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[dikbutdagrate]

Refining cinnabar ore into mercury would be kind of neat.

It wouldn't be game defining reaction, exactly, but it'd be cool to be able to make it.

An optional gameplay mechanic could involve the creation of a thermometer, which allows the bookkeeper to record information concerning item temp.

[Putnam]

Mercury thermometers are pretty far past the tech cutoff, being invented in the early 1700s, but mercury had a lot of very interesting stuff going for it back to antiquity. Dental amalgam, at least, though also medicinal and, like, art stuff.

Kinda reminds me: we have stibnite. Where's al kohl? Surely dwarves love that stuff.

[A_Curious_Cat]

What about refining electrum into gold and silver?

[delphonso]

Electrum is in the game, isn't it?

I expect mercury wasn't included because it should be liquid at room temperature, but Toady specifically said liquids were exhausting to program. Every time you refined it, you'd end up with a mercury bar that instantly melts, or barrels of useless mercury.

[brewer bob]

Kinda reminds me: we have stibnite. Where's al kohl? Surely dwarves love that stuff.

Cosmetics (and perfumery) in general would be a nice addition to the game, but then might just as well add alchemy/chemistry into it. Though, there'd hardly be many practical applications for it, considering the tech cut off -- maybe some ore refining stuff and "medical" things? Also, dwarves trying to find a way to transmute material or to extend life by drinking all sorts of elixirs with quicksilver and potable gold would be cool, too (with all the side effects accumulating over the years, of course)!

[dikbutdagrate]

Electrum is in the game, isn't it?

I expect mercury wasn't included because it should be liquid at room temperature, but Toady specifically said liquids were exhausting to program. Every time you refined it, you'd end up with a mercury bar that instantly melts, or barrels of useless mercury.

Huh, I was wondering why players aren't able to define custom fluid liquids.

But I mean, is a barrel of mercury useless? I dunno. If you could use it to make jewelry, that could be pretty neat. And if it was cold enough, It'd be metallic solid, which could be then be used at a forge. And would a barrel of mercury crack open if you tossed it into a pit? Theres probably a lot of fun you could have with an entire moat made out of mercury.

[jecowa]

Mercury moats sound cool. How will you get it down to ~9920 to freeze it? It’d be funny to trade away Mercury weapons and then watching them leak off their wagon as it leaves. Scoop it back up, freeze it, make new weapon with it, and sell them again to the next group of traders.

[Starver]

Qin Shi Huang's tomb, or go home...

Or a hat-making workshop. Bowler hats might even be better armour than a leather helmet for top-down attacks!

Programatically, I think the data structure to define flow-liquids (primarily magma and water) would need revamping. But as something more practical to do with barrels-of-blood, etc, it'd be interesting to have more than contaminent status fully available. But then it needs to handle blending. Water+magma is fudged into obsidian casting (and/or steam, depending on how you do it), but perhaps your goblet can have a splash of water in its whisky[1] or that moat can be made into one with various mixes of blood and perhaps the odd dash of vomit[2] without more problems than the various-loose-coinage restacking one.

Hmmm, probably a mercuric-magma mixing should make for an interesting ground-hugging mist, if that gets implementable in any real and accurate way (if it doesn't just dissolve in or compound up), which gives me an idea for a ziggurat with a nasty (albeit prolongued) surprise for those who wish to climb it. But melting other metals, at appropriate temperatures and in carefully calibrated quantities, could make for mixing chanelled rivulets into various massive amounts of more diverse and exotic alloys, governed by floodgates. Not necessarily to the extent of producing 18/8 austenitic stainless steel (perhaps for huge fortress-scale springs?), but a bit of clever property tuning and on a scale vastly larger than the current ore/bars in a reheated crucible...


But I diverge from the mercury. Perhaps I should have swerved into the subject of pottery statues, instead!


[1] Or whatever drink it would be best in. I don't even like my drams being on the rocks, which could at least be downed before much more than the cold leaches into the fine malt concerned, but that's just my personal preference and I imagine it'd be different for the kinds of whisk(e)y and blends that I already don't favour.

[2] Leaving the question of more "household wastes" aside, though 'improved'/more realistic dying and tanning would call out for Number Ones/Twos, as many have pointed out before. Even as Toady says he is disinclined to go thst way, as also pointed out before.

[Azerty]

Mercury would see uses in medicine (it was used as a miracle cure for pretty much everything), jewelery and gold refining.

[DwarfStar]

You can call this topic “multi-phase fluid simulation”. And DFs choice of its only two fluids cleverly sidesteps the problem of the interaction, because they’re like matter and antimatter. Even better actually since the obsidian stops further mixing.

It’s a shame we don’t have liquid blood, especially since the caravans come with barrels of the stuff. Maybe that could be implemented as water with a blood contaminant because it would otherwise behave like water. Also, beer. I think a beer moat would make a great mega project.

But it seems less likely that we’d see multiple fluids simultaneously on the same square and not mixing/annihilating, because that would require deep changes to the simulation and probability make it unavoidably slower.

[Eric Blank]

Mercury could still be useful even if it can't be made into a dynamic liquid like water/lava. For instance, the aforementioned melting weapons trick, miracle "cures" and pigments/dyes. Or, dropping mercury bars/blobs onto magma or magma-heated floors to create a toxic mists to poison invaders or visitors you don't want to engage (like a member of your civ stealing an artifact.) Or just a trade good stored in barrels. Gnomeblight comes to mind.

It's also used in gold refining IRL, apparently gold dissolves into mercury, allowing one to leech gold dust from soils into usable product. Maybe dwarves could extract tiny amounts of gold from clay and sand using murcury.