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[chewd]

How about making it possible to cook loamy sand or sandy clay in the kiln in order to make sand?

Perhaps make it also require a bucket of water to loosen up the sand.

[mainiac]

I'm no geologist, but I'm pretty sure that loam and clay are always made of particles smaller then sand.  I'm unaware of any process to increase particle size.  Also, I don't think the composition of clay or loam would be consistant enough for glass production.

[Exponent]

He wasn't talking about just clay or loam, but sandy clay or loamy sand.  Stuff that should already have some sand in it, but it isn't pure enough sand to use in its current state.

I'm no geologist either, but I like the idea.  (And I think it's better than my current method of modding those soil layers to act like ordinary sand.)

[Neonivek]

Don't you Sift for Sand?

I don't remember being able to cook for it.

[FunkyBomb]

As for cooking with sand, maybe someday our dwarven chefs can use hot sand frying. 

[chewd]

The idea is to loosen up the various sediments using water, diluting the dirt & clay which is then filtered out, the remaining sludge is then cooked dry and broken up and cooked an a high enough temperature to reduce any remaining organic materials to ash.

The result would be mostly sand.

In a RP sense, this isnt any more unrealistic than making booze without access to water.

[Soadreqm]

How about washing it? With water? I'm not sure how this would translate into game mechanics, maybe the dwarves could lower it into water in a bucket. Being able to do something like this would be nice. Or just trading for sand.

[Captain Xenon]

maybe... a workshop with 1 of its 8 boarder tiles over water, able to do three new tasks- collect 'dirt' in a bag, sort out the sand (which is now in the bag, but you get a % as from melting an object depending on dirt type), and WASHING the vomit/blood off of your clothing/armor! im sure everyone would love that last one.

[Pilsu]

I'm sure it'll be considered if you can provide a real life method of doing it. Something accessible in the 1400s

[catpaw]

I'm no geologist, but I'm pretty sure that loam and clay are always made of particles smaller then sand. 

AFAIK in reality clay *can* turn into sand. And this is a pretty uncomforting fact, since you can have a forests growing on clay.. like the rainforests. When you cut an area empty, the clay will turn to sand, and is unable to sustain any bigger plantlife anymore. It will turn into a savanna, a process you hardly can ever turn around again.

However I dont think you can do this in a oven, or? Usually the result if you bake clay is it getting pretty hard... Theoretically it is possible to turn a rock into sand, however I don't know if there is any technique known to humanity but having water crush on it for millions of years... There has also not been much interest to humans to turn rock into sand, as sand is the single most common material on this planet short after saltwater. :-)

[i2amroy]

Or just trading for sand.

This is a super seconded, I mean, the traders should bring anything that they can make a profit on, so if it is bags of sand, so be it.

[Othob Rithol]

Silicon Dioxide (sand) is the mot common compound in the earth's crust, and can be found in virtually all soil types and exposed rock to some extent. There is no reason at all that it could not be extracted from a given soil layer.

The process is pretty much like the OP describes.

First you wash it. The finer particles are much easier to keep in suspension via agitation, and most of the organic material is water soluble. Rinse, Repeat, Rinse Repeat as needed. Then, as the OP said, you end up with a sludge. You could probably use that to make the glass (as the furnace is hot enough to burn off most impurities) but an intermediate heating, followed by a washing to get rid of the ash, would result in a more refined product.

As for my suggestion:

• Any river,lake, brook, cave river tile is a valid sand source
• Any soil type with "sand" or "sandy" in its name counts as sand.
• All other soil types can be made into a bag of sand at the glass furnace with fuel, and a bucket of water.
• For the complexophiles the duration/iterations of the task could vary by soil type.
• Quartz is mostly composed of larger crystals of SiO2, so you can process any quartz gem into sand at a millstone.

The idea of trading for sand is at best a stop-gap measure, but one that I'd welcome. Normally I'd oppose modern knowledge of chemistry dictating in-game logic, but glass is in no way a balance issue. Almost everything you can do with glass, can be done with stone.

[Osmosis Jones]

Clay is primarily comprised of very fine aluminosilicate particles, with varying degrees of hydration. In theory, you would be able to increase particle size via sintering (baaaasssically baking particles so that the edges melt together slightly), but the resulting product wouldn't be sand.

Burning off the organic material in loamy sand sounds like a good idea however.

[Align]

Getting sand from most anywhere sounds alright, but only if we introduce a difference between glassmaking-usable sand and more mundane sand.

[Goran]

How bout a more obvious, practical and realistic solution to the sand problem? Regardless of layer types present on location, if there is any body of water present on map, let there be some sand soil attached to its bank. Ie. brook, river, lake, underground river, lake...

Or how bout switching sand to mineral matgloss instead of soil matgloss and adding clusters of sand to soil layers?