Getting bored with how easy vanilla DF is, I'm experimenting with bits and pieces of other people's mods, orcs and harder farming and improved megabeasts and so on.
I'm also adding a few of my own metals, filling the niche that is better-than-steel but worse-than-adamantine.
Specifically:
* a really valuable, but weak metal, like pimped-out platinum (unobtainium);
* a metal that is 200 DAMAGE_PERC which can only be used for weapons (wyrdflint);
* a metal that is 200 BLOCK_PERC which can only be used for armour (wyrd wirewool);
* a metal that is 250 of each made by smelting the two previous metals together, which can be used for anything (wyrdsteel).
Now ideally, I'd like it so that (a) my dwarfs start out with steel weapons/armour on the embark screen as normal, and (b) dwarvern traders still bring steel objects.
Basically I want to ONLY be able to access the modded metals by mining their ores and smelting them down into bars.
But because of the [METAL_PREF] tag (I think), they always prefer the new, better, rarer metals on the embark screen - and reclaiming a fortress results in all your dwarves wearing the improved metals. I tried to fix this by adding [DEEP] to the metals and/or their ores, but this causes adamantine to appear in veins on the surface.
The only stopgap I can find is to reduce the damage and block values temporarily, so steel is preferred on the embark screen. But once I change them back in-game, dwarf traders still prefer to bring unobtainium bracelets, immigrant woodcutters come with wyrdflint axes, and so on.
[Also, making the modded metals ridiculously valuable doesn't work - it just extends my points available on embark to, say, 12000, to allow the standard 2 axes, and once I lose the axes, I have a huge excess]
Is there a solution or do I just have to suck it up?