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.