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[ptb_ptb]

Today's exploit is "Melting objects that return more metal than it takes to make them"

How exploity is it? : ***00
How easy is it? : ****0
Where do you find out about it? : In the wiki.

Do you use it (intentionally) in your fortresses?

Do you think it should be fixed?

[Celarious]

That coin efficiency

[Dirst]

That coin efficiency

It's the Keynesian multiplier.  There's no sign of it in the real economy, so it was bound to show up somewhere.

[Telgin]

I've never used a melt exploit to give myself extra materials to work with.  It doesn't overly bother me if others do it, since it's a single player game, but it's definitely in the realm of broken things that should be fixed in my opinion.

I'm actually not sure if I've ever intentionally used any exploits like this.  I've definitely used DFHack on occasion to cheat though.

[ptb_ptb]

That coin efficiency

Coins are fiddly though. I think Enormous Steel Corkscrews are the way to go.

I just started a fortress expressly to play around with this exploit. [EDIT] Starting with normal embark points I was able to make 44 steel bars and 44 iron bars. I could have done more steel and no iron, but I forgot that one ore <> one bar.

[Sanctume]

That coin efficiency

Hmm.  I managed to split 4x 500 steel coins into 2000x 1 steel coin last night.
After reading the coin star is out of order, I can just melt 2000 steel bars instead.

[Celarious]

That coin efficiency

Hmm.  I managed to split 4x 500 steel coins into 2000x 1 steel coin last night.
After reading the coin star is out of order, I can just melt 2000 steel bars instead.

What about steel corkscrews? Or giant axe blades?

[Koremu]

If you are going to use this exploit, you are better off making things that train armoursmith & weaponsmith.

[neblime]

I once tried to do the overly complicated bolt splitting thing to get more adamantine but gave up because it was too slow.
Never done it with other metals, I don't think I really would either.

[Aslandus]

I don't have the patience to do the coin thing, but I always use the exploit for trap components and armor because I almost never have a map with iron ore available, so I have to multiply my steel with exploits to keep from running out...

[Findulidas]

I think the simple fact that trap components being hugely overpriced coupled with the fact that you could easily make them out of wood is bordering on exploit. If so thats probably the only exploit Ive used. Trading everything they got every time without even touching metal is pretty strong imo.

[Tacomagic]

I think the simple fact that trap components being hugely overpriced coupled with the fact that you could easily make them out of wood is bordering on exploit. If so thats probably the only exploit Ive used. Trading everything they got every time without even touching metal is pretty strong imo.

Yeah, I've personally quit selling trap components and food just because it's so brokenly overpowered in the early game.  Good things to utilize while learning the system, but really makes it too easy to succeed in hostile biomes if you can just buy 200-300 units of food and booze plus a bunch of cloth and leather for 10-15 logs worth of trap components.

Not that it isn't easy enough to make a ton of trade goods, shields, and minecarts to trade, but at least the pricing vs labor and material usage feels more reasonable doing that.  Mechanisms are borderline broken too, but I'll still dabble in them when I need emergency value.

Back to the original exploit: It depends on what I'm doing.  Generally I don't multiply metal unless I find myself in an extremely tight spot.  That said, because caravans are kinda screwy and really need to be improved so you can make better requests, I find that sometimes metal multiplication is the only really good way to get your hands on metals you can't just dig out of the ground.  Even if you move all the sliders on the various things to max, right now you're lucky to pull enough material out of a caravan to outfit a single dwarf.

[Col_Jessep]

I think the simple fact that trap components being hugely overpriced coupled with the fact that you could easily make them out of wood is bordering on exploit. If so thats probably the only exploit Ive used. Trading everything they got every time without even touching metal is pretty strong imo.

Well, If you have to dig through an aquifer, wood and food are the only things you have for a while. I usually embark with a full set of craftsdwarfs, some tetrahedrite and cassiterite. That allows me to get some silver spiked balls going and to trade for meat, cheese, fish, veggies and a bit of everything in case of strange moods. And if DF decides to drop the monarch on me  without warning I at least have a way to get one or two of his rooms to royal quickly.

Another thing that works well is to have everybody who isn't critical for work on the aquifer fishing and one guy turns the shells into armor. That got me everything I wanted from the first caravan and I got rid of my trash at the same time.

If you want to talk exploits: Green glass serrated discs. All you need is one square of sand and some trees. It gets ridiculous on volcano embarks! =D

[TheDarkStar]

I don't have the patience to do the coin thing, but I always use the exploit for trap components and armor because I almost never have a map with iron ore available, so I have to multiply my steel with exploits to keep from running out...

I learned how to use macros to be able to split coins quickly in chat. Set up correctly, you can do (ctrl-u 99 enter) x 5 or so times to split the entire stack of 500.

[taptap]

At the same time you can lose a hilarious amount of metal by just melting stuff you made - in a way the exploit is a fix to that.

@jessep: How long does it take you to dig through an aquifer that you can even trade while doing so?