So far as I can tell, one always embarks with the cheapest available anvil.
No, iron is not cheaper than copper. You end up with "normal" which is 1 level lower than the best, so in the best case you'd end up with steel anvil which costs 3000 dwarfbucks. A bit too much.
I suspect you are either not really reading or utterly failing to comprehend my posts.
I did not say that iron is cheaper than copper. I said that copper is cheaper than iron, and that if one adds the ANVIL token to copper in the matgloss then one embarks with a COPPER anvil instead of an IRON one.
If one really embarks with an anvil "1 level lower than the best", then when I added Kana (the super-metal) to the matgloss I should have embarked with a STEEL anvil, since it would have been 1 lower than the best (Kana). However, I still embarked with the IRON anvil, which would be two levels lower.
For my own peace of mind, I just re-added the ANVIL token to copper and am generating a world as I type. The metals with the ANVIL token are, in descending order of value:
Kana
Steel
Iron
Copper
As expected, I embarked with a COPPER anvil, which supports my earlier assertion that one embarks with the cheapest anvil available.
Perhaps you are playing a different game, or in a different reality.
I'd also like to note that you completely neglected my question, but at this point I have little reason to believe you'd be able to answer it satisfactorily.
Update (or possibly answering my own question): a trade caravan just showed up from my race (it appears that the first trade caravan to show up is always that which belongs to one's race; I had set mine to be active in Winter, so the dwarves didn't show up in Autumn as they normally do) and they are laden with Kana items. This doesn't necessarily mean that all the other races get unlimited access to the metal, but it does seem likely. We shall see, and possibly revel in some ridiculous sieges.
Update the Second: oi, I just realized how bitchy this sounded. Sorry about that; I should probably refrain from communicating on so little sleep. As if my social ineptitude wasn't bad enough to begin with...
There's still something I'm not understanding, though: when you say "costs 3000 dwarfbucks", do you mean it's too expensive on the embark screen? Because there doesn't seem to be a fixed "embark points" value; rather, one always receives two copper picks, two axes of the highest quality non-deep metal, some alcohol, some food, an anvil and 200 extra points (as I mentioned earlier, however, this appears to vary depending on which items have been permitted in the entity file). Assuming one doesn't need an anvil immediately, it's actually beneficial to start out with a more expensive anvil because
a) the fact that it costs more doesn't actually detract from the points one is able to use; and
b)
not bringing it along means
more points to spend on other items.
But again, I may be misunderstanding something.