I suggest that while you're poking around looking for local metal, you make plans based on finding none...
That sucks. Does Toady have any plans for improving the availability of ores to at least 40d levels? I don't want to trip over a vein on every step like in .18, but if the fucking caravan can have all kinds of metal in large quantities, then I'd better be allowed to have some too! Trading is undwarvenly!
You must have missed all the passionate "debate" about metals just after .19 was released. There was considerable heated exchange over this issue in the
Dwarf Fortress 0.31.19 Released thread.
Anyway, you might be interested in reading some of the
Missing Metals thread. In particular, Toady One posted there to calm things down and explain his position:
Once we have trade, some assurance that a reasonable amount of ore is being brought to the surface in world gen and better local mineral veins, I imagine it'll be less of a problem, but we don't have any of those things yet. Even after that, I think we should end up with some world gen options for different play styles. As people have mentioned, an over-abundance of metals will essentially remove that element of the economy (and warfare etc etc), but not everybody is going to be playing for those reasons.
So, yeah, hopefully we will see some sort of option in a future release for more abundance and less importance on trading for
metals. (Though,
besides this issue, I have little objection to the planned expansion on trade.)
In the meanwhile, you may be interested in trying one or more of these mods:
Note: The
A Little Bit More Mod hints that there may be a certain risk in your mining dwarves contracting the Black Lung disease every time they mine (certain types of?) coal. However, looking at the files, it does not appear that this feature has been implemented yet.