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[MW]

First post due to extreme revelation at this idea.

My last attempt at a fortress ended with my first attempt at screw pumping ending up getting overpowered and flooding everything. But I recalled something a little while before. I found a pocket of realgar next to some metals while mining. Seemed interesting. It was a nice and red colour. Around the time I was building some castle walls and a moat, so I decided to use it to make a drawbridge out of. The red complemented the gray/black walls.

That was about a month ago after my one mistake without seasonsave forced a ruined project. Just today, I was listening to a podcast called "Philip Ball on Chemistry and Colour in Art" (link: http://feeds.tvo.org/~r/tvobigideas/~3/z-6aL0J7NX8/BI_PhilipBall_031205.mp3) It was talking about how medieval painters used alchemy to make paints.

Then, at around 28 minutes in, he says this:

On the cymbal player in the middle is an even rarer pigment, which you can see on her orange robes. This orange is realgar, which is another form of arsenic-sulfide and another form of alchemical compound. This was also highly poisonous, and it was not very popular, partly for that reason. Gelino warns painters who use it to "look out for yourself."

Without knowing it, I had accidentally poisoned my dwarves and every merchant caravan that went through my gates. Of course, the game just treated it like any other form of stone, but think of the possibilities here. Once the health care system is more or less working, why not give the miners a few occupational hazards? If the miners smash through a hazardous rock, it'll give off a cloud of smoke that could give a mild syndrome to anyone who breathes it. Since realgar is aresnic (similar to absbestos), short term affects could be coughing and long term effects would be a shortening of life span.

I'm sure there are plenty of rocks in the game that have workplace hazards in the working world. Why not import them into DF? Currently, watching out for the a [clown car] or a [big top circus] is the only hazard for miners aside from cave ins. This'll provide the fortress with more happenstance events as it grows.

[3]

This is entirely possible already (well, 99% possible), just not implemented in vanilla DF.

[Kanddak]

There was a big thread about this last year in anticipation of 0.31's materials/syndromes system: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30291.0

People brainstormed various forms of pneumoconiosis and poisonous minerals, while arguing that dwarven beards should filter a lot of these things out, explaining why dwarves do so much more mining than the other races.
And I wanted to use rock salt to melt slugmen.

[thijser]

That would mean some dwarfs can't mine because they are clean shaven.

[Sizik]

That would mean some dwarfs can't mine because they are clean shaven.

Yeah, dead dwarves don't mine very well.