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[MOK]

Howdy folks!

I've been playing DF off and on for the past 2 or 3 years, started maybe a dozen.  But every time I do, I can't get a solid metal industry going.  Usually I don't have iron.  And I've only encountered coal or coke once.  And usually the metal is waaaay down in the lower quarter of the world.  And magma forges?  No way.  I don't find magma anywhere near the surface, nor the middle.

When I read of others' experience, I get the impression my problems aren't difficult to overcome.  How do you guys get your metalworks humming?  How often do you have local iron, versus copper, or(very frequent for me) no ores at all?  And fuel? 

And especially, how often do you setup magma forges?  Do you do them a mile away from your fort, down in the deeps, or do you usually make those giant pump towers?  The latter seems like a really extensive and time-consuming project, compared to how casually I see people talk about their magma forges.

Or is it a matter of having a near-surface lava tube?  If so, then how can I influence my chances of getting those?  I've not yet seen one.

My experience so far is that making a metal industry is so demanding and time-intensive that by the time I'm making progress, I have hundreds of dwarves, sieges outside, multiple security issues to address, and a lot of pressures vying for the time.  This doesn't jive with the experiences I've read, where a bit of armor and weapons are forged fairly early.

Whats the deal?

[FuzzyZergling]

I usually set up my forges down by the magma sea fairly early on. No pumpstacks for me!

[Seleucian]

Iron is also very rare for me, but I make sure I embark somewhere with at least some metals(usually useless ones like zinc . I usually bring some iron ores and coal with me at embark, coal especially is very cheap. Then I request ores and metals items(anvils!) form the caravan and trade for them with legendary meals. You can get a lot of iron and other metals this way.

As for settings up the industry, I always set it up right above the magma sea. Then I make some bedrooms and a foodstockpile and add all my dedicated metalworkers to a burrow so they won't have to walk so far. I usually try to find the magma sea as soon as possible, after settings up my food supply, workshops and a few bedrooms. So somewhere at the end of year 1, I usually have the metal industry set up in the middle of year 2.

[Garath]

most often I have silver and copper, which is good enough to get started. The rest I trade with the caravans for useless crap or with the goblins for mutilation. I usually start near the surface, working with charcoal, but try to move everything down as soon as I can

[Rvlion]

I cheated a little bit in my raws... I removed all useless ore types (incl. flux stones) and added some which have a combination of ores (for example electrum comes can be found underground like regular gold and gives both gold and (a smaller percentage of )silver bars when smelted).
In the end my new setup leaves me with only copper, iron, silver, gold, platinum bars and 2 alloys that can be made from combining the ores that are available.
This combined with a nice embark spot ...3x3 embark with a vulcano, white sand, 1x1 size stream in the corner... Generally gives me a whole lot of metals and access to glass...

A shame I have to "embark -e" in dfhack. Lol

The good part is that I have a necro tower very close by... 

[WanderingKid]

Magma forges: At the sea

Ores: Usually I embark only at places with metals and flux.  I need to do a terrifying glacier one of these days.

Metal: Dwarven cooking being the most amazing thing on the planet, you can buy out entire caravans of every piece of metal they own.  Overpay them rediculously and they bring more.  Melt it down and you're swimming in bars before you know it.

[Larix]

The presence of metal ores is indicated by the embark finder - when looking at the biome information (first choice by default), 'shallow metal(s)' and/or 'deep metal(s)' can be displayed. If you want local metals usable from early on, you should look for an embark site with 'shallow metals' (note plural, that improves chances of having not only sphalerite or so).

The general frequency of interesting stuff for your miners to dig up is governed by the world generation options - either 'minerals' in the standard worldgen ('frequent' gives you a lot to play with, 'everywhere' can become excessive) or 'mineral scarcity' in advanced worldgen (must be set low to make minerals 'less scarce', i.e. frequent; 500 and less is somewhere around 'frequent' in standard worldgen, it can be set as low as 100). You still need to pick a site with a promising pre-embark prospect - a site with no indicated metals on a mineral-rich world will probably still have no metals

You can bypass the guessing nature of pre-embark information by being cheaty - if you have DFHack installed, you can 'prospect all' from the Hack console while the game is still in the embark finder screen, and all stones, minerals and gems present on the currently chosen site will be listed.

Early magma is guaranteed when embarking on top of volcanoes, but can also be made much more likely by increasing the 'minimum volcanism' setting in advanced world generation. You'll have to do some exploratory mining to locate magma pipes in that case.

In general, the early metal industry is much easier to set up if you bring some ore and coal on embark, order more ore from the dwarven caravan and buy items to melt down (anvils are made of iron or steel and come in base quality, so are comparatively cheap for their yield of one bar each). Charcoal is an acceptable early-game fuel source, but of course requires a logging industry and probably a tree farm later on.

Pumping magma from the depths is generally a bit of a project - you not only have to dig out the whole construction, constructing and building a pump on every level you want to move magma across takes a while. And all pump parts need to be magma-proof, which in the case of the corkscrews usually means lots of glass if you're not swimming in iron already. If magma is only needed for a handful of workshops, building a minecart filling station and moving those up to your workshop level is probably less work.

[grody311]

Yeah coal is stupidly rare.  You can get by with wood from caravans/caverns/surface though until you dig down to the magma sea.

Look for multiple shallow metals at embark if you want iron.

For a fun challenge though, you could probably get a metal industry going using just the caravan goods and invader loot.  Melt it all down and make chain mail for everyone.  If your fort is anything like mine, you are swimming in prepared food and crafts to trade away and could easily buy every bit of metal off the vans.

[MOK]

This clarifies things; My experience is clearly pretty common.

I do, of course, look for ores and flux on embark biomes.  But I think part of the problem was that I was accepting deep metals, and it seems that it's shallow metals that tend to carry iron and fuel.

In the past, I've assisted my metal 'industry' with caravan trade, buying anything that's iron or steel, buying all the wood.  Usually with lavish meal pots.  I do hope that in the future, food isn't made such an overpowered trading commodity.

But all that, again, runs contrary to many of the stories people tell of their own fortresses.  Perhaps that's written off as glossing over, or by non-default play.

Speaking of which, I've started a new fort, where I'm tunneling down to the magma sea early.  But knowing the frequency and danger of the caverns, I used DFHack to reveal all, so I could find a clear shaft down.  So my suspicion is that going to the magma sea early, using default play, isn't a reliable method.  It's a good way to bring in fun from the caverns early on.

So to doublecheck....  A persistent, independent metal industry is not easy to get started in default play, not unless you chop a lot of trees.  Those who manage it via magma forges are actually getting lucky, or aren't playing default?  If I'm wrong here, then something is still missing, because otherwise it doesn't seem to add up.

[Mushroo]

I recruit 3 soldiers per year (the best one from each migrant wave) and have no trouble outfitting them with metal weapons and armor, even on maps with no ore or magma, using trade, goblinite, and wooden charcoal. If you are going for dozens of melee soldiers at a time then you pretty much need metal and a native source of metal.

You can build a fantastic military with no metal at all simply by using archers instead of melee dwarfs.

[AutomataKittay]

Speaking of which, I've started a new fort, where I'm tunneling down to the magma sea early.  But knowing the frequency and danger of the caverns, I used DFHack to reveal all, so I could find a clear shaft down.  So my suspicion is that going to the magma sea early, using default play, isn't a reliable method.  It's a good way to bring in fun from the caverns early on.

So to doublecheck....  A persistent, independent metal industry is not easy to get started in default play, not unless you chop a lot of trees.  Those who manage it via magma forges are actually getting lucky, or aren't playing default?  If I'm wrong here, then something is still missing, because otherwise it doesn't seem to add up.

Drilling to magma sea early is pretty standard for some players with strong metal working preference. I can do it within a year after getting through aquifier or from the start if there're none. It just involve a few more miners than usual and a lot of masons if you want to go straight down. It's pretty much at expense of developing other things, though. It's safer to pause at each cavern level to wall them up and mineing some space out to supply the blocks beforehand, but takes half-year to a year longer.

Metal industry's relatively easy to set up once it's gotten down to magma sea, it's mostly the trip takes so long between more top-ward and bottom-ward areas. Importing ore and materials to melt down works well enough to keep at least one smith working year-around. Coals are stupidly hard to get, I've had entire civs without either forms of coal to import, though it doesn't really hurts me since I request every wood to the max if I'm running non-magma metal industry anyway.

So yeah, it's not so much lucky as it's focused drive to get a major industry up, it's doable with just wood, but it involve clear-cutting and major importing. I tend to focus on clothing industry first, which does makes other industries suffer until it's up to speed or I just have enough hands at it.

[Aquathug]

You can build a fantastic military with no metal at all simply by using archers instead of melee dwarfs.

This right here.

Wooden crossbows shoot just as well as iron crossbows and bone bolts are worth a huge bang for their buck. Leather armor is also easy to come by if you setup an animal farm or whatnot. This in turn also provides bones for the aforementioned bolts, not to mention delicious prepared organs that dwarves are so fond of.

That being said, the hitting power of something like a single steel bolt will have far more power than one made of bone, but it is harder to come by, and not something you should train with.

[AutomataKittay]

You can build a fantastic military with no metal at all simply by using archers instead of melee dwarfs.

This right here.

Wooden crossbows shoot just as well as iron crossbows and bone bolts are worth a huge bang for their buck. Leather armor is also easy to come by if you setup an animal farm or whatnot. This in turn also provides bones for the aforementioned bolts, not to mention delicious prepared organs that dwarves are so fond of.

That being said, the hitting power of something like a single steel bolt will have far more power than one made of bone, but it is harder to come by, and not something you should train with.

Don't forget leather or wooden shield pretty are pretty light and just as good as metal shield in batting things aside! I've had non-metal armor melee manage surprisingly well with dodging and shield, still better off giving them full metal gears since it does helps.

[FuzzyZergling]

Speaking of which, I've started a new fort, where I'm tunneling down to the magma sea early.  But knowing the frequency and danger of the caverns, I used DFHack to reveal all, so I could find a clear shaft down.  So my suspicion is that going to the magma sea early, using default play, isn't a reliable method.  It's a good way to bring in fun from the caverns early on.

So to doublecheck....  A persistent, independent metal industry is not easy to get started in default play, not unless you chop a lot of trees.  Those who manage it via magma forges are actually getting lucky, or aren't playing default?  If I'm wrong here, then something is still missing, because otherwise it doesn't seem to add up.

I've never had any trouble with the caverns.
Just drill straight down. When you pierce a caverns, seal the hole in the ceiling by building an up stair over the up/down stair that pierced it. Then, find a solid pillar and go down through it.

[jcochran]

Also digging down at the border between embark tiles tends to avoid caverns in the first place. So for a 2x2 embark, drill straight down on one of the 4 tiles dead center (They will be 47 or 48 tiles from either a top or bottom edge. And of course 47 or 48 tiles from the left and right edges). For a default 4x4 embark, you have 9 "sweet spots" for drilling down. Or you could just pick a place at random. Drill down until you hit a cavern or the magma sea. If you hit a cavern wall up the breach tunnel sideways to get to another clear spot and resume your downward progress. It doesn't take long to reach the sea then.