Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Single Giant library workroom. Takes a bit of set-up but once done is done.

90 (40%)

Specific Library sections. Books are in the library and the menu is managable.

111 (49.3%)

Generic library sections with free floating books. Messy, but flexible.

19 (8.4%)

Other: Describe (keep in mind the limits of modding)

5 (2.2%)

Total Members Voted: 224

[utuki]

Mephansteras are you sure [UBSTEP:MAX] in hauburk works ? i am getting consistent bitten off arms only at upper arm which it is supposed to cover. Vanilla df doesnt use this setting on armor, only on cover.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm, I thought my original testing showed that working. I might need to check things again.

[utuki]

I tested hauberks, they work properly, seems i just got unlucky several times with those damned giant ants.
Do you think it would be possible to spread evil civilization to different  game progress stages according to their strength ?
Jars seem to have too little capacity, i had to set it to 5000 to get them to work.

[Wyrm]

This is a nice mod and I use pieces of it to play DF. However, I spotted a few things that bug me.

The first two are name gripes:

First, you used 'ubal' as the gloss for 'spirit' in 'spirit of salt' (hydrochloric acid). I think 'ubal' means spirit as in disembodied soul, a ghost, or poltergeist. In reacting salt with oil of vitriol, what is formed is sodium sulfate and gaseous hydrogen chloride and steam. The hydrogen chloride and steam is distilled out to yield hydrochloric acid. Thus, this isn't the 'ghost of salt', but the 'distilation product of salt', or more colorfully, the 'rain of salt.'

Second, the gloss of water is 'arel' not 'aren'. Aqua fortis should be 'emen arel', and aqua regia should be 'relon arel'.

The second two are chemistry gripes:

The chemistry for preparing magnesium sulfate (aka, epsom salts) from dolomite, talc and olivine does not work out. Dolomite is primarily the carbonate of calcium and magnesium, while talc and olivine are the silicates of magnesium and magnesium/iron. There's no sulfur in either of them. You'll need sulfuric acid to prepare it.

In the case of dolomite, you'll get not only the magnesium sulfate (epsomite/epsom salts), but you will also get a precipitate of hydrous calcium sulfate (gypsum) and carbonic acid as by-products. The epsomite will be in solution, and you will need to wash the precipitate with water, and then boil off the carbonic acid from the wash to recover the epsomite. Similarly with talc and olivine — you will get a precipitate of silicates, and the epsomite will be in solution, this time only of water. Wash with water, and boil the wash to recover the epsomite.

(I'm not a chemist, so I'm not sure the reaction will work, but it's closer to reality than the current reaction.)

Finally, your oil of vitriol preparation needs water to be complete. What you get by baking the green vitriol is gaseous sulfur trioxide, which you need to let dissolve in steam (hence water), and then distil it out.

[Mephansteras]

They chemisty of a lot of it is really rough. Water would be used for most things, to be honest. So I made some sacrifices to keep things marginally less complex for the player. As it is I think the whole Alchemy aspect is largely ignored by a lot of people. So some of it gets glossed over or simplified to make things more manageable.

I'll look at the word issues, though.

[Wyrm]

So some of it gets glossed over or simplified to make things more manageable.

"Manageable?"

This! Is! DWARF FORTRESS!!!

[Anathema]

Obviously I don't speak for Wyrm here (your chemistry is.. impressive, by the way. Armok help us if alchemy ever gets that realistic), but personally I'd give up some chemical realism if it made alchemy more usable. The end results are certainly worthwhile, but there are two barriers to actually getting alchemy to work:

-It's difficult to get all the necessary ingredients in a single embark, particularly with the 31.19+ changes; there tends to be less variety now, you have a lot of a few types of mineral/other rare stone and none of anything else. Your chances of having all the necessary ingredients to, say, make mithril on a given embark are slim; it takes some looking just to find an embark where you can make steel, which is about half as complicated as mithril. Alchemy needs to be less dependent on certain key materials: for example needing the (in my experience) relatively rare chalcanthite or melanerite to make Emen Aren, which is required for most of alchemy. Can these minerals be made more common, or a third alternative provided, or what if you got a lot more Emen Aren from each reaction (or used less of it) such that importing or embarking with a few melanerite boulders was all you needed? I feel like finding the actual truesilver/elemental crystal should be the difficult part, yet being able to make enough Emen Aren is the harsher restriction in my experience, and you need this stuff for practically everything.

-It's difficult to figure out how the system works; too many reactions, ingredients, buildings. I say this as someone who scaled vanilla DF's patented Learning Cliff of Doom^TM and decided it just wasn't complicated enough, so I downloaded CivForge - anyone who gets this far is a gamer not scared off by a little complexity.

Anyway I spent quite some time pouring over the alchemy basics txt and the wonderful alchemy flowchart (which should be linked in the first post!), and abusing dfprospector to try and find an embark that actually had the ingredients I needed to get some alchemy going - ultimately the best site I could find had tons of truesilver, a little chalcanthite hidden somewhere, everything else I needed, except.. no saltpeter, so I gave up. Weeks later I accidentally stumbled across the building that makes saltpeter from potash, I hadn't realized I didn't even need natural saltpeter. The documentation is good, the information's all there, there's just too much of it - with so many steps and buildings and ingredients involved, it's easy to miss a crucial little thing like the saltpeter beds. If it were up to me I'd merge some of the building functions (4 separate buildings to make mithril bars, including saltpeter beds and jarmaker's shop, is a little much), and abstract out a few unneeded intermediate reactions, i.e. use chalcanthite directly for Emen Aren instead of turning it into blue vitriol first.

Not that I'm complaining; if I can continue fending off of half a dozen hostile races with crucible steel while ignoring that whole 'alchemy' system, I'll still enjoy the mod. Just saying if you wanted more folks like me to actually use alchemy, addressing the above issues would help.

[Wyrm]

I would agree with you, but none of the changes I suggested should be a problem from an acquiring materials standpoint. In the current CF, you are not able to create mithril unless you are also able to create sulfuric acid. And the addition of water to make sulfuric acid... if you have absolutely no water on your embark, you are in really deep trouble.

[Mephansteras]

Well, with the new version you can order the powders that you need. They aren't that expensive to start with a bunch at embark and pretty easy to import if that's all you ask for. They aren't even that heavy. I'm pretty sure that all of the basic alchemical reactions can be met with just the various powders and saltpeter.

It does sound like the Alchemy Basics file could stand a re-write to make things easier to understand, though.

@Wyrm: Water is reasonable for most things, except that I'm not sure that I can make it part of a reaction yet. I know that prior to .19 it was impossible. I haven't looked too hard in the new version, though.

[Anathema]

Well, with the new version you can order the powders that you need. They aren't that expensive to start with a bunch at embark and pretty easy to import if that's all you ask for. They aren't even that heavy. I'm pretty sure that all of the basic alchemical reactions can be met with just the various powders and saltpeter.

I've considered importing, but I'm skeptical that it's worthwhile. Consider your options:

-Import green vitriol
-Find truesilver
-Create saltpeter
-Create Emen Aren
-Smelt 5x (or was it 10x?) truesilver to get (on average) a bar of mithril

or:
-Import mithril

To make importing green vitriol worthwhile, it'd have to generate a lot more mithril than you'd get by requesting mithril bars directly (cost is, in general, a nonissue except at embark). If I ask for nothing but bars of mithril, incendium, glacium, etc., the dwarves will bring me.. say about 10-20. If I ask for nothing but green vitriol, can I get enough to make significantly more than 20 bars? Well, I'll find a good truesilver embark and try it for the sake of !!Science!!, we'll see if it's practical.

I should clarify that now that I've figured out the learning curve, I actually enjoy the added complexity of making your own mithril - I just expect that same complexity is a big factor in keeping others from using alchemy, it took me a while to get the hang of it myself. And unless you get many more bars by importing ingredients and doing your own alchemy than by simply importing bars, there's not much incentive to go through with that added complexity (assuming you can't find a dwarf heaven embark with all the ingredients you need readily available).

Edit: Ah, and Wyrm, I don't object with the addition of water to the reaction in theory - it certainly makes sense, and most embarks should have it available. It's just that in practice, that's a few extra steps (you would need to create/designate a water source and make buckets) added to a system that, I think, is already more complicated than it needs to be. That's just my preference, though.

[Mephansteras]

I imagine that as the trade system gets more complex and reasonable that this will all average out. Mithril should be pretty expensive/rare and once you can't just trade a bunch of masterwork mugs for a bar I think importing relatively cheap alchemy components to use the truesilver you have will be a good option.

A lot of this mod is sort of a looking-ahead sort of thing, so stuff doesn't always make the most sense for a given version.

I am curious to know how well your science works out, though.

[Wyrm]

Quite right. Once scarcity becomes an issue (we'll see how relative abundancies play a role in DF), simply requesting mithril directly will not net you a bunch of mithril.

Now, I noticed something verrry interesting when I was trolling the Wikipedia: if you drop zinc into copper sulfate, the copper will get displaced by the zinc, and you'll get a precipitate of copper and zinc sulfate. Now, if you have zinc sulfate, copper sulfate, zinc and (now) copper, some jars, and some salt (to make a salt bridge), you've got the makings of a galvanic cell.

In short, electrochemistry.

Won't allow you to directly smelt aluminum by way of the Hall-Héroult process, but it will allow you to separate alkali metals like potassium and sodium from their hydroxides. You can use hydrochloric acid to turn alumina into aluminum chloride, and after carefully dehydrating it, you can then react the anhydrous aluminum chloride and sodium/potassium to yield metallic aluminum. The alkali grabbed up the chlorine from the aluminum, leaving the poor old aluminum behind.

I put this out because it's long bugged me that while most of the minerals (which aren't completely made up) are geologically plausible, native aluminum is not. Aluminum is never found naturally in metallic form; it's is just too reactive. With this, you can have your expensive aluminum, without needing a bogus natural mineral type.

[Mephansteras]

Hmmm. Not a bad idea.

[Anathema]

Yeah, I expect the entire trading system is skewed until the volume of trade goes up drastically (perhaps when wagons come back at long last?). Currently I could assign 10 dwarves to creating [anything, let's say pig tail socks], and in a year generate enough pig tail socks to buy out a caravan full of mithril battle axes. Not that there's anything wrong with pig tail socks, the quantities are just skewed; no matter what they choose to make, those 10 dwarves could make enough of it to buy out any caravan, the caravans just don't bring enough to make you consider cost.

I assumed earlier that a caravan could bring about 20 bars of mithril if you asked for nothing else, which may seem like a lot, but compare it to how much crucible steel (about 1/2 value of mithril) a fort could generate in a year - more than enough to trade for those 20 mithril. Now if the caravan was bringing, say, 200 mithril, I'd have to stop and think if I could actually afford that much, and consider asking for cheaper green vitriol instead. Not that mithril should ever be that common, just making a point that the low quantities caravans bring are the problem.

[Mephansteras]

That and no trader would buy that many socks unless they could sell them somewhere at a good enough mark up to make the trip worthwhile. So flooding the market with socks might work one year, but you'd have to do something else the next year or you won't sell any. I imagine that you'd also have to sell them at a lower cost to convince the merchant to take so many.