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[ryak2002]

For the longest time now i've been unable to build a magma forge since i lack even a single unit of hematite.

In a fairly desperate attempt to find some, i made 3 several-hundred-tile long vertical shafts between the chasm and the magma river then criss-crossed them with a horizontal shaft every 10 or so tiles and i still found...nothing.

Is my map completely devoid of hematite for
some reason or is it really this rare?

I heard platinum is supposed to be rare, but i'm swimming in the stuff compared to hematite.

[OverrideB1]

I'd willingly trade you my hematite (in which I am slowly drowning) for a like quantity of malachite which is rarer than hens' teeth on my map.

It's pretty much the luck of the draw I guess...

[Jaqie Fox]

I like my steeldance. I am drowning in gold...

[Paul]

My current fortress, Dreamgate, I'm drowning in EVERYTHING.

I have found a bunch of massive gold veins, hematite veins, platinum veins. I'm rolling in steel because there are several big layers of limestone all around both sides of the magma, and scattered through my fort - most of the rock that I am digging up is either light or dark stone, and lots of it ends up being limestone - I actually seem to have about a 50/50 rate of normal stone to special stone, which seems pretty weird. Right near the magma I found a MASSIVE double malachite/cassiterite vein that goes all the way across from the chasm to the lava and a bit beyond the lava. Near the river I found huge cassiterite, sphalerite, and malachite veins. My entire fort is utterly loaded with galena. I haven't actively dug out ANY galena veins, yet just from opening up rooms and making my towercap forest I have 300 units of galena ore on my stocks screen, and I have already smelted about 50 for use in various things - plus I have like 20 big veins of it that I never dug up, scattered all across from the start of the map (some of it touching the edges) to the demon pits and intermingled with all the other veins. I also keep finding clusters of diamonds, I already got 7 different colored diamonds from all the diamonds I dug out. Its actually to the point that I can't hardly build a room without veins of ore and gems sticking in half the walls. The mountain is so rich that I can't smooth half of the walls, because they are ore and gems.

It's like a blessing and a curse at the same time, my fort is ugly as hell because all my walls and supports are ore and gems, my rooms have to be made wall-less because the gems and ores make the rooms too valuable. And yet I have a seemingly never ending supply of any material I could want...

And I have hardly scratched the map yet, since this is a small time generational fort where I am limiting immigration and keeping only the dwarves that are born here and a couple nobles that I need (bookkeeper to chasm/melt stuff, for instance).

[TotalPigeon]

Sounds like a helluva rich mountain. I'm currently in an area called "The Copper Mountain of Leading." And, what do you know, I've hit about 5 copper ore seams on about a quarter of the map, one of them going right from the cliff face to the edge of the cave river. I've got probably 600 copper ore... making lots of bronze armour

[Asehujiko]

i found silver on the first square i dug in my old world  

[BoltsFogs]

I am currently lacking coal. Which really sucks. What's worse is that, I'm seeing a ton of coal (and diamonds!) across the magma river, where the pits are, and I know better than to go there, but still.. Every day that coal mocks me, waves at me, POSES at me, just begging to be dug out for our steel production...

[puke]

so, as a disclaimer, i've never dug past the magma.  if your fortress is destroyed by following my advice, you have no one to blame but yourself.

that said, im fairly sure (and the wiki would support) that the mountain is laid out in stripes.  the river, chasm, and magma all lie in a certain consistant zone, and although they zig and zag, they never leave the stripe that they are confined to.  even with the little spikey branches coming off of them.

So, even if its hard to tell for certain exactly where the pits start, you SHOULD be able to pick the left most bend in the magma, and dig no further than the right most bend, and thus be safe.

also, it surely cant be dangerous just to mine the few little squares of coal you need with out following the veins or digging more than one square past the magma.

of course, you then run the risk of assuming "well just one more square is safe, isnt it?  ISNT IT?"

[Core Xii]

When looking for ore, I create vertical mining shafts 5 tiles apart. It seems to be efficient in locating veins.

My last fortress was built on top of a MASSIVE coal deposit, and my "apartment building" almost messed up a gigantic hematite vein  :confused: Fortunately there were plenty even in the bits I mined out for the fortress.

[schnobs]

I like to make my shafts nine tiles apart. Not only does this go over well with the DF interface (shift-arrow makes a nine tile jump), the spacing can later be expanded into  two wide corridors with 2xsomething rooms for housing.

Unless you have ore everywhere, this pattern will find the patches where you have no (or at least little) ore to interfere. 2x2 undetailed still is cheap housing; 2x3 will suffice for most nobles.

code:

#.########.##
#.########.##
#.########.##
#.########.##
#..#..#..#..#
#..+..#..+..#
#..#######..#
#..#..#..#..#
#..+..#..+..#
#..#######..#

[Bas Cost Budde]

Very useful to me.

Can I think up things like this myself? Yes.

Do I? No.

So, thank you for sharing this.  

[Jerkwhistle]

Should a more complete search reveal that you are in fact completely and mysteriously without hematite, you can still line your entry hall with a great big block of traps, then just wait for a goblin siege to provide you with a glut of iron armor to melt down. You'll still need the bookkeeper I guess, so you'll have to burn through a lot of wood in minting coins at a non-magma furnace/forge. Just build a big riverside grotto for tower caps and hunker down.

[Master BOB]

If you want to squeeze every tiny bit of ore (or even find it), the most effective way to be 100% sure that you don't oversee something is digging long lines every third tile. You'll see the right and left wall of each corridor, so you'll see everything. From time to time a cross-corridor to speed the work a bit up and allow them to reach their next work-tile faster (they will switch the corridors).
That method becomes handy if you need certain rare goods, and I mean every little piece of it. Yesterday one of my crafters went berzerk because I had every material except crystal glass (I had 2 pieces or so, but he needed more). If I had dug like that earlier, he would live.

Since it's enough to dig 1-tile-lines, you can easily change the area for what you need it later. I dug many hundreds of tiles to find hematite and built stone stockpiles later   .

 

[ April 22, 2007: Message edited by: Master BOB ]

[ April 22, 2007: Message edited by: Master BOB ]

[4bh0r53n]

quote:  I dug many hundreds of tiles to find hematite and built stone stockpiles late

I prefer to use 3 legendary stonecrafters and 2 legendary masons to keep my stone levels down

[Mylon]

The small problem with relying on goblin sieges is that one needs iron ore to make steel, so goblins alone cannot provide steel.