I was not sure about that, I wanted to make steel making harder, but actually all it does... it just needs more fuel.
What's your opinion on the subject? I will make sure I decide which way do I want it to be BEFORE the next release, so it's okay .
And more fuel is provided by the "1 log stack into 2 charcoal" wood furnace. It does make it harder with the two methods (flux or pig iron) and extra workshops. It's good to let people also choose non-flux sites.
I hope the need for fuel is driving dorfs to get the trees that grow in the dangerous caverns. And encourages growing your own tower-caps in dug soil caves.
IRL the biggest redwood trees weigh 500 000 kg; in DF all trees are about 200 kg (but weigh 22-37 kg in-game to fit caravans and haulers) and create one 75 kg table (length 1.2-2.3 m I imagine).I like the "pure iron" step, lets you make "pure iron anvils" so can make finishing forges, and export pure iron items (chains, buckets, barrels). I hate the hardcoded 20-60% metal loss the "melt object" command has.
And "Iron" is actually low-grade steel whereas "steel" is high-grade stuff. But some people will be totally confused by ore->pure iron->iron->pig iron->steel sequence.
What would make iron and steel harder to get would be to change the ore so iron ores don't yield 100% but 35% metal. Those ore largeclusters are too huge for good game balance.
Bronze, that is actually hard to get since it requires two metals. Cobalt gear is heavy (slows down your soldiers) but quite plentiful on some maps, and too simple to smelt. Maybe cobalt could require some extra work (fuel, rockgrinder step) since it's not in the vanilla DF.
EditN: here's a savegame of my current fort, right before bushfire releases lots of caged foes.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8967397/Lakedisk%20autumn%205%20bushfire%20-%20region11.zipBugger, it's called Lakedike but I failed.
You know you can just set the blood for dumping, mark the barrel for trading when merchants are at the depot then the dwarves will carry the barrel to the depot and leave a puddle of blood/ichor/venom on the ground? This should get cleaned up afterwards by a dwarf.
Thanks. I'd rather "j-m-q use blood as fertiliser" make it go away instead of mark-dump, barrel-to-depot conditional thing.
I also dislike "build cage, build lever, build link between them, pull lever to release were". So I don't do it.