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[Yagrum Bagarn]

Arrkhal, as I understood it, making HFS available on all maps was intentional and probably here to stay, so we'll have to always think of steel in relation to it.

Even with steel's raws changed to be relatively better than iron, how much better is enough to justify the current convoluted process of making it?

[Ashery]

My solution: Chalk. I have two smelters running at full power. One is repeating "Make Coke form Lignite" and "Make Coke from Bituminous Coal."

The other one's tasklist:

Smelt Magnetite Ore /R
Smelt Magnetite Ore /R
Make Pig Iron Bars /R
Make Steel Bars /R

And none of my stockpiles accept iron or pig iron bars.

I do about the same. Main difference is that I combine the coal and metal reactions onto the same smelter.

Note that steel requires *more* than four total coal to produce as the game now requires one fuel to power the forge and another to act as the carbonizing agent (Or whatever the hell the technical term is).

I actually got my steel industry up and running shortly after producing two sets of bronze plate, ie around the end of the first year, thanks to the dramatically increased availability of coal.

The only time steel is difficult to obtain is if your map has no flux.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Or if it's all marble.

On another note, yeah. The extra fuel requirement is annoying. I solve it by having the first of those two (magma) smelters running nonstop.

Yeah. I use magma smelters for coal and steel.

[Arrkhal]

Arrkhal, as I understood it, making HFS available on all maps was intentional and probably here to stay, so we'll have to always think of steel in relation to it.

What I mean is, there's too much of it per map, and it's still relatively easy to fend off the clowns.  The process of finding the stuff should be difficult enough to compensate for how good it is, and the balance isn't quite there yet.

Even with steel's raws changed to be relatively better than iron, how much better is enough to justify the current convoluted process of making it?

Well, in real life, good heat-treated steel is about 5-10 times stronger than wrought iron, depending on the relative quality.

[Retro]

Arrkhal, as I understood it, making HFS available on all maps was intentional and probably here to stay, so we'll have to always think of steel in relation to it.

What I mean is, there's too much of it per map, and it's still relatively easy to fend off the clowns.  The process of finding the stuff should be difficult enough to compensate for how good it is, and the balance isn't quite there yet.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Agreed, and on top of that, it's insanely easy to find adamantine now. Dig straight down until you hit semi-molten rock, magma, or in the somewhat rare case adamantine itself. If you hit magma, an addy tube is probably exposed (somehow). If you hit semi-molten rock, just move around a bit to the side until you do open up the entire magma sea at once. It's actually kind of hard to hit magma and not find adamantine now. You can even find them in caverns sometimes.

[Shadowlord]

I don't find steel-making that much of a problem, even without magma. I'm running two forges making steel armor and weapons and two smelters making coke (from lignite, mostly), iron (from limonite, mostly), pig iron, and steel constantly, with two wood furnaces making charcoal constantly as well. At the moment I have 50 or so steel bars.

Of course, there are no goblins or elves around to bother me, and the only "threats" have been two handless firebreathing titans with wings (and the fire didn't even hurt the dwarves, although they were able to kill dogs for some reason). Each of them was effectively a giant buffet on wings, once the butchers got to their corpses.

[BigD145]

Steel production is hard:

[Koozer]

Yes. It should be harder to obtain better materials than steel, not easier to obtain steel itself. Haven't looked at the raws myself, but I gather that iron doesn't have low enough properties at the moment either.

[Wolfius]

One smelter can queue ten orders.

Make Coke R (as many as needed, depending on coal type and magma/no magma)
Smelt Iron R
Smelt Iron R
Make Pig Iron R
Make Steel R

Fully automated steel production, no fuss, no muss, no screeching halt if fuel use outstrips production when you split the tasks between multiple smelters, and it fully scalable to any number of smelters.


This request is utterly pointless(seriously? You want your little make-game-easier mod to make it into the default game so you can use it in vanilla-only challenges? Isn't that a little self-defeating? :wtf: ). And, in fact, I'd like to see more complexity, not less. It's the effort needed that makes steel such a prize compared to other metals.

[Talith]

One smelter can queue ten orders.

Make Coke R (as many as needed, depending on coal type and magma/no magma)
Smelt Iron R
Smelt Iron R
Make Pig Iron R
Make Steel R

Fully automated steel production, no fuss, no muss, no screeching halt if fuel use outstrips production when you split the tasks between multiple smelters, and it fully scalable to any number of smelters.


This request is utterly pointless(seriously? You want your little make-game-easier mod to make it into the default game so you can use it in vanilla-only challenges? Isn't that a little self-defeating? :wtf: ). And, in fact, I'd like to see more complexity, not less. It's the effort needed that makes steel such a prize compared to other metals.

Couldn't agree more.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Steel production is labor intensive.  You need a miner or two chewing on coal + iron veins all the time and as many furnaces as you can afford pounding out bars and coke and one making steel.  Its a lot of work for a little bit better metal because if it was easy, or alot better, then there would be no point in iron stuff.  If you want that extra steel strength and edge or whatever, then it costs a bunch of work.  Not that I think its a bad request though.  There certainly should be a "make steel and needed intermediates" command that allows one smith in one furnace to go through all the steps on their own.

When weapon degradation and armor damage is in I think there will be much more use in steelmaking, because suddenly melting down that pile of iron swords blunted on goblin skulls and making new ones has to happen.   

[Urist Imiknorris]

Steel production is labor intensive.  You need a miner or two chewing on coal + iron veins all the time and as many furnaces as you can afford pounding out bars and coke and one making steel.  Its a lot of work for a little bit better metal because if it was easy, or alot better, then there would be no point in iron stuff.  If you want that extra steel strength and edge or whatever, then it costs a bunch of work.  Not that I think its a bad request though.  There certainly should be a "make steel and needed intermediates" command that allows one smith in one furnace to go through all the steps on their own.

When weapon degradation and armor damage is in I think there will be much more use in steelmaking, because suddenly melting down that pile of iron swords blunted on goblin skulls and making new ones has to happen.   

a. two legendary miners + one fortress in a flux layer + two clusters of magnetite + four bituminous coal veins + three lignite veins = Nigh-infinite  steel. Even more so if your steel operation is running on a magma smelter, cutting the fuel use from [1 per "make coke from" reaction + 6] to 2. And none of these are very hard to find/dig out/ embark on.

b. Making steel is quite doable with one smelter.

c. Steel is three times as valuable as iron, making steel items valuable trade goods.

[Paul]

I honestly never saw making steel as hard. I do it first thing on every embark to equip my military. I don't even bother with other materials, since steel making is so easy. I can embark on a site with limestone, dolomite, or chalk and have steel production fully operational within 5 minutes, less if I already have a visible iron ore vein. Set the miner to digging out a big magnetite cluster or hematite vein, set the woodcutter to chopping down some trees, get a wood burner going on making charcoal, get the furnace operator to start smelting - shortly thereafter I have steel flowing in and have armor/weapons being produced. How is that so difficult?

Removing pig iron from the process is the wrong way to go IMO. It would make sense to be able to produce pig iron straight from ore, though - just ore + flux + coal = pig iron. That way the process would be:

Make iron (1 ore, 1 coal)
Make pig iron (1 ore, 1 coal, 1 flux)
Make steel (1 coal, 1 flux)

That way it would cut one of the steps out, and it's perfectly reasonable to be able to make pig iron straight from ore (that's how its done in reality).

[Kanddak]

I think you're all a bunch of whiny elves. It's really not that hard to drop a batch of the appropriate jobs into the manager and forget about it; steel is less complex than making clear glass and the same as making soap.
If you don't want needlessly complex micromanagement, you're playing the wrong game. This is Dwarf Fortress.

[Bakawolf]

My current fortess doesn't seem to have the proper layer for coal OR flux....but i have iron!...and magma.