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[Brotato]

Quick question: If I make bronze from ore instead of from bars will I get four or one bronze bars?

[Quietust]

You will get eight bronze bars - each chunk of ore corresponds to 4 bars of the base metal, and mixing 4 bars of copper and 4 bars of tin gives you 8 bars of bronze (conservation of mass and all) just as you can use 1 bar of copper and 1 bar of tin to make 2 bars of bronze using the "make bronze (from bars)" reaction.

[Brotato]

Sweet, thank you!  That'll really help on charcoal until I get to the magma sea.

[Niyazov]

If you have a lot of cassiterite and you want to make valuable nonmilitary items while saving fuel, consider using fine pewter.

You get 16 bars of fine pewter bar per unit of charcoal if you make it from the ores (3 cass. + 1 copper ores), making it the most fuel-efficient metal to produce. Fine pewter has the same material value as bronze.

The downside is that you can only get cassiterite veins in granite, otherwise you just get small clusters that you'll want to save for bronze.

I have no idea why trifle pewter even exists since fine pewter and bronze are better than it in every meaningful respect.

[Dorfimedes]

Just a small warning though, if you try to use an ore with more than one metal in it (galena and tetrahedrite off the top of my head) in an alloy you won't get any of the "unused" type of metal from the reaction and it's wasted. If you care about the other metal you should make them into bars first. Let's say you take galena ore, which has a 100% chance to produce lead and 50% chance to produce silver when smelted, and alloy it with native gold ore to make electrum. You won't get any lead without making it into bars first, but galena works just as well as a source of silver for the purposes of the reaction, despite only yielding silver half of the time when made into bars.

On the flip side, if you used tetrahedrite ore (100% copper, 50% silver) and smelted it with tin, you would lose all the silver. In this case, you use bars so you get the most out of it.

[Garath]

tetrahedrite has 25% silver, but more importantly, you forgot to factor in a number. Unless you have a magma smelter, using cassiterite and tetrahedrite uses 1 fuel and creates 8 bars. melting them into bars and then making bronze uses 6 units of fuel. So if you have no magma and are on a sparsely forested area - or non forested, melting the ores is much prefered

[Panando]

It's also worth noting that alloys can produce more net value even though you get fewer bars. Take tetrahedrite for example. Smelted individually it produces 4 copper and 0.8 silver bars per tetrahedrite. Smelted into billion from ore, it produces 4 billion per tetrahedrite. These respectively have a total material value of 16 and 24, so you get 50% more total value by producing billion directly from tetrahedrite ore. In fact when making billion or electrum, you always get more net value when using a low-grade silver ore. Sometimes of course you actually want the pure gold/silver items, but if you're just trying to maximize net material value, smelting the silver alloys from ore can be a great deal.

[Garath]

It always amuses me that people talk about the value. My fort value, room value, pretty much any value, is usually so incredibly high that aside from srange moods demanding certain metals, I don't see any reason to make more expensive stuff

[Bilanthri]

I have no idea why trifle pewter even exists since fine pewter and bronze are better than it in every meaningful respect.

This is because Toady likes realism, and, in the real world, ley pewter, which has a high lead content compared to more valuable pewters, is commonly used to practice working soft metals and for cheap items like "lead" miniatures.

[Niyazov]

I have no idea why trifle pewter even exists since fine pewter and bronze are better than it in every meaningful respect.

This is because Toady likes realism, and, in the real world, ley pewter, which has a high lead content compared to more valuable pewters, is commonly used to practice working soft metals and for cheap items like "lead" miniatures.

Right, lay pewter is fine since it has a different composition and uses lead. I'm talking about trifle pewter.

There is no situation (moods excepted) in which you would ever have a reason to make trifle pewter.

It does not have a unique color (same as tin, zinc, nickel and billon).

It has a worse material value than bronze and fine pewter although it is made from the same materials.

It requires more fuel per bar than fine pewter.

[IT 000]

I have no idea why trifle pewter even exists since fine pewter and bronze are better than it in every meaningful respect.

This is because Toady likes realism, and, in the real world, ley pewter, which has a high lead content compared to more valuable pewters, is commonly used to practice working soft metals and for cheap items like "lead" miniatures.

Right, lay pewter is fine since it has a different composition and uses lead. I'm talking about trifle pewter.

There is no situation (moods excepted) in which you would ever have a reason to make trifle pewter.

It does not have a unique color (same as tin, zinc, nickel and billon).

It has a worse material value than bronze and fine pewter although it is made from the same materials.

It requires more fuel per bar than fine pewter.

Out of curiosity, what would you change to make trifle pewter more worthwhile?

[Niyazov]

I have no idea why trifle pewter even exists since fine pewter and bronze are better than it in every meaningful respect.

This is because Toady likes realism, and, in the real world, ley pewter, which has a high lead content compared to more valuable pewters, is commonly used to practice working soft metals and for cheap items like "lead" miniatures.

Right, lay pewter is fine since it has a different composition and uses lead. I'm talking about trifle pewter.

There is no situation (moods excepted) in which you would ever have a reason to make trifle pewter.

It does not have a unique color (same as tin, zinc, nickel and billon).

It has a worse material value than bronze and fine pewter although it is made from the same materials.

It requires more fuel per bar than fine pewter.

Out of curiosity, what would you change to make trifle pewter more worthwhile?

I would remove it. There's no need for three kinds of pewter and the real-world difference between trifle and lay pewter is minimal.

I would also give/restrict the metals' special uses in the game to reflect their real-world uses, e.g. lead for assembling (gem?) windows, brass for mechanisms and pipes, nickel silver for instruments.

Right now being able to make anything out of any metal renders most of the metals uninteresting once you strike iron, gold, silver, etc. Perhaps instead of completely restricting uses, the value of an item or the thoughts it gives could instead be enhanced if it's made from an "appropriate" kind of metal.