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[miauw62]

The artifact page on the wiki says that shells are the hardest to come by, but I find this to be very much not the case.
I have a LOT of mussels. They all produce shells. Even with a legendary mussel carver spamming me with masterwork mussel action figures of my militia captain hugging ducks, I cannot empty my shell/bone stockpile. I'm drowning in mussel shells. What do I DO with them?

[GiglameshDespair]

Crafts.

[Dunamisdeos]

Decorate the hell out of everything.

[TheFlame52]

Decorate the hell out of everything.

[Naryar]

Weaponize them. Hint: minecart shotguns.

[SimRobert2001]

Decorate the hell out of everything.

On that note, it only works if ypu dont intend to trade with elves. You force them to stop trading every time youoff er something decorated with shell. Otherwise, you would  have to go through and manually check every single item for shell decoration.

[Bumber]

On that note, it only works if ypu dont intend to trade with elves. You force them to stop trading every time youoff er something decorated with shell. Otherwise, you would  have to go through and manually check every single item for shell decoration.

Why would elves care about shells?

[utunnels]

Well some foreign items have wood and glass decorations.
Usually I will avoid them if I want to trade with elves.
But if everything has decorations on them...

It is not really a problem though.

[AceSV]

Mussel shell crafts have terrible value, probably because mussels themselves are "vermin".  There are a million better uses of your dwarves' time than making crafts or decorating with mussel shell.  They are garbage to be thrown away. 

I'm not a fan of letting dwarves go fishing in the first place as it is potentially dangerous, time consuming and unreliable (unless you are building some kind of dorfy fish trap, which is potentially all of those 3 things anyways).  A good quality dyed plant-cloth robe will have enough value to buy half the seafood from a human caravan. 

[Bearskie]

Mussel shell crafts have terrible value, probably because mussels themselves are "vermin".  There are a million better uses of your dwarves' time than making crafts or decorating with mussel shell.

If we actually bothered about value though, we'd be making wooden spiked balls 24/7.  OP just wants to know what to do with those mussel shells.  I second decorations.

[utunnels]

Well fishing is a simple, no-brainer job. If you have nothing but a river, it is just convenient to use shells.
And we never run out of slaves dwarves...

[SimRobert2001]

On that note, it only works if ypu dont intend to trade with elves. You force them to stop trading every time youoff er something decorated with shell. Otherwise, you would  have to go through and manually check every single item for shell decoration.

Why would elves care about shells?

Elves tend to care abour you selling them skeletons and snonal remains.

[utunnels]

Elves tend to care abour you selling them skeletons and snonal remains.

 I sell them totems and other bone crafts.

[Niddhoger]

Aye... Most of the time I am just looking for something to make my dorfs do.  Maximizing trade goods? Stuff your clothing and just make prepared meals.  Proper roasts made from quarry leaves/whip flour/dwarven syrup/high value meat (or at least huge meat stacks) eclipse lower end artifacts in price easily.  Particularly with trees and general-purpose OP herbalists, you can keep several cooks going none-stop.  Add in some trap lines to the caverns/trap choke points to mix in high value meat (everything from the caverns is at least x2 iirc).  You don't even need  close to legendary cooks to buy out early caravans with a handful of "prepared food barrels" worth 10-20k each. 

Bone crafting isn't that great of a skill to level, but if you lack metal they could always be masterwork shell armor? If nothing else, decorating/crafting with the shells disposes of the "garbage" while making a use of it. You can decorate peasant beds with them as well.  This serves as a cheap, easy decoration that should keep them more than happy.  Gems are a pita to use for peasant decorations unless you are using (magma powered) glass or stone... and even then they have to be cut first.  The value is far more than a peasant typically expects anyway.  Just build a furniture stockpile near your craftdorf shop and begin decorating beds... or tables/chairs for dining room. 

[Niddhoger]

Elves tend to care abour you selling them skeletons and snonal remains.

 I sell them totems and other bone crafts.

Aye... I regularly sell them bone crafts decorated with horn.  Since you can't brew fish, or turn them into bags/clothing I rarely fish.   Thus, I don't gain shells that often.  However... I tend to prefer "live training" my militia and put cage trap my cavern entrances (taming GCS make me so happy).  I like to embark with sheep as well (combined milk/meat/bone/leather/wool with the smallest grazing requirement! handy boogers), so I'm typically swarming in bones.  I wind up making tons of bone crossbows until I get however many masterworks I need then turn the rest into crafts/decorations.  I'd even decorate the "failed" crossbows with horn/bone and sell those.  In general, its far too easy to make "trade goods" and buy out caravans of all useful items- which are few enough as is.  I don't tend to worry about it and instead try to push up skills and in general keep my dorfs busy.