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[Ancalagon_TB]

Doesn't matter if it's dog soap or forgotten beast soap, my dwarves seem to love soap.  And yes, if you buy lye from caravans and have the least amount of butchery going on, making soap is easy. 

[Jigowah]

I made dragon soap once.  I remember it was reasonably expensive but I couldn't bear to part with it.

[Thisfox]

Dragon soap sounds cool. I've had Forgotten Beast soap. It was in the same hospital that was filled by the Forgotten Beast in question (he'd arrived early in the game) and was used to wash the crush injuries it had created (the beast was a big heavy thing that appeared to have sat on a lot of dwarves). I never tried selling it.

[wierd]

Now I have a mental image of another side business for the mermaid bone industry...

"Feel the sensual difference that sentients make! Creamy soft decadence in every bar!"

[Larix]

Trawling through the wiki, i found a rather intriguing "trading soap" reference for older versions:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Soap

Soap had a base price of 25☼ per bar, multiplied by the "mod value" of the soaped creature, and dragons, hydras and merpeople had a modvalue of x50. Thus, it was possible to make soap selling for 1250☼ per bar.

In versions .31+, the most valuable soaps reach 75☼ per bar.

[Aslandus]

Trawling through the wiki, i found a rather intriguing "trading soap" reference for older versions:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Soap

Soap had a base price of 25☼ per bar, multiplied by the "mod value" of the soaped creature, and dragons, hydras and merpeople had a modvalue of x50. Thus, it was possible to make soap selling for 1250☼ per bar.

And considering that most of those critters probably give more than 1 blob of fat, you could make quite a lot of soap from them...

[GavJ]

Yes but you can much more simply make tallow roasts for the same creature modifier and a tiny fraction of the work.

[wierd]

But with soap, you can build an industrial processing center for sentients, out of products made from sentients.

cant make a kitchen out of tallow blobs, but you can make a wood burning furnace, a lye maker's workshop, a butcher shop, a kitchen and a soap maker's workshop all out of delightfully creamy sentient tallow soap bars.

[utunnels]

Can you use sentient creatures to make soap? Or do I misunderstand?

[wierd]

At one point in time, (long ago) there was an exploity way to raise, then butcher merpeople.

It was very profitable.

This was also the period in time when soap bars were very valuable as a base material, meaning you could make delightfully creamy sentient soaps at the same time you made merpeople bone crafts.

Let me see if I can find the infamous thread about farming merpeople.


**EDIT

Here it is.

Toady has since made it not worthwhile to attempt this, and nerfed merpeople farming.


These days you would need to be able to set the butchery flag on a sentient creature in order to get soap made from sentient creatures. As far as I know they only way to get that is to use modding.

Still, if you go with the modding route, you can still make bars out of soap, and thus make an industry all around slaughtering and processing sentient creatures, out of parts made from sentient creatures.   For a race that does not have ethics violations for doing this-- say goblins-- it should be entirely possible. (alternatively, use a temporary syndrome reaction that polymorphs a sentient creature into a non-sentient one, so that you can assign the butchery tag. when the syndrome wears off, the butcher flag should still be set.)

[utunnels]

I see.
 

[GavJ]

Still, if you go with the modding route, you can still make bars out of soap, and thus make an industry all around slaughtering and processing sentient creatures, out of parts made from sentient creatures.   For a race that does not have ethics violations for doing this-- say goblins-- it should be entirely possible. (alternatively, use a temporary syndrome reaction that polymorphs a sentient creature into a non-sentient one, so that you can assign the butchery tag. when the syndrome wears off, the butcher flag should still be set.)

There's a simple ethics tag for letting dwarves butcher all sentients. Just one line in the entity file. I don't think they butcher other dwarves still, but everthing else yes.

[Naryar]

It would be handy to trade soap, but I only make a soap industry when I have idlers around and a working meat industry.

Wood isn't a problem anymore since the DF2014 "oh my god i cut a few trees and i have suddenly 200 wood logs around" thing.

So yeah. A few soap industry dwarves (lye maker/soaper/wood burner), a few workshops, stockpiles and there.

It must take a few minutes to set up and while the barrel/bucket thing is obnoxious it generally works well.

Not worth it trading soap unless you can't spare dwarfpower or are in a full badlands/glacier/mountain embark.