Do all civilizations send guests to your locations? Could I even get necromancer visitors....? That's really scary stuff! Perhaps there's something in the raws that allows races to visit other race's locations, if so, it should probably be removed for certain races, like kill-everything werebeasts that enrage, or necromancers that raise the dead, things like that.
That might be their LARGE_PREDATOR token... I
'll have to ask around, I'm unsure about visitors, libraries and taverns myself. Remember, I've been away for a while.
Bloodsteel, Ironbone, Bloodwine... got it.
Silver => Mithril too easy. got it too.
I'll think about it. Althought the blood/bone related metals would be much more suited to Succubi, Necromancers, maybe Orc Shamans... but not dwarves (?). Its one of the reasons I restart the mod, to avoid feature-creep.
Don't you worry Meph, I know you went to travel the world and didn't have time to play around with those new goodies like taverns and such
Just making sure you're aware of certain odd behaviors so you have an easier time fixing them, eventually^^
As to the topic of bloodmetals and feature creep... I do need to say, I liked my cannibalistic dwarves with their thatch huts and all their things made out of blood and bone... But now that you put it this way, I might have to agree with you. I realize that those dwarves I tend to play are not what dwarves ought to be, so it would in fact be _better_ not to include bloodsteel etc for dwarves... Ah damn, a depressing thought but not having crazy feature creep is very important, so you're absolutely right here!
However, I think bloodwine might still be on the table? I don't see why dwarves would refuse any kind of booze; they drink things called sewer brew after all, how bad could bloodwine possibly be compared to that
And to make blood barrels not a one-produt only intermediary (for wine), how about the following idea:
Blood contains iron (hemoglobin). What if there was a way to extract that iron and use blood to start an iron industry? That's like, science and stuff, very dwarfy. Perhaps the blood would have to be boiled (smelter? some sort of cauldron specific to this task?) which would then yield iron dust(?needs a bag) which can be melted into pure iron bearing stone (like pure magnetite, hematite etc...).
So: Animal -> Butcher:Meat -> Kitchen:Blood(Barrel) -> Cauldron/Smelter:Irondust(Bag) -> Smelter:Pure Iron Ore -> Smelter/BlastFurnace: Iron Bars
It's a long process, but it's essentially infinite iron without ever having to dig something out the ground, all can be done via husbandry and with some fuel. It would result in you being able to make iron out of the meat industry like before, but more dwarfy and less "savage sounding" than bloodiron
Just a thought.
Edit: I realize that this is still bordering on feature creep upon proofreading >.< But at least it would stay lore-friendlier than bloodsteel, no?^^
Edit2: Thinking some more, this would essentially make it possible to create steel on any map once again. Perhaps Mithril could then again be given steel as an ingredient? I'm not sure about this, but it might be worth a consideration. My Mithril Swords are pretty badass, they should be harder to make for sure
Edit3: Obviously values need to be balanced. It would make sense to either need multiple barrels of blood to create a bag of iron dust (my favorite) or multiple bags of iron dust to make pure iron ore. Perhaps it would also require multiple pieces of meat to make a blood barrel in the first place!
Edit4: The metallurgist needs 2 iron cauldrons. It would be perfect if that's the place you boil the blood I believe. It would be a situation where you could possibly require to embark with 2 iron cauldrons to enable that industry, which sounds fine to me honestly. And if the whole production chain has become too ungodly long, perhaps the metallurgist can turn 5 or so barrels of blood straight into iron bars? That would remove the bonus from pure iron ore, which sounds okay for infinite iron.
I've ran into another "issue" of sorts when designing my military, the uniforms specifically.
I've noticed that upon selecting the (M)aterial for my equipment, notably cloak but applicable to all armor, there is a huge amount of non-generic leather, silk, yarn and stuff like that. There's so much of it that I can't even find the improved leather (can't remember the name now; the one you upgrade with tallow in the tanner's!) in the list, as it's ungodly long and it must be somewhere in the middle, so I have to stick to either normal leather for now, or let the dwarves pick for themselves.
Will those materials be made generic? If not, perhaps you can do some magickery so that all the materials a fort supposedly can produce are somewhere on top of the list, with normal leather, iron and such? If all that fails, perhaps DFhack might allow for a search function when selecting materials for uniforms? (Although I don't think you do extend DFhack that way yourself?)
Anyway, just create a new uniform and select a material for a cloak and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Edit4: Okay that was the final edit, I promise. Back to slaughtering stuff.