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[Aaarrgh!]

Hi there. I've set up a fairly decent fortress so far, and even found some raw adamantine. The problem is that I can't smelt it - when I tell my magma smelter to, it says that I need fuel (what for, I don't know), but I have charcoal in the stockpile supplying it. Any suggestions?

[Reese]

IIRC, first you need someone with the strand extracting labor enabled to extract strands at a crafting workshop , then you can smelt the strands (or weave them in to clothes... or have your medical dwarfs abscond with them for sutures.

[Aaarrgh!]

Thank you - I wasn't aware of that extra step, I thought it was just for making adamantine cloth.

[JasonMel]

Adamantine is very resistant to heat. Extruding thread-sized wire before smelting allows the heat to penetrate a given volume of metal through a greater surface area; otherwise, it simply won't melt. (That's how I think about it, anyway.)

[Quietust]

Supposedly, the logic is that Raw Adamantine is actually just regular stone laced with razor-sharp strands of Adamantine, and normal smelting methods wouldn't work - if you pulverized the stone you'd destroy the strands, and attempting to melt the stone away would fail due to the heat being absorbed by the adamantine itself (which has an incredibly high specific heat capacity). Thus, Strand Extractors are needed to very carefully (and slowly) remove the Adamantine from the stone before it can be used.

Another thread suggested that adamantine wafers aren't solid but are a sort of flattened mesh, and the correspondingly reduced amount of material in each wafer explains why you need around 3 times as many wafers to make stuff like weapons and armor.

[GreatWyrmGold]

It also explains adamantine's low density, and the fact that its liquid density is higher.

[JasonMel]

A flattened mesh would be fine for armor, but how would a flattened mesh form and retain a superior keen edge? It must be solid at some point. There's no need for smelting otherwise.

[Hyndis]

A quick tip is that if you have magma smelters and forges you can continually refine adamantine or any other metal.

Make it all into coins at your magma forge. Just put coins on repeat. Use up all of the metal.

Then designate all of your coins for melting, and melt them all down at the same magma smelter.

You should end up with more metal than you started with.



As an experiment last night using aluminum, I started with 60 bars of aluminum, made coins, melted the coins, and now I have 72 bars of aluminum.

[JasonMel]

72 bars of aluminum on the wall,
72 bars of aluminum!
Melt one down,
Coin it round,
73 bars of aluminum on the wall!

[i2amroy]

That's nothing. If you really want to generate material in that method you should be making leggings instead, they have a 150% return rate on the metal you put in where coins only have a 110%, as well as training a useful skill.

Of course if you want to do that you should probably just add a cheat reaction that gives you free metal, possible with a 1 bar->2 bars to duplicate the fact that you need at least 1 bar to get the ball rolling.

[Hyndis]

That's nothing. If you really want to generate material in that method you should be making leggings instead, they have a 150% return rate on the metal you put in where coins only have a 110%, as well as training a useful skill.

Of course if you want to do that you should probably just add a cheat reaction that gives you free metal, possible with a 1 bar->2 bars to duplicate the fact that you need at least 1 bar to get the ball rolling.

Coins train up the metalcrafting skill, which improves decorating items and also making things like chains, quivers, flasks, and other trade goods.

Coins also have the benefit of not having any quality modifier, so your blacksmiths won't become unhappy when you start melting down masterworks.

But yes, making and then melting leggings works just fine, the only problem is that you risk having miserable legendary armorsmiths. If you keep that in mind and watch out for that then leggings are superior for making more metal.

[Quietust]

That's nothing. If you really want to generate material in that method you should be making leggings instead, they have a 150% return rate on the metal you put in where coins only have a 110%, as well as training a useful skill.

That only works with normal metals, though - when you make stuff out of adamantine, it requires (roughly) 3 times as many wafers to make, but the yields are not multiplied accordingly, so for weapons and armor you'll end up getting exactly 30% of the wafers you used.

[i2amroy]

Good point. I guess we would need to go back to the old "splitting bolt stacks and melting down the individual bolts" method then.

[Quietust]

Good point. I guess we would need to go back to the old "splitting bolt stacks and melting down the individual bolts" method then.

Or you could just use coins, since those still only need 1 wafer to make.

[i2amroy]

Interesting, I didn't know that. Guess that comes from never ever having made coins, what with them being a hauling problem already back when I first started playing, and never having seen an actual use for them since then.