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[Mrhappyface]

I just wanted my platinum. I don't need all that fancy other stuff.

[UHaulDwarf]

No, I mean geothermic smelting irl has only been implemented a few years ago. But dwarves can do it in a medieval setting. So suspend your technological disbelief. I like platinum the way it is.

Dwarfs never have to learn any technology and can build anything from the year 0.
I believe that this is because the gods teach dwarfs and anyone else how to build and work most if not all tech that we see.

[Arkenstone]

Platinum only occurs in-game as native platinum; its only inclusions would be small amounts of other platinum-group metals that are not represented in game at all. The processes you are describing are for separating gold from platinum, which is not an issue as the game stands right now.

Those other platinum-group metals make native platinum far too brittle to work with, making it less valuable than silver.

The only period means of dealing with this problem was alloying it with gold, pure platinum (which is soft enough to work) is beyond the tech level to refine.


For the purpose of clarity, I'm going to define some terms now:

• Platinum: the pure element, without the trace impurities.
• Platina: Native Platinum, which contains trace amounts of other platinum group elements.
• Refining Platinum: the process of removing the impurities from platina, resulting in pure platinum.

I shall use these terms as defined until further notice.

[GreatWyrmGold]

To all of those noting that many gems are opaque: Aren't most of those crystals? Metal =/= crystal.

[nanomage]

To all of those noting that many gems are opaque: Aren't most of those crystals? Metal =/= crystal.

If by "crystal" you mean a "solid thing with crystal lattice and a minor amount of impurities" then yes sure metals are crystals.
I'm afraid by "crystal" you mean a "transparent, shiny and highly refractive thingie" then most gems aren't crystals.

[JohnieRWilkins]

No, I mean geothermic smelting irl has only been implemented a few years ago. But dwarves can do it in a medieval setting. So suspend your technological disbelief. I like platinum the way it is.

However, that again just brings up the issue of "if we suspend our disbelief for this, why don't we suspend our disbelief for any other random thing?" 

The reason we have an arbitrary technological cutoff date is not to make everything hyper-real, it's to make the game feel like it's a medieval fantasy world. 

If we have railroads and steam engines and electrolysis and flintlocks and giant steam-powered mechanical spiders, it makes the whole game more steampunk than high fantasy. 

Dwarves digging deep into the earth and forging their weapons in the fires of "The Blood of Armok" feels fantasy.  Steam engines don't.

I'll be willing to buy making a rare metal through alchemy, especially if it's extremely complex or takes multiple rare items to do, so as to make it a really rare and valuable metal, and magma-forging is fine as it is (although I still want deadly gasses), but saying "we have magma-forging, so we should have access to modern technology" doesn't really cut it.

I'm going to play the devil's advocate here and turn your argument on its head. I say that having metal platinum doesn't change the feel of the game. Platinum isn't central to the high fantasy aspect of dwarf fortress.

The only real argument I've heard against it is that it's either past the tech cutoff date or is too pure (should be an inseparable natural alloy that spawns in tiny gem-clusters) and way too common. The only real argument against this suggestion I can think of is: we're asking toady to remove a feature from the game.

WE'RE ASKING TOADY TO REMOVE A FEATURE FROM DWARF FORTRESS.

[NW_Kohaku]

To all of those noting that many gems are opaque: Aren't most of those crystals? Metal =/= crystal.

If by "crystal" you mean a "solid thing with crystal lattice and a minor amount of impurities" then yes sure metals are crystals.
I'm afraid by "crystal" you mean a "transparent, shiny and highly refractive thingie" then most gems aren't crystals.

To be clear - Solids are defined as being one of two things: Crystals or Glass. 

Glass is something like obsidian or, well, what we normally mean when we say "glass".  It's something with no regular pattern in its molecular structure, and as such, has irregularly arranged elements within it, and can be rearranged under pressure, as well.

Crystals are anything with a regular molecular pattern.  This includes ice, metal, and stone of nearly all types besides obsidian. 

Transparency is incidental to definition of metal or glass.  Microcline, for example, is named for its crystaline pattern that doesn't quite match up to a right-angle.  But most microcline is common and not valuable.  Amazonite is a "gemstone" level color and quality of Microcline, however.  Common quartz is the thing you turn into glass in most forms of sand, and quartz is a crystal (until you melt it into glass) and can be a gem if large enough, but it's part of almost any stone in some quantities. 

[NW_Kohaku]

WE'RE ASKING TOADY TO REMOVE A FEATURE FROM DWARF FORTRESS.

The problem with that notion is that it's really just a few lines of a raw definition.  In that way, it's not really much of a "feature". 

Plenty of people have been upset with the sheer volume of ___-man creatures, and have been making mods to quickly remove a good percentage of ____-man creatures from the game for that reason.  They sure don't seem worried about removing a whole lot of "features" from the game. 

A feature is something like having a military system, or having the ability to order your squad to move to one point.  I consider "realistic geology" as a whole to be a feature.  I don't, however, consider Dacite a feature, nor do I consider the lack of Granodiorite a missing feature.  If Toady removed Dacite entirely, so that we only had Mafic, Felsic, and Intermediate igneous stones, I'd be perfectly happy with it, and it would make the game make more sense.  Dacite is the only Intermediate-Felsic stone in the game, and it's a little bit of an odd man out, anyway.

[GreatWyrmGold]

If metals are crystals, then...erm...it's been a while since I've taken chem, so bear with me.

IIRC, metals are sort of a...an electron "sea," with all of the nuclei sharing all of the electrons in the vicinity. This is probably over-simplified, but it's also easy to fit in one sentence.
Crystals (like diamonds and salt) have a regular pattern that, barring imperfections, is repeated until the end of the crystal. This is what causes their brittleness and regular geometric forms.
Metals are malleable and rarely found in geometric forms.


Now to wait for people to correct everything I just said.

[NW_Kohaku]

If metals are crystals, then...erm...it's been a while since I've taken chem, so bear with me.

IIRC, metals are sort of a...an electron "sea," with all of the nuclei sharing all of the electrons in the vicinity. This is probably over-simplified, but it's also easy to fit in one sentence.
Crystals (like diamonds and salt) have a regular pattern that, barring imperfections, is repeated until the end of the crystal. This is what causes their brittleness and regular geometric forms.
Metals are malleable and rarely found in geometric forms.


Now to wait for people to correct everything I just said.

From the wikipedia article on Metal:

The high density of most metals is due to the tightly packed crystal lattice of the metallic structure.

Again, it's either a crystal (has a regular pattern of atoms or molecules), or it is a glass (it is amorphous, or has an irregular pattern), and metals are crystals because they form regular bonds.

The malleability of some metals, like iron, comes from the fact that these bonds are spaced out in cubic structure in a way that allows for some bending of the bonds to occur.  (And steel is just iron with some irregular carbon atoms thrown into the spaces between atoms to prevent this flexibility.)

If you want to learn more, this is the wiki page on crystals.

[Sadrice]

Steel is much more complicated than that (as I'm sure you know), and the important properties come from the relative quantities and arrangements of iron crystals and several types of iron-carbon crystals.  Interestingly, hot iron is not soft because it is semimolten, non glassy substances like iron have sharper melting points than that.  When you heat iron to an orangeish glow, much of it converts to austenite, which is soft and nonmagnetic (smiths often keep a magnet stuck to their anvil for testing iron), and depending on how it's cooled, more or less of it is converted to martensite, which makes good blade steel.  If you quickly cool it to ~500 C (if I remember right) by putting it in a bath of certain molten salts, it stays flexible, but does not glow, and can be handled (carefully) with thick leather gloves, and easily bent over your knee (or more commonly, straightened).  Also, for the purposes of our discussion, true iron (with no carbon) doesn't exist at all.  That didn't exist before the modern era (some people say the romans used it, and the technique was lost).  There's just good steel and bad steel.  Only certain formulations of steel are useful, if you have too much carbon, you get cast iron, which is used for casting because excess carbon lowers the melting point and makes it flow better, but is too brittle to be good for much else.

Also, I didn't know that geothermic smelting was even possible before this thread, so I just accepted it as possible in the DF world.  I doubt irl geothermic smelting has much in common with DF's magma furnaces anyways.

It has nothing at all in commong with DF magma smelting, and the comparison makes no sense.  IRL geothermal smelting is for aluminum, which is smelted with the Hall–Héroult process, which uses electrolysis, and requires ridiculous amounts of electricity.  Iceland, because of their shallow magma, can cheaply produce way more electricity than they could ever really use, so they import bauxite (not normally economical) and export refined aluminum.  Not geothermal smelting really at all.  Just geothermal electric plants powering electrolytic smelters.

[NW_Kohaku]

It has nothing at all in commong with DF magma smelting, and the comparison makes no sense.  IRL geothermal smelting is for aluminum, which is smelted with the Hall–Héroult process, which uses electrolysis, and requires ridiculous amounts of electricity.  Iceland, because of their shallow magma, can cheaply produce way more electricity than they could ever really use, so they import bauxite (not normally economical) and export refined aluminum.  Not geothermal smelting really at all.  Just geothermal electric plants powering electrolytic smelters.

Just to add onto this, aluminum smelting is done not where you find aluminum, it's done where electricity is cheapest, because, as Sadrice said, it takes obscene amounts of electricity to make aluminum.

This is why aluminum is usually made near hydroelectric dams, because that's where power is usually cheapest (since it's functionally powered by gravity, there is no fuel cost for the powerplant), so you find things like Alcoa built around the places the Tennessee Valley Authority built all their dams.

[Mrhappyface]

Regardless, I honestly think the geology system is fine the way it is. Getting too realistic to the point it's needlessly convoluted and dampering isn't fun. In DF,pretty much all the minerals can be found in equal distributions globally as long it's in the correct kind of layer. And I'm cool with that. Rule of fun.

[King Mir]

Metal scarcity should be more fun once the caravan arc is under way, and you can actually trade with other towns for the metals you need.

[Sadrice]

It's not really the caravan arc that we need.  It's for the diplomats to not interpret "I want a lot of iron and flux" as "I want 10 of each".