So is there a way I can find the differences in power between weapons? I assume a handcrafted tribal bloodsteel spear is much more powerful than a normal bloodsteel since it requires much more work to make.
Ironbone is roughly as powerful as iron;
Bloodsteel is roughly as powerful as steel.
Tribal bloodsteel is the same material as regular bloodsteel; the main advantage is that the tribal crafter doesn't require an anvil.
re: whether it's more work -- it's supposed to be a trade off; The Tribal craftsman needs lamellar leather, but on the other hand also only uses the equivalent of 1 bloodsteel worth of bone/ash/blood. Which I believe is a savings (wrt Harder Smithing) since the spear is the size of 2 bars and macuahuitl is the size of 3 bars.
p.s. The handcrafted *katana* etc. at the Damasc shop is indeed actually a special material -- patternwelded mithril as opposed to regular mithril
The death spell does not cause death. It gives some message about uncontrollable bleeding, there is a bit of blood of the target on the ground, but nothing else happens. How about the death spell targets the nervous system instead?
Cool, thanks for feedback! The learnable magic spells are one of those things that are very hard to test outside of a game, you can't easily do it the arena ... So, yeah, it is a quite severe bleeding from the throat, but appearently non-fatal! Sometimes I forget that DF physiology is so different :/
Is there a message on a dreamwalker's successful learning of a spell?
Is using aether for skill promotion disabled for orcs?
Spell learning -- Sadly, there is no message. This is one reason why I might move away from learning spells "a la carte" and back to something more like the Masterwork version where you transform into a new caste with a specific group of spells pre-loaded. Too bad, because I like the current idea, but the lack of messages is pretty bad.
Aether -- No, I didn't disable it on purpose, and theres no magic involved specific to dwarves ... hmm ... I think that the problem is that Meph added a container to help with that reaction. The Taiga Orc entity would need [PERMITTED_REACTION:CONTAINER_ESSENCE] added so they can make the containers too.