsmeltable.
• The "Refine platinum (use lead ore)" reaction takes one galena ore (coded as ore of lead), one platina rock and one unit of flux and produces 4 platinum bars and 4 lead bars.
• The "Refine platinum (use lead bars)" reaction takes one platina, 4 bars of lead and one flux, producing 4 platinum and returning 4 lead.
• The "Make white gold (use gold ore/bars)" reaction(s) should take one platina and one native gold (or 4 gold bars) to a smelter and output 8 "white gold" bars.
• The "Make white gold (use platinum bars)" reaction takes one platinum bar and one gold bar and produces two white gold bars.
• The prices of these two materials could use adjusting, but for that matter all metals do; leaving platinum's price as-is is the current recommendation.
• The frequency and occurrence of platina could be updated even more (will do additional research if the argument stays calm...)

More clarification:

Platina, being platinum alloyed with small amounts of Platinum-Group Metals, is not a workable metal for the same reasons pig iron isn't: because it is brittle.  If one were to try and hammer it into a desired form, it would fracture and break instead of bend.  Also, even if dwarven furnaces could get hot enough to liquify it, and a mold that could withstand such temperatures was found, the resulting artifact would be fragile in the extreme, threatening to crumble at the slightest jolt.

The way man dealt with this historically (so far as I can tell) was to alloy it with another metal such as gold, increasing its malleability to workable levels; hence my "white gold" suggestion.

Spoiler: (Partial) Cite List (click to show/hide)

Aluminum:
http://www.mindat.org/mesg-66-116150.html

Platinum:
http://books.google.com/books?id=QYlCAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA582&pg=PA576#v=onepage&q&f=false (The most significant one of all, IMO.  Scroll down to get to the part on platinum.)
http://bullion.nwtmint.com/platinum_history.php
http://www.humantouchofchemistry.com/wonder-why-platinum-is-so-expensive.htm
http://www.platinum.matthey.com/publications/a-history-of-platinum/
http://www.mindat.org/loc-4435.html
http://www.fabreminerals.com/search_show.php?SECTION=RSFSU&CODE=TC16N9
http://www.goldandsilvermines.com/platinum.htm#his
http://www.galleries.com/Platinum
http://webmineral.com/data/Platinum.shtml
http://nevada-outback-gems.com/placer_gold/Platinum_placers_P1.htm
http://nevada-outback-gems.com/mineral_information/platinum_mineral_info.htm
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Platinum

[GreatWyrmGold]

1. Sensible.

2. Fairly sensible, although platinum has been seen as a "one-up" over gold for a while in fantasy (see: D&D).

3. Why should platinum be worth less than gold? Not only does it go against popular conception, which is more important than youd think, there really isn't any reason to make platinum worth less than gold. After all, it's about as useful.

[nanomage]

suggestion for remove Al would seem sensible, but somehow the idea of dwarves collecting tiny flakes of extremely rare aluminium in tons of volcanic mud seems suitable to me! I think it's okay to stretch realism a bit to allow for beard vision and other dwarfy things like that. Dwarves are supposed to be expert metalworkers more than aby contemporary human society.
As for platinum, I would support your idea. It seems I remember reading somewhere that even Spanish conquistadors didn't value platinum higher than gold, and even the word "platina" means "little silver" in Spanish, which means they valued it even less than silver.   
However, it would just turn platinum to another sort of silver, just unusable for weapons and ammo. That's bad, I think.

[Arkenstone]

3. Why should platinum be worth less than gold? Not only does it go against popular conception, which is more important than youd think, there really isn't any reason to make platinum worth less than gold. After all, it's about as useful.

No, it is less useful.  Native (read: impure) platinum isn't any shiner than silver, and it's too brittle to work by itself.  In this case, popular conception is just pure cultural baggage.  The better question to ask is "why would it be worth more than gold?"

However, it would just turn platinum to another sort of silver, just unusable for weapons and ammo. That's bad, I think.

I don't think it would be so bad; after all we already have nickel silver, bullion, three different types of pewter... oh, and let's not forget bismuth.

[NW_Kohaku]

Gold and silver was only ever valuable because it was rare, relatively hard to falsify (compared to wood or leather tokens that were alternate means of money), it was too heavy to steal in economy-crashing quantities, and because (before the Industrial Revolution in the case of Silver, at least,) it never tarnished or decayed.

The first uses of money basically involved tying the value of silver to the value of wheat (As in, the temples that were the center of commerce said 1 silver bar = 60 rations of food, and enforced that), and basically the silver bars never left the temple vaults for thousands of years because it was traded mostly in the form of the numbers written on the ledgers of accountants, rather than actually being traded around. 

[GreatWyrmGold]

As NW_Kohaku noted, a big part of why silver and gold were so valuable is their rarity. As Arkenstone stated, platinum is harder to smelt due to the contaminant metals. That's reason enough for platinum to be worth more, even without D&D and the like. And if DF decides to make plainum worthless(ish) and realistically hard to smelt, there's not any point to it. Not to mention, popular fantasy culture really is a big inspiration for DF.
To put it somewhat differently: Platinum probably should be harder to smelt, at least something like a lower chance of getting metal from each ore, but it should also be worth more than gold.

[DG]

I support Arkenstone's suggestions for both metals. I think the "no point" arguments have no point in DF as all the pewters show, and popular fantasy culture should be even less important. DF is what it is because it does things properly where it can and within reason, and here it definately can. Toady just updated the density for stones and trees...What's the point? As for value, something that is undesirable but rare is not automatically more valuable than something desirable but more common.

[Arkenstone]

The first uses of money basically involved tying the value of silver to the value of wheat (As in, the temples that were the center of commerce said 1 silver bar = 60 rations of food, and enforced that), and basically the silver bars never left the temple vaults for thousands of years because it was traded mostly in the form of the numbers written on the ledgers of accountants, rather than actually being traded around. 

My history professor says your wrong.  According to his class, an early Temple or Palace economy had no concept of currency whatsoever: they were pure communists, with everything going into and out of a common pot.  The closest thing they had to currency was an ancient form of ration stamps.  Later when empires rose they would find precious metals were convenient for paying officials, as being always in demand they could be traded for what was actually desired.  Coinage came about as a means of storing metals in units of guaranteed weight and purity, and eventually trickled down into the middle classes during the Central-High Middle Ages.  But even then, the concept of 'money' as we know it, a numerical measure of wealth, was still alien to them.

Yeah...  I had to write an essay on this stuff last week.


History lesson aside, basic economics says that a high price requires an intersection of supply and demand.  But while platinum does have a low supply, it's demand is lowered because of competition with silver.  Now, I'm not an economist, but if I'm not mistaken this should result in the prices of the two metals equalizing.  Of course, this is just an educated guess so any economists out there feel free to enlighten me.


Finally, just imagine trying to sell the stuff to a local goldsmith:
"Here we have a sample of the super-rare metal 'Platinum'.  Oh yes, it is extremely rare.  Oh no, it certainly isn't silver cut with tin..."

[Vattic]

I think it's better to err on the side of realism even if it would cause some confusion. Would we really miss unrealistic platinum?

[thisisjimmy]

I think it's better to err on the side of realism even if it would cause some confusion. Would we really miss unrealistic platinum?

Wouldn't it be better to err on the side of not confusing people?

[Vattic]

In some ways but I fall on the side of accurate simulation more often than not. It seems beyond 1400 technology to get pure, valuable, platinum so why include it and not other technologically impossible metals?

Edit to add: Bronze is a prime example of this. Most people assume iron is superior to bronze because of a misunderstanding about why iron became favoured over bronze and because of gaming / role-playing. I'm glad the game reflects the metals realistically. I wouldn't want their stats fixed to pander to peoples expectations even if it would stop some confusion.

[Courtesy Arloban]

Since Native Platinum is usually alloyed with other metals, it could be made as a native alloy in the raws.  As in when you smelt the Ore instead of Platinum you get a less useful alloy, which you smelt again to seperate the metals.  Two of those metals, Iridium and Rhodium are more useful than Platinum.  Another example of a native alloy is bronze, some copper deposits naturally form with tin.  Also when a fire occurs in coal vein with Iron deposits Steel is formed, which is another example.

I had never heard of native aluminum before dwarf fortress, but if the deposits are so small could it be given tags to grow in small clusters like a gem?

[nanomage]

I had never heard of native aluminum before dwarf fortress, but if the deposits are so small could it be given tags to grow in small clusters like a gem?

It already does. Realistically speaking, even what's called "small clusters" in df in a huge overestimate for the occurence of native aluminium. And yes, it was never identified as a metal different from silver or tin. But that's by humans, after all! I'd like to stick to having unrealistic Al just because it's dwarves and they should have particular affinity to collecting super-rare resources. I would not even mind having radium, honestly.

[Sus]

Okay, so DF "aluminum" and "platinum" are wildly unrealistic.

Then again, we're talking about a game with a magical unbreakable stone and a metal that can be forged into paper-thin blades that cut through steel while being about as dense as cork.

Where is your realism now?

[nanomage]

Okay, so DF "aluminum" and "platinum" are wildly unrealistic.

Then again, we're talking about a game with a magical unbreakable stone and a metal that can be forged into paper-thin blades that cut through steel while being about as dense as cork.

Where is your realism now?

Realism is still a valid concern. In fantasy or fiction, you always have some sort of fantastic assumption - it's what makes it fiction after all. So, you have a set of "fantastic assumptions" like existence of elves and goblins, adamantine veins deep below in the earth's mantle and hell hidden below them. Okay then, it in no way means that now native platinum should be ductile and overpriced. To state that would be to add another fantastic assumption, and that's bad to have any more of them than really necessary.