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[ThrowerOfStones]

I've just struck it for the first time, and I'm wondering what the standard operating procedure most people use is. Do you fortify every section before mining in case of HFS? Do you build armor and weapons immediately, or wait to train up some smiths? Do you carve out interior rooms to act as super valuable tombs?

[Rotten]

What I do is mine all the way around, so you get the shape of the vein. DO NOT MINE ANY BLUE STUFF.
The hollow fun parts are always 2X2, but not straight up and down, as long as they overlap one tile from the lower 2X2 hollow part, it's dangerous. I use that information to find what part of the tube is safe and what parts I'm not sure of. I then mine all the safe parts, leaving me with usually a wall of adamantine surrounding a 2X3 black part. I leave that (sometime smooth and engrave), and build coffins around it. My smelters are nearby as well.

[Eric Blank]

Firstly, people usually prefer you add spoiler tags somewhere in your title, just so there's a tiny chance some poor loaf will find out about all this on his own and wet his pants.

You'll want your metalsmiths, specifically of the armor and weapon varieties, to have very high skills before playing with it. You may also want to find that one useless guy that has some points in the strand extraction skill (there's always a few, don't know where they get it since there's no adamantine anywhere in world gen, and nothing else needs strand extractors...), but I don't think that has anything to do with it except getting it done faster. I never payed much attention...
Only let LEGENDARY miners work on it, if this means locking your workforce in the general area for months on end (which is also the safest choice), do it, you must obtain as much ore as possible.

Always mine from the outside in, mine a circle around the shaft from the surrounding rock (don't touch the adamantine yet, this is just exploratory, you need to know how big it is.), then peel it off like layers of wood from a tree. This is to maximize your output and minimize your chances of committing suicide. I've found that the upper two layers usually don't have a breach, especially if they extend a significant distance above the magma sea. Since the pipe is usually near the center, you don't really need to smooth and fortify until you get it down to a 5x5 block or something similar. If your pillar is already so small, you may want to be extremely cautious while mining it.

If you breach it, just abandon/savescum if your computer is slow like mine. The lag is terrible... If it doesn't murder your processor though, give your military a go at them while walling them off. Then search the forum for the various threads describing traps to finish off the first few waves.
remember, safety first

[o_O[WTFace]]

I try and wait for legendary weapon/armor smiths before doing any Admantine work, although I harvest it and make some wafers as soon as I can.  Sooner or later a master immigrant will show up or someone will get a mood.  You can cheese the mood system if you want also, by having haulers and farmers make a single piece of armor/weapon.

Also I'm pretty sure that even dabbling miners can't destroy any admantine.  If you could pound it into dust with a copper pick it wouldn't be all that useful to begin with...

[elwessweettea]

Adamantine always has a 100% yield rate, even if you have a 0-skill miner. Something about the magical blue metal makes it come out easier.

[Arekis]

Adamantine always has a 100% yield rate, even if you have a 0-skill miner. Something about the magical blue metal makes it come out easier.

Oh, really?  I did not know that...  Do legendary miners get any benefits on top of that 100% yield rate or is it a flat 100% no matter what?

[Dearnen]

First of all, save the game before you do anything else.  Then, dig tunnels around the vein to get an idea of how big it is and where it's centered.  Then you can start digging away the branches that stretch out from the center.  You can also carve fortifications into the adamantine to safely take a look at what's on the other side, and if it's safe you can dig away the fortification as easily as any other rock.

[NW_Kohaku]

HFS isn't really that bad if you can survive the initial wave.  I don't think it even murders your FPS too much once the initial wave is over, as the pathing behavior is a little like a wild animal's on the subsequent clowns, some of which can't even fly, so they can't come out of the HFS to attack you, anyway, and like wild animals, they only respawn as you kill them, and only chase after dwarves if they see them, unlike the initial wave.

Therefore, breaching is terrifying, but surviving and having a decent fort afterwards is possible.  (Note: surviving the first wave is HARD.  Either have 50 warriors with legendary skills, divert the HFS so that it attacks a goblin seige to soften them up before your warriors fight, or build some kind of giant chamber of spikey doom or obsidian hammer shoot.  In other words, you have to make SERIOUS preparations to survive this.)

Oh, and keep in mind that now, there are adamantine veins in every 2x2 portion of the embark, so you have 4 adamantine veins in a 4x4 embark to explore.

When mining the adamantine, you are actually probably safe as long as you don't go into the magma sea-levels of the adamantine.  (I don't think you can breach until you are at least a couple levels into the magma sea.)  So long as you aren't getting cancellations because of warm stone, you should be fine.

As for what to MAKE with the adamantine, I'd honestly reccomend armor.  Maybe a spear or a sword, as they have terrific edges, (but blunt weapons are useless) but a breastplate of adamantine is still terrific at preventing piercing attacks, although it should be backed up by some padding chain or leather made of denser material.

[Dahenk]

It feels a little like cheating, but you can just smooth the parts of the vein you are unsure of, and then carve fortifications in that part. that way you will see through the rock and see if there a hole behind it or just more rock.
It does indeed seem like the first top levels of the adamantium adamantine veins are solid so they can be mined all the way through.
I have a legendary armorsmith and a high master weaponsmith atm so my military is rather neat (when they dont randomly drop all their gear suddenly for some reason).
I actually found 2 veins the first time i breached a cave...

try to keep adamantium adamantine near your craftdwarf shop / forge.. it's always exciting when a moody dwarves pick adamantium adamantine as their main ingredient

[NW_Kohaku]

Also, while this may be a bit nitpicky, it's "Adamantine", not "Adamantium".  The latter is what Wolverine has for bones.  The former is... well, it's basically aluminum crud in real life.

[Dahenk]

Also, while this may be a bit nitpicky, it's "Adamantine", not "Adamantium".  The latter is what Wolverine has for bones.  The former is... well, it's basically aluminum crud in real life.

Yeah i know, I'm having a hard time adapting to this spelling. I always thought it was the same stuff anyway.
It has gotten me confused sometimes when searching the forums or the wiki for "adamantium" and not getting any hits

edit: oh maybe you meant the OP. Well looks like im not the only one with this problem =D

[Miuramir]

Oh, and keep in mind that now, there are adamantine veins in every 2x2 portion of the embark, so you have 4 adamantine veins in a 4x4 embark to explore

Not always true; every 2x2 aligned square has a vein (pillar?) randomly placed in one of its four squares.  If your 4x4 embark is perfectly aligned to contain exactly four 2x2 squares, you'll have exactly 4 veins.  If due to trying to include river, volcano, etc. your embark is not aligned, you can have as few as 1 vein or as many as 9, depending on exactly how it is mis-aligned and how the random placement works out (average is still 4).  In the following diagram, lower-case letters are no vein, upper case have a vein; x/X is outside the embark, e/E is the embark. 

Unlucky:

xX|Xx|xX
xe|ee|ex
______
xe|Ee|eX
Xe|ee|ex
______
xe|ee|ex
xX|xX|Xx

versus lucky:

xx|xx|xx
xE|Ee|Ex
______
xe|ee|Ex
xE|eE|ex
______
xE|Ee|Ex
xx|xx|xx

[ungulateman]

@ OP:

I eat it.

Om nom nom.

[gtmattz]

I ignore it.  In 40d i was a whore for the blue stuff and it was my #1 priority to mine it all out at whatever cost(I would even go so far as collapsing the whole node in order to destroy the residents that could not be drown or burned out), but when I learned that it no longer brings the king automatically it lost all of its draw for me I think.

[NW_Kohaku]

Funny, I avoided the stuff because of the king - I wanted to earn the king the "right way" before I would start mining it out.