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[StagnantSoul]

I've been thinking of adding things like stone hammers, diamond swords, stone spears, and the like for a while now. I tried running a game without any forging or metal work at all, and actually found obsidian swords now do some damage, but not enough to be truly effective. This is somewhat different than I actually expected, as I've seen examples of obsidian knives being sharper than steel ones. But it's forgivable. You can't have a volcano pumping out better than steel swords, can you?

Back to the topic: would you like to see stone hammers and spears, so you could actually arm each peasant in certain emergencies, or a diamond sword, with an edge sharper than steel, maybe a diamond spear, or stone axes, which were used extensively by stone age civilizations? Tell me what you think, and I may add a tier of equipment made of stone to my creature pack that I'm working on. They'd probably be for your backup soldiers/militia, with your normal military using up the metal, while your reserve soldiers use stone weaponry.

[Chevaleresse]

I'm all for crude stone equipment, but gemstone weapons are incredibly unrealistic.

[StagnantSoul]

Well okay. Knives are made for surgery with diamond edges though. But I guess I can leave them out. Also: how do you feel about adding in japanese swords? I'm thinking nodachi, katana, and wakizashi. Wakizashi being a higher velocity short sword, katana being long sword, and the nodachi being a faster two hand sword. They'd have a smaller contact area, meaning better armour penetration, but then they'd be less likely to cleave parts off, like probably no bifurcation.

[NullForceOmega]

I think it would be interesting to see some ceramic weapons in game, but that would take a lot of RAW work I think.

[StagnantSoul]

Well I'm moderately good at RAW work. Just from looking at examples and templates, I made a new creature from scratch, right from a blank notepad. He didn't act like I wanted, so I deleted him. It's slowed down my creature creation.

[Jake]

You can add [CAN_STONE] to any weapon you want to make out of obsidian, and add [SHARP] to any other stone you want to make weaponiseable. (Is that a word?) Flint isn't in vanilla DF for some reason, but Medikohl's Expanded DF mod and probably several others have raws for it.

For other weapon types like wooden spears, you'll need a custom reaction. The wiki has a comprehensive guide here.

[Slidey]

glass and obsidian arrows among other things makes sense also if you are in the vision stage (even execution been very limited due to way its been coded)

[Kumil]

I don't find adding japanese swords interesting in itself unless you're making a Japan-themed mod. Giving them better armor penetration makes more sense for Stab since nihontōs have a strong piercing point. For Edge attacks on the contrary, I would give them a large contact area with a low penetration to represent slashing attacks, since japanese swords were designed and used for this purpose.

[Meph]

Chert could give blades and arrow tips, and I use horn to make daggers in the tanners shop. Also bone/wood/gem-tipped everything. Rock armor is pretty bad, rock weapons too, but ammo is great. Gem edged weapons are very sharp.

[GavJ]

gem edge weapons are pretty silly. Do they bring it to the local laser cutting machine or what?
Gem arrowheads, maybe, but pretty wasteful. I don't see them being particularly more effective than flint.

Flint (or other kinds of chert) are great and effective for anything from arrows up to fairly large axes. Not swords though, much too brittle to extend torque out like that. Axes, hammers, and spear points are compact in size and thus won't shatter.

Glass is fine too, but is a hell of a lot more effort than chert for weapons for no benefit in strength, and is not exactly a low tech alternative to metals.

Obsidian is similar to chert

Hammers are super easy to make out of damn near anything and would be plenty effective. Most rocks are fairly similar in density, but if you still want to max out density for a hammer, igneous rocks are generally the heaviest, specifically mafic igneous rocks like basalt.

None of the above are appropriate at all for armor. If you want low tech armor, your best bet is cloth armor, which can be extremely protective and sturdy. It's also, incidentally, the best kind of armor against bludgeoning (better than steel! In real life, dunno about DF) which, if you're in a stone age fight, is probably pretty important. And with many thick layers, pretty resistant to edges too. Not cheap for a low tech people to make, but doable.



Ceramic, no. It shatters from a stern look if it's thin enough to be sharp, and those are mostly very modern ceramics anyway. Old world ceramics would nearly always be lower quality (silt impurities for instance) and need to be tempered with grog or shells or similar which makes any kind of edge totally impossible, and simply aren't composed of the same exotic materials.

[NullForceOmega]

I agree on all points Gav, but if we are looking at effective non-metal weapons the options are pretty limited, there's stone and bone for the major and wood for the minor, but since modern processes can create viable ceramic cutting tools, I thought it might be worth mentioning.  While I have no hands-on experience, I have heard that ceramic hammers are actually quite viable as tools, but I do not know how well that would translate to combat worthiness.

[Meph]

A diamond sword, made without the local laser cutting machine, is unrealistic, but a steel sword, made with bare hands on an anvil is fine? If dwarves can work metal by hand, why not gems? Even their jewelers who cut and engrave items need no tools to do so.

[Putnam]

I think the implication is that the tools are in the workshop, given that a workshop is required.

[StagnantSoul]

The tools are definitely inside the workshop. They may not be listed, but it's heavily implied. Remember, this is a fantasy game. Many inconsistencies exist, such as how weak obsidian is. It should really be nearly as good as copper for the short swords at least. You seem to be heavily stuck on the idea that Dwarf Fortress should be a second Earth. What if some made dwarf scientist made a glass a diamond reverse telescope in his workshop, making a mini sun-laser/beam stand? Incredibly unlikely, but the dwarves seem to be more advanced than the humans technology wise. It could've been an accidental discovery. How do we know? We're not either Armok or Toady.

[scamtank]

Dwarves are advanced mostly because they're all buddy-buddy with rocks and so bypass the prequisites of mining technology and understanding of chemistry.
Humans didn't discover crocoite until the 19th century. Dwarves just ran into the stuff while digging around that afternoon.