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[GreatWyrmGold]

Arkenstone, there's a difference between "Everyone wants X!" and "X could be valuable, so we can't assume that it's worthless."

[Arkenstone]

Arkenstone, there's a difference between "Everyone wants X!" and "X could be valuable, so we can't assume that it's worthless."

There's also "X could be worthless, so we can't assume that it's valuable."

Not to mention "The evidence suggests that X was not valuable."

EDIT:
That isn't to say I think platinum should be worthless; I'd say a value roughly equal to that of silver would be generous enough.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Remind me, what's your standing on if plainum should even BE in the game? If you're against it, and I'm against it, why are we arguing about this? Especially seeing as we're both right and unlikely to change the other's view on which it should be.

[Arkenstone]

Quick fix for me is deleting it, but ideal case would be renaming it "native platina" and making it only smeltable with native gold for "white gold", or some more appropriate name.

I think I was arguing against the notion of having refining platinum be a necromancy-style secret; that sounds like it belongs in a separate "Alchemy" suggestion thread to me.  Besides, the product would still have to be well-known for such a limitation of supply to have any sort of positive effect on price.

So then, how about we move on to gathering data on the topic?  I know there's at least one question still unanswered...

[slothen]

So, my suggestion is this:

• Remove aluminum entirely.
• Make native platinum only alloyable 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.

This is fine, EXCEPT... make white gold MORE valuable, and keep the value of platinum the same.

[Ubiq]

Platinum can be found natively. It is difficult to find in significant qualities. It is only about 100 years late for the 1400's era. 1557 was the first written reference to platinum, "which no fire nor any Spanish artifice has yet been able to liquefy"

That article also points out that pre-Colombian peoples in Mesoamerica used the metal extensively, mostly by alloying it with gold, and that notions that it was difficult to work with are because most of the initial samples were contaminated with other elements. On the other hand, it could be argued that the limited amounts of native platinum that weren't contaminated with those elements and retained its usual malleability and ductility were used up first and a desire to keep using the metal resulted in experimenting by the natives to find a workable solution to dealing with those impurities. 

[Silverionmox]

Precious metal: Aluminium

"A precious metal that became common was aluminium. Although aluminium is one of the most commonly occurring elements in the Earth's crust, it was at one time found to be exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores. This made the little available pure aluminium, which had been refined at great expense, more valuable than gold.[4] Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855,[citation needed] and Napoleon III's most important guests were given aluminium cutlery, while those less worthy dined with mere silver.[4] Additionally, the pyramidal top to the Washington Monument is made of 100 ounces of pure aluminium. At the time of the monument's construction, aluminium was as expensive as silver.[5] Over time, however, the price of the metal has dropped; the invention of the Hall-Héroult process in 1886 caused the high price of aluminium to collapse permanently."

[NW_Kohaku]

Precious metal: Aluminium

"A precious metal that became common was aluminium. Although aluminium is one of the most commonly occurring elements in the Earth's crust, it was at one time found to be exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores. This made the little available pure aluminium, which had been refined at great expense, more valuable than gold.[4] Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855,[citation needed] and Napoleon III's most important guests were given aluminium cutlery, while those less worthy dined with mere silver.[4] Additionally, the pyramidal top to the Washington Monument is made of 100 ounces of pure aluminium. At the time of the monument's construction, aluminium was as expensive as silver.[5] Over time, however, the price of the metal has dropped; the invention of the Hall-Héroult process in 1886 caused the high price of aluminium to collapse permanently."

That was refined aluminum, however, not native aluminum.

If you wanted to make that sort of process possible, then you should just set up something that makes refining aluminum possible but pointlessly expensive, like using up half a dozen bars of coke in a special furnace that requires a mechanical fan using power to blow more air in to burn the coke faster. 

So long as it's just another ore, the notion behind that paragraph doesn't make sense, and you could still just use bauxite for the ore, rather than using a native aluminum vein. 

[slothen]

Currently if you have gold, then you have oodles of gold. There's a niche for a scarce and more valuable metal ore (that is not adamantine).

[King Mir]

Currently if you have gold, then you have oodles of gold. There's a niche for a scarce and more valuable metal ore (that is not adamantine).

But that's exactly how metal ores should work. They are either abundant enough to put a mine site on, or not there at all. That said, I'm not against having small, rare aluminum veins clusters.

[Ubiq]

Currently if you have gold, then you have oodles of gold. There's a niche for a scarce and more valuable metal ore (that is not adamantine).

That's pretty much how I feel about it; aluminum and platinum are just nice expensive options for making trinkets that fall between iron and adamantine in value.

Strictly speaking though, platinum ought to be really common in Dwarf Fortress if only because sinking down towards the core during planetary formation doesn't really seem to be an option in those worlds like it was in ours. There should be loads of it down towards the semimolten rock layer. Native aluminum being really rare makes sense though since it takes extremely unusual conditions for that to happen even in trace amounts.

[bluea]

Additionally, evidence is incomplete.  The very same page on wikipedia also said that they were able to alloy it with gold.  How they might have done so without melting it remains unanswered.

Alloy doesn't always mean "melting everything and mixing".

Think more along the lines of -dissolving- something. Sugar dissolves in water at room temperature. Freeze the water and you have "an ice-sugar alloy". Known as a popsicle

But the key point is noting that the sugar -never- even -vaguely- approached its melting point. This is -not- tiny sand-like grains of material suspended in the solution.

Metals can do something quite similar.

So the entire process would be:
Melt gold. Add chunks of weird non-meltable stuff. Be amused and baffled at the change in color of the gold when it cools off.

Without ever coming anywhere near the melting point of Platinum.

[Niyazov]

Presumably in a preindustrial society platinum might be attributed value because of its high melting point. There are always uses for outliers- and in a world where magma is so easily accessible, platinum can have applications that it doesn't have in our world.

That said, hopefully with the caravan arc we will see an unpinning of market prices so that they respond to supply and demand. For niche materials with limited demand like platinum it would make sense that prices usually be high but extremely susceptible to collapse if you start flooding the market.

[Mrhappyface]

DF is a bit weird when it comes down to tech. Minecarts and crossbows exist along with civilized nations that aren't yet out of the iron age.

[GreatWyrmGold]

There is a cut-off date for tech, though.

Niyazov brings up an interesting point, though. The world of DF is not like our own. Magma's proximity to the surface and various properties make it a resource that should probably not be discounted when we consider the value of a substance. If native platinum could be extracted, it would be at least as valuable as...um...bauxite. Well, is native platinum kinda shiny? If so, an argument could be made for native platinum to go as high in value as obsidian, even without any ability to extract platinum.