Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[schlake]

The wiki makes me think that if I melt down a non-adamantine giant metal axe blade that I will get more metal out of it than I put in?  Is that true?

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Trap_component

[Albedo]

If you say it makes you think that, then I'll take your word for it - it ~must~ be true!


It's also true that it does create more metal than it took to produce. When the new version changed the stone % remaining after mining, it increased bar production from ore by a factor of x4 - "1 ore" used to make "1 bar", but now "4 bars".  But the melting %'s were not reduced by the same amount, so - yep, free metal if you want to abuse that.

[schlake]

Doesn't the idea of a 15-Z 100x100 steel fortress made from a single axe blade sound intrigueing?

[PatrikLundell]

Some ordinary weapons and armor yield more metal than was put into their production upon melting, while some yield less. I think you'll get the maximum abuse out of it by using bolts. My memory says something like 1200% is returned for a single bolt, so you need to split them, I think.
My interest in this stems from the fact that I tend to rely on goblinite for metal, but still wants to train my smiths, so I want to break even. It's not fun to get saddled with a monarch who has a fetishism for some negative yield weapon when all the metal you have are the two bars you brought on embark to handle moods (well, you CAN sacrifice one of the axes, and one of the picks). You can recover when the next caravan comes (or your friendly neighborhood goblins or necromancers pop over to give you some goblinite), but that's a long time when oppressed by a mandate factory.

I still prefer the goofiness of a soap castle (and if you must go for metal, I'd prefer a butter knife, or, if unavailable, a carving knife or a gold ring).

[schlake]

My most recent attempt I discovered that a glass furnace churning out serrated wheels is much better moneymaker than mechanisms.  And with the glass furnace, I probably don't even need to dig.  I can bring enough food to last a year and buy more food with my wheels.  So I could set my first seven dwarves to brewer/cook/woodburner/glassmaker/glassmaker/glassamaker/woodcutter.  I should be in an ideal position to buy armor, weapons, booze, and food from the first caravan.  I can turn my migrants into a wall-building brigade, and hopefully have some defenses and military training by the time the first siege arrives.

[Uggh]

well, you CAN sacrifice one of the axes, and one of the picks

Nornally you would sacrifice the monarch...

[Albedo]

... So I could set my first seven dwarves to brewer/cook/woodburner/glassmaker/glassmaker/glassamaker/woodcutter.  I should be in an ideal position to buy armor, weapons, booze, and food from the first caravan...

No need to specialize or bring glass-skilled dwarfs - an untrained dwarf starting mid-summer should be able to turn out enough absurdly over-priced glass weapon-trap-trash to buy out the caravan of everything that's useful and not over-priced, np.

Meanwhile, other dwarfs with Weapon, Armour, Carpenter, and Cook, and possibly a skilled miner to get you inside faster, will fill everything else in nicely.

[Mushroo]

Glass industry requires sand, bags, and charcoal...

Spiked wooden balls are much easier (requiring only logs) and 1 dedicated carpenter can easily produce enough value to buy out the entire first caravan.

But you don't actually need to buy out the entire first caravan... you just need 1 steel bar so you can melt-cheat into 1,000,000 steel bars.

[Eldin00]

It's still worthwhile to get as much steel as possible from other means, even if you're using the infinite metal by melting exploit. Creating metal by forging and melting items is not a terribly fast process, especially before you get enough metal reserves to be able to run the forges non-stop, keeping in mind that even with the most efficient items that don't require splitting stacks you need to forge/melt 2 items for every bar gained.

And if you don't have magma smelters, fuel expenditure from melt-cheating is fairly extreme relative to the amount of metal you get out of it.

[Albedo]

At best (150% return per cycle), remelting is 2 Tasks + 2 Fuel (1 to forge, 1 to remelt) for 1/2 bar, or  {4T + 4F} /bar.


For comparison, 4 steel costs...

1 task for 1 iron ore
4 tasks for 4 flux stone
plus hauling

plus

_1 fuel for 4 iron bars, 1 task
+2 for 1 pig iron bar, 1 task
+2 for 2 steel bars, 1 task
+4 more for the other 2 steel bars, 2 more tasks
= 10 Tasks (+ hauling) + 9 fuel for 4 steel, or {1.5T (+H/4) + 2.25F} /bar.

So ~roughly~ half the cost. Meh. Not sure that qualifies as "extreme", but ymmv.

[ldog]

Without magma smelters it definitly isn't worth it, unless you have no/limited other source of steel.
If you have plenty of steel it really isn't worth it. I still do it to get all mastercrafted crap, but really steel armor is steel armor. There are no low quality items in the game, only higher qualities. The thing is even plain steel armor (w/ bp and greaves) makes you pretty much invulnerable to everything except syndromes, which no armor is going to protect from. Weapons the same, if you can bash/slash/stab it with a steel weapon, a plain one is just as lethal as a mc one.

Also even though I make a bit extra on the axes, gauntlets and boots, I lose it back on melting down everything else, so it's all a wash. It takes up a lot of time, is micro-management intensive, causes a lot of job cancellation spam. Also a lot of labor time. Would also be more profitable to sell to caravans no doubt.

So we do it because it's dorfy, not because it's efficient. The only real benefit I can see is provides lots of cross-training ops. In a pinch if you were desperate for steel then yes, make leggings and battle axes and melt them down. Rinse, repeat.

[Pearofclubs]

Glass industry requires sand, bags, and charcoal...

Spiked wooden balls are much easier (requiring only logs) and 1 dedicated carpenter can easily produce enough value to buy out the entire first caravan.

But you don't actually need to buy out the entire first caravan... you just need 1 steel bar so you can melt-cheat into 1,000,000 steel bars.

True, but glass is an infinite resource with a magma glass furnace.
Also, its almost smelting, which makes it a bit dwarfier.

[Eldin00]

So ~roughly~ half the cost. Meh. Not sure that qualifies as "extreme", but ymmv.

Ok, 'extreme' may have been a bit overboard. But you do expend almost double the fuel/dwarf time, and it's kind of a pain from a micromanagement standpoint until you get a buffer of at least a dozen or so bars to allow for differences in production speed between forge and smelter.

[Rogue Yun]

I used to use dfhack's workflow + the automelt plugin to build a steel fortress back in the day. Personally, I really want this exploit fixed. The yield should never be as much as or more than what you put into it.

[schlake]

I used to use dfhack's workflow + the automelt plugin to build a steel fortress back in the day. Personally, I really want this exploit fixed. The yield should never be as much as or more than what you put into it.

A cold-fusion denier eh?  Just because the dwarfs use cold fusion for iron production doesn't make it wrong!