Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Zucchini]

Hello DF forum people,

I have an idea and I want to ask you all about it.

I've been checking out a lot of mods that deal with metallurgy, and looking at how the issue of proportions in alloys has been dealt with in the past.  I know it's always sort of a pull between realism (like bronze in real life being at maximum only 20% tin), on the one hand, and the problems inherent in implementing those ratios in-game (do you make big 8-bar reactions that are way more efficient than we want to be, but get the right ratios?  do we use partial bars, which is very difficult to track because it's not displayed in the furnace?  and so on).

So, I wanted to throw out another workaround to see if it gets shot to pieces.

What about reactions that take, say, take a tin bar, and render it into 10 tin rod bundles (represented in the raws as TOOLs), each representing 5% of a bar.

If we decide to create two bronze variants, we could have one use 4 rods, and another use 2, whatever the case may be.

Some crazy superalloy could also be so-represented...  Either with specific alloy rod bundles -- say, a bundle type that is made with 6 nickel, 2 chromium, 1 iron, 1 molybdenum, 1 niobium, and perhaps cobalt, Manganese, aluminium, etc., and is called "alloy rod bundle (inconel 625)".  (Obviously, inconel 625 is a horrible name and would hopefully be represented with a more appealing name, perhaps made by some horridly complex or partly-magical process. But whatever.)

Or with more generalized bundle types...  tin rod bundles, nickel rod bundles, etc.

Basically, using the TOOL functionality to either divide bars into smaller pieces so we can have the best of both worlds...  manageable bar portions without huge, over-efficient reactions or unrealistic proportions.

So, good idea?  Any side effects this would have, other than bloating the tool list?  Fire away!  Shoot that sweet puppy down.

[AutomataKittay]

I believe it could work, actually. I think I've seen some mod use something similar with gems to make exotic alloys.

I don't know of any specific issues with TOOL tag, but there might be issues with the whole thing being fiddly and having much bigger list to deal with

[Putnam]

i love you

[Tsuchigumo550]

If you get this working, I totally want to eff around with making alloys that shouldn't exist.

[Putnam]

If you get this working, I totally want to eff around with making alloys that shouldn't exist.

"If you get this working"? No, this will most certainly work. However, all alloys will have to be raw-defined.

[AutomataKittay]

Yeah, I imagine most of the effort going this route would be adding reactions to smelter and data entries for the new alloys and making tool bundles play nice in proportions.

[janglur]

I can't wait for my reinforced titanium-steel alloy breastplate!  =D

This sounds kind of like how I implemented some of my Mogun mod stuff.  (The latest version isn't out yet.  I dunno, just lazy I guess).  Where there's a lot of intermediary products before you can actually produce anything.  Like the ceramic llamelar armor:
Make slats (in 5-slat lots per clay), 10 or 25 slats required for a spaulder or armor suit.  Then combine with iron bars (1 or 2, respectively) and either raw leather (for spaulder) or a suit of leather armor (for armor) to produce one Llamelar armor.  Time consuming and complex, but the time to produce it actually balances out to real-world expectancies of only 1-8 suits a year, depending on various factors.  RL armorcrafting is hard work!  It's also superior in a few ways to even steel armor, namely being more resistant to damage, especially blunt, and slightly better to piercing, but is also much heavier.

There's also some special alloys, such as cobalt steel, which is ever so slightly sharper and lighter than regular steel, making it ideal for cutting weapons-  however it is troublesome to make since it requires cobalt, and an entire 'nother steel step (so yet more coal and flux).  It's arguable whether it's worth the slight gain.  More of a question of 'quality over quantity' since you can produce 3 steel axes in the time it takes to make 2 cobalt steel, provided you even HAVE cobalt available in the first place.

And chocolate.  Which has proven to be a lot of fun!  It can be ground into cocoa powder, or made into delicious, deliiiicious chocolate.

Sometimes, the most complicated tasks are the most rewarding, if for no other reason than accomplishment.  (See:  Solid-steel towers or other megastructures)




rambleramble

[Tsuchigumo550]

I see a LOT of cobalt for some reason... unless there's cobaltite anywhere on the map.

That, and I want to make a TON of reactions for the non weapons grade metals to make them weapons grade metals.

[Zucchini]

Awesome!  Then this is very exciting.

So, some newbie questions then:

If I, say, make this reaction:

Code: [Select]

[REACTION:MAKE_ALLOYING_RODS] -- OCDF
[NAME:make alloying rods]
[BUILDING:SMELTER:NONE]
[REAGENT:A:150:BAR:NO_SUBTYPE:METAL:NONE]
[REAGENT:Box:1:BOX:NONE:NONE:NONE][EMPTY][PRESERVE_REAGENT]
[PRODUCT:100:20:TOOL:ITEM_TOOL_ROD_BUNDLE:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:A:NONE][PRODUCT_TO_CONTAINER:Box]
[FUEL]
[SKILL:SMELT]
...  to go along with this tool:

Code: [Select]

[ITEM_TOOL:ITEM_TOOL_ROD_BUNDLE] -- OCDF
[NAME:rod bundle:rod bundles]
[VALUE:2]
[TILE:22]
[SIZE:10]
[MATERIAL_SIZE:1]
[METAL_MAT]
[UNIMPROVABLE]
Tested it...  and...  nooo!

It works...  with the problem of producing 600xp for the furnace operator's smelting skill, and the rods having quality differences, which is probably not the best.  Also they're not taken to the Finished Goods/Tools stockpile...

Is there another way to do it that doesn't run into these problems?  Or at least the treating-it-as-20-completed-jobs-for-skill-gain problem?  (Sorry, newb here learning just about from ground up.)

[Jilladilla]

i think giving the reaction no skill solves the massive xp gain, but makes the reaction finish instantaneously
just remove [SKILL:SMELT]
should also solve the quality issue,  although there is no tantrum if a masterwork is used up in a reaction

the stockpile issue, well i have no suggestions for that

[Zucchini]

Ah, thanks, Jilladilla.  Yes, that works nicely, and I don't think it's too much of a big deal that the reaction is instantaneous, since it's not something we'll be doing a lot of.

As for the game not putting them in stockpiles, I found out it was because I was outputting them to bags; it couldn't do anything (melting, reactions, stockpiling) with them until I had my little dwarven guinea pigs dump them out. Once they're in bins, they stockpile appropriately.

So apparently there's a game limitation/bug/feature in that tools can't be stored in bags...?

[Putnam]

Well, do you see any tools in bags normally?

[AutomataKittay]

I'd not use the bags personally, and let the bins stack it up. Bin can take a lot of stuff in, too!

And job exp is by product amount times 30, last I checked, so any bunches of products will have a lot of exp. Not that it'd really be a problem for smelters, considering they don't usually make quality product.

[Zucchini]

Well, do you see any tools in bags normally?

Nope.  But it hadn't occurred to me because I was happily picturing little bags of rods.

Bins it is.


EDIT: Testing next thing before I ask more dumb question.  =D

----------------

Okay.  So now the question of exploitability.  How can I get around the problem of melting yield being ridiculous no matter the item size?  (Apparently 0.25-0.33 no matter what I do.)  Not that I think the kind of person who'd like this sort of thing would care to exploit, but still.  Just make each rod type a material-less, individually-specified type?

[Jilladilla]

there are already ways to exploit infinite metal in vanilla, if someone wants infinite metal they could just use one of those methods