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Author Topic: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)  (Read 2806 times)

ShuangXi

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OK, I finally got my metal industry up, and (through DFhack) discovered the only metals on my embark available to me is Silver, Lead, and Candy (which I haven't found yet).

Silver I know is good for hammers, and maybe arrows (though wasteful).  Anything else?

Anything useful to use lead for besides randomly building blocks to get experience?
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Azated

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2012, 04:47:13 am »

You have no tetrahedrite or iron ores at all?

Sounds like you're going to die.
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2012, 04:51:31 am »

Silver is good for hammer and bolts. It's technically a weapon metal, but it's not much good beyond those for weaponery :D

The rest of metals, you can use for whatever you feels the need for, though I'd recommend against using them for barrels and bins, most of them being heavier than wood and dwarves slow with heavy things. Silver's valuable enough for furnishings, at least.

You could build lead chains and cages, or really flasks and sell them to caravan to buy better metals. I've never really paid attention to metal much, having plentiful leather and cloth to sell off, but if you got magma it's pretty much free money. You can melt down metal junks from caravan to recover it's metal :D

If you're worried about military, make some bone or wood crossbow, bone and silver ( latter's better, but up to you ) bolts and leather shields, and have fortifications.
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ShuangXi

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #3 on: November 13, 2012, 04:56:00 am »

You could build lead chains and cages, or really flasks

Is there any downside to making flasks to use (with the weight issues?)

You have no tetrahedrite or iron ores at all?

Sounds like you're going to die.

Seriously no other metals.  Well there is Sphalerite (Zinc), but that's no different.  For some reason when I pre-embark 'prospect'ed, I thought Sphalerite was for iron, and never really came back to the question until now.
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #4 on: November 13, 2012, 04:58:35 am »

You could build lead chains and cages, or really flasks

Is there any downside to making flasks to use (with the weight issues?)

You have no tetrahedrite or iron ores at all?

Sounds like you're going to die.

Seriously no other metals.  Well there is Sphalerite (Zinc), but that's no different.  For some reason when I pre-embark 'prospect'ed, I thought Sphalerite was for iron, and never really came back to the question until now.

Nah, no downside to flasks, they're small enough to not be too noticible. Material poisoning's not in DF, yet, so lead anything are safe to use for barrels, but they're big enough that weight's an issue.

Flasks have around as much value as a craft, and dwarves will always makes 3 flasks ( IIRC, I know I always get 3 leather waterskins or 3 glass vials ). It's as good as goblet for trading material!
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Imp

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #5 on: November 13, 2012, 05:58:47 am »

You have no tetrahedrite or iron ores at all?

Sounds like you're going to die.

Everyone dies in the end.

You still might have a long and interesting path getting there though, and that path might include a lot of armor and weapons.

Direct military might is one way to win, but not one that's available to you at this point in this game, perhaps.

There's still traps, both direct and indirect ones.  Given adequate stone and wood, you can trap yourself enough time to harvest the metal you need from your first many waves of attackers.

Weapon traps are one option that's mostly closed to you.  There's still cage traps, and those will hold most attackers indefinately.  You can strip any caged attacker by dumping the cage - the creature will stay caged, just be stripped before being taken to the dump.  Reclaim and make their items yours, including their weapons and armor - dwarves and goblins happen to be about the same size.  You don't have to deal with a caged attacker immediately.... you could just make another cage until you're ready to see how best to kill them with your options of the time.

Bridges and walls, with a few mechanisms and a bit of strategy in the design of pathways can create pitfall traps.  A fall of 10 z-levels or more is almost 100% lethal, so do mind who goes where when you order a lever pulled.

Some horrid monsters are far to heavy to permit your bridges to move when the heavy thing stands on them, and some are immune to cage or other direct traps.

You can still use spear traps, each with a single wooden spear (or more, if you've enough wood) and use your stones for walls and create a creative path that enemies must walk... which if you know enemies are walking you'll station someone to pull a lever on repeat.... the spear traps will flail (even if the target is trap immune.... that's not the target setting them off, it's the lever) and the enemy will, sooner or later dodge.... you, in your strategy as you designed this path might have created a good many opportunities for dodging while on this path to lead one over a 10+ z-level fall...

You could even design creative path control, through the use of various rising bridges, so that should attackers of any sort make it through your defenses, why you can but pull a lever and seal that path - opening a new pathway that requires them to move through your traps again to reach that new opening.... a whole new set of chances to dodge to their deaths, assuming neither normal traps nor bridges can bother your attackers.

Should you design your defenses in this way, there's nothing to stop you from continuing to shift where you appear 'open to attack', and force your enemies to run through various sorts of nastiness until they are unable to threaten you anymore.

After a bit, the loot (reworked as needed) that you can gain from this should outfit your troops nicely.
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katwithk

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #6 on: November 13, 2012, 08:31:47 am »

You're fine on weapon traps. With enough silver serrated blades, anything non trap avoid is mincemeat.

As for weapons and armor, I've been there.

You will have two main sources of iron and copper/bronze

Traders. Not just bars, everything made of metal. Buy is all, by mass producing silver crafts, and melt it all down.

And goblonite. Invaders after the first siege or two should be brining a respectable amount of metal with them. I personally see invaders pretty often.
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Caldfir

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #7 on: November 13, 2012, 12:55:09 pm »

You could build lead chains and cages, or really flasks

Is there any downside to making flasks to use (with the weight issues?)

You have no tetrahedrite or iron ores at all?

Sounds like you're going to die.

Seriously no other metals.  Well there is Sphalerite (Zinc), but that's no different.  For some reason when I pre-embark 'prospect'ed, I thought Sphalerite was for iron, and never really came back to the question until now.

Nah, no downside to flasks, they're small enough to not be too noticible. Material poisoning's not in DF, yet, so lead anything are safe to use for barrels, but they're big enough that weight's an issue.

Flasks have around as much value as a craft, and dwarves will always makes 3 flasks ( IIRC, I know I always get 3 leather waterskins or 3 glass vials ). It's as good as goblet for trading material!
DO NOT MAKE FLASKS
While not obvious in fort mode, flasks are actually quite heavy, and can weigh upwards of 10 kilos (if I remember correctly, a rose gold flask weighs 19) which will slow down your military units (first noticed this on an adventurer - speed drop was very noticable!).  Slow units = dead units.  Always use waterskins, never flasks. 

The silver can be made into trap components, of which serrated discs are the most valuable, so if you're going for pure value, go with those. 

The lead is somewhat problematic as a material, since not a lot of benefit comes from having heavy crap.  What you CAN do is make lead minecarts for use as weapons (I'm sure you can find a way to be clever with this), or, if you just want to use it for something then just put the "stud with lead" job on repeat. 
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AmpsterMan

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #8 on: November 13, 2012, 01:28:47 pm »

Make stone fall traps and load them with led ore
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Damiac

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #9 on: November 13, 2012, 01:58:24 pm »

Eh, it's not as bad as people are making out here.  A silver hammer squad and a couple railgun marksdwarf squads should be fine to keep you going until you can trade for enough metal to make some good axes and armor.  Plus you can make all sorts of traps.
You can make good food to trade with, so the lack of highly valuable metal shouldn't be a huge problem.  Due to the lack of metal armor, you'll probably want to let your marksdwarves do most of the work in early ambushes and sieges, until you can at least make some bronze or iron armor.

Lead's not terribly useful, but it's better than stonecrafts, at least value-wise. 

It's going to take you a while to get enough steel together to arm a decent militia, but iron's pretty plentiful from goblins and traders, so I think you'll be ok.  Dwarves are expendible anyway, and it's not like you can't reclaim the armor if someone dies has too much fun in it.

Without gold or platinum it'll be a bit more of a pain to give your nobles the nice rooms they want, but it's nothing a little extra engraving and smoothing can't solve.  You may want to do more jewel crafting and encrusting than usual, to improve the value of your finished goods.
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weenog

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #10 on: November 13, 2012, 03:23:26 pm »

I like to make lead sarcophagi.  You can never have enough of those, and once they're ready, they aren't moving.
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Beenoc

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #11 on: November 13, 2012, 03:33:10 pm »

If you end up with a surplus of silver, make goblets. A single silver bar (worth 10) becomes, at minimum, 3 goblets, worth 300 each. If you get high-quality, then there's another 300 value per quality level. Goblets are great trade goods.
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #12 on: November 13, 2012, 03:37:36 pm »

If you end up with a surplus of silver, make goblets. A single silver bar (worth 10) becomes, at minimum, 3 goblets, worth 300 each. If you get high-quality, then there's another 300 value per quality level. Goblets are great trade goods.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Quality#Quality_grades
Much bigger at masterwork :D

And yeah, non-weapon metals makes for better studding stuffs or export goblets ( Furnishings are good, too ). I tend to not pay attention to flask weight so it's probably worse than I expected since I've not made any metal ones since minecart version, which I forget happened for weighting down dwarves :D

ed: fixed minecraft to minecart, was distracted by crafting.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2012, 03:44:19 pm by AutomataKittay »
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Captain Man

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #13 on: November 13, 2012, 03:40:55 pm »

I don't know if you know but there's a melt item bar duplication bug thing. My favorite is to make leggings, melt them, get 1.5 bars back per (technically 3 for each 2). Trains up armorsmithing!

With or without that bug, make silver crafts or some kind of expensive silver thing (or butt tons of rock crafts, whatever) and trade for a lot of iron and (optionally) repeat the exploit.

Happy dwarfing!
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ShuangXi

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Re: Non military grade metals and what to do with them (silver and lead)
« Reply #14 on: November 13, 2012, 08:06:24 pm »

Thanks for the advice everyone.

I have to think about whether or not I will want to use the smelting exploit.  It seems cheatey, but at the same time easy to justify with the game giving me no usable metals.

I should note that on this biome, I have never successfully gotten a trader into my fort (year 3 just started), and the surface has 190+ undead vs my 60 dwarfs hiding below, so in the short term trading seems impossible.

I'm thinking to turn all the lead into cages and try a mass trapping and dumping of the surface guys to try and get some caravans in.

BTW, the numbers given on the 'prospect all' in dfhack... what to they translate to in real game terms?  Is the quantity given the exact number of tiles, which then I can divide by 4 to see how much I have (I want to see if I have enough silver to start making silver bolts without wasting it all)
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