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[QuQuasar]

The elves brought me some fun instruments made of stuff I didn't know you could make stuff from...





I thought that was interesting, until I noticed this...





Obviously I'm going to buy that.

Hadn't seen this mentioned on the wiki or forums, so thought I'd make a note of it.

[PatrikLundell]

Yes.
It's a well known presumed bug that elven strings can come made out of procedurally generated silk (it's been claimed they can also be made out of procedurally generated metal, but despite looking for it I've never found any). These silk items are useless, as you don't have the knowledge to make those elven instruments even if you somehow managed to get all their parts. Procedurally generated metals could be melted down and if you managed to get enough of it you could eventually get a bar of the material and produce something out of it.

[FantasticDorf]

The metal thread in my own experience tends to be more common in larger fixed instruments, you can inspect the insides of things like "Piano's" or violins with the T key. Glass etc pipes too.

If you could have a way to deconstruct each instrument (likely by hardcoding them first, which is a option to replace the originals) you could reduce it to parts, but have very little to no chance of retrieving individual different material parts unless it was all made out of the same thing and yielded "Oak Wood Strings" etc.

I might make a suggestion for hard-taking apart things by a token mechanic.

[PatrikLundell]

Even if it was possible to get metal strings out of complete instruments, I haven't seen any complete instruments with the extreme prices they ought to have if they had procedurally generated metal parts in them. Also, I've only seen those procedurally generated parts being fabric strings and only from the elves. I suspect the elves don't bring any metal at all (which would make sense), and the bug that causes elves to bring generated fabric strings doesn't affect humans, but I don't have any solid indications that this is the case. It can be noted that instruments can have a lot of different metal parts, with metal strings just being one part that can be made out of metal.

[Starver]

things like "Piano's"

Can you re-use that apostrophe if you melt one of those down?

(Not very dorfy, I know, but the plural of 'piano' is 'pianos'. Or, rarely, 'piani'. That's the singular-posessive you're using there, or possibly the contraction of the definite identity phrase "piano is". I pass by a similarly annoying roadside sign, fairly often. One day I'm going to get a tin of paint of the just the right colour and stop off to correct the darn thing.)

As for molten metal strings... Theoretically, it can maintain only a very low tightness[1]. The cross-sectional mass would also be exceedingly out of proportion under most circumstances. I'm going to guess that it'll only be able to sound out an infrasonic sound, when plucked, of a very strange character, but in the absence of any realistic scenarios I'm not even starting to plug figures into formulae to confirm my snap intuitions...

It would be a very strange instrument, though. Not necessarily hot to touch (a mercurial version could work, but probably not with glass 'tensioner ends') but probably has some technical handwavium as part of its construction.



[1] Purely as some form of surface tension between the two ends, held I-don't-know-how but possibly with suitable concave menisci/capilliary-action/vacuum-capping within tubing at either end, and either enough viscosity to hold against gravity or enough reduction of gravity[2] to not need to be so viscous.

[2] Not by buoyancy, I suspect, as the medium involved would surely over-dampen the oscilation.

[PatrikLundell]

As far as I understand, "molten" in generated substance names does not refer to the phase of the material, but rather the description of it, such as e.g. "molten darkness" (although I'm not sure that's an actual example of a name). If you were to melt down a molten darkness metal string you'd end up with a fractional molten metal bar.

[Bumber]

Yeah, "molten" relates to the volcano sphere, I think. (Could possibly be assigned randomly to any fire-related sphere.)

[Will Phoenix]

Looks like they got some divine material.

Had some invading elves carry with them on two separate occasions a hornpipe-like instrument whose bellows were made out of rustling cloth (wind sphere) and patchy cloth (disease sphere).

Dunno what they were using the pipes of Aeolus or the pipes of Nurgle for but I was not complaining to get them out of their hands

[Atarlost]

I suspect that the game falls back on weird materials when a civilization has native instruments that require materials it can't produce.  Elves don't farm silk so they make silk components from forgotten beast silk.  They don't work metal so they make metal components from random divine metal. 

[Nyxalinth]

Tobias Budge would like to know their location...