If I wanted to add clay armor and glass swords, how would I go about doing that? I've got a volcano embark with easy access to sand and clay, but limited access to water and metals, and I want to protect my entire fort. I was thinking maybe a clay cap and a clay chestpiece with straps of cloth or something, with strength somewhere in between leather and metal. Also wanted to make green glass short swords, similar to obsidian ones but slightly less effective.
The problem is that I don't even know where to start. I think I can figure out how to add the reactions to the kiln and possibly to the glass furnace, but other than that I'm completely lost. Would it even be possible to do something like this?
I'm assuming you want the clay armor to be fired into pottery, rather than just slapping a pile of mud on somebody and wrapping cloth around them to hold it on. You could probably do something like this:
[REACTION:---------]
[NAME:make clay armor]
[BUILDING:KILN:CUSTOM_ALT_A]
[REAGENT:clay:1:BOULDER:NONE:NONE:NONE]
[HAS_MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:FIRED_MAT]
[PRODUCT:100:1:ARMOR:ITEM_ARMOR_BREASTPLATE:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:clay:FIRED_MAT]
[FUEL]
[SKILL:POTTERY]
[REACTION:---------]
[NAME:make clay cap]
[BUILDING:KILN:CUSTOM_ALT_C]
[REAGENT:clay:1:BOULDER:NONE:NONE:NONE]
[HAS_MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:FIRED_MAT]
[PRODUCT:100:1:HELM:ITEM_HELM_CAP:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:clay:FIRED_MAT]
[FUEL]
[SKILL:POTTERY]
I haven't tested these, but they should make caps and breastplates out of the appropriate ceramic for whatever kind of clay you feed into them. No idea how effective this armor will be. The trick is that if you want to use them in an existing world, you'll have to copy over a couple of other reactions that you don't mind losing. Go into the world save and open the reaction raws - maybe use lay and trifle pewter, or something. Keep the REACTION:PEWTER_TRIFLE_MAKING tag, and copy over the rest of the reaction. You can't add new reactions to a save, but you can change the old ones pretty much any way you want.
If you want to require cloth as a component, you can add another reagent to the reaction. I'm not certain what the format is to use one cloth item. If you want to use some custom clay material with qualities you consider appropriate, I suspect you'll have to change the name and properties of some alloy you don't use. You can specify INORGANIC:(material name) instead of GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT.
The easiest way to make glass swords would probably be to require a piece of raw glass (ROUGH:NONE:GLASS_GREEN, I think) and a wooden log (WOOD:NONE:NONE:NONE), and then put them together in a craft shop just like obsidian swords. This will require replacing another reaction, and give you swords that are as effective as glass trap components. You could change its properties by replacing an alloy you don't use with a fake glass material.