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[Chandrak]

Is there a benefit for building high-quality serrated disks for Weapon Traps, over making them out of metal? I live in a desert, so I can crank out alot of those pretty fast. I know the progression of metals, but nothing on the wiki really talks about things like Elven wood weapons/armor, or glass/obsidian weapons.

[WrathNail]

According to the wiki, glass serrated disks go through your enemies like a dull knife through rock. They do however, seem to cause the tired status in enemies.

So far I can only confirm the former.

[Chandrak]

Hmm, bugger. I was hoping it would work well.

Where was that in the wiki? I mustve missed it.

Edit: Ah, under the glass bugs section. Thanks.

[slothen]

they'll also train your enemies skills up i would imagine.

[zilpin]

I can only confirm that they are essentially useless.
Glass should at least perform well against unarmored targets, but weapon damage physics are slightly less than totally working right now, and unlikely to be fixed any time soon.

Keep in mind that 'useless' traps can also be used to train your dorfs in dodge ability, if you make a room carefully.
I mod all traps to be used as SPIKE, so that I can hook a spiked ball to a lever.  Lock dorf in room of wooden clubs, pull lever for a while, usually they don't get hurt too bad.  So far works decently at getting dorfs trained up on basic survival skills without putting them in the military.  Wood spikes occasionally impale them, though, so I only recommend this for modded traps, and I only use featherwood.

[Chasov]

Do traps force enemies to dodge? Cause then you could build a bridge with glass traps 10z levels over a desert and force enemies to jump off.

[foop]

Do traps force enemies to dodge? Cause then you could build a bridge with glass traps 10z levels over a desert and force enemies to jump off.

This worked quite well when I tried it.  At least, it did until my military engaged a goblin ambush on the bridge and half of them dodged off.

[Nameless Archon]

Are the uninitialized values of glass edges always low? In some programming languages, an uninitialized value could be unexpectedly high, leading to many dorf tears if an uninitialized value turns out to be high, even if the danger room has been safe in the past!

If the goal is a danger room, use wooden spears (low damage against armor) and if the goal is a trap, use metal!

Additionally, eventually Toady will fix the missing value, and then glass traps will work again, leading to a danger room you can't use, and to traps with an unknown future effectiveness in some later version!

[FleshForge]

Do traps force enemies to dodge? Cause then you could build a bridge with glass traps 10z levels over a desert and force enemies to jump off.

This actually works a lot better with wooden training weapons, since they very rarely inflict a kill and thus very rarely jam.

[gtmattz]

Are the uninitialized values of glass edges always low? In some programming languages, an uninitialized value could be unexpectedly high, leading to many dorf tears if an uninitialized value turns out to be high, even if the danger room has been safe in the past!

I believe that someone (Quietust I think?) did some research on this in the past and found that the value is all over the place.  While it is usually low, it can be extremely high, and changes every time you reload the game (or was it map?).  So your glass danger room could work great, then you reload and it massacres your military because glass is now sharper than bluemetal.

[Quietust]

Are the uninitialized values of glass edges always low? In some programming languages, an uninitialized value could be unexpectedly high, leading to many dorf tears if an uninitialized value turns out to be high, even if the danger room has been safe in the past!

I believe that someone (Quietust I think?) did some research on this in the past and found that the value is all over the place.  While it is usually low, it can be extremely high, and changes every time you reload the game (or was it map?).  So your glass danger room could work great, then you reload and it massacres your military because glass is now sharper than bluemetal.

Yes, that would've been me. In the few tests I did, the values tended to be zero or otherwise fairly low. The value actually gets "determined" each time the materials are initialized, which happens when you start a new game, load a saved game, or enter Arena mode (when you return to the main menu, all of the materials get unloaded).

[Nameless Archon]

Yes, that would've been me. In the few tests I did, the values tended to be zero or otherwise fairly low. The value actually gets "determined" each time the materials are initialized, which happens when you start a new game, load a saved game, or enter Arena mode (when you return to the main menu, all of the materials get unloaded).

Did you have any test cases where the value was unexpectedly higher than some of the metals?

[proxn_punkd]

However, apparently glass items make great trade fodder (green glass only for elves, unless you're trying to piss them off), and are magma-safe, so glass can still be quite useful. And sand is pretty much an infinite resource.

[Quietust]

I never actually tested the sharpness of glass in combat situations - I was only monitoring memory to see what the MAX_EDGE value was being initialized to. Hell, I don't even know if MAX_EDGE is even used during combat. There's also the fact that glass's physical properties* are all [foo_YIELD:10000] [foo_FRACTURE:10000] [foo_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:0], which could also be reponsible for it being comically ineffective.

* - and, in fact, the physical properties of ALL hardcoded materials - amber, coral, water, coal, potash, ash, pearlash, lye, mud, vomit, salt, solid brown "filth", liquid yellow "filth", liquid white "unknown substance" (yes, those 3 substances), and grime

[Fearless Son]

I was considering some glass disks as well since I do not want to waste my small supply of high quality metals on traps rather than armor, especially as this is only a backup trap in case my much more complex magma-flooding chamber fails to activate.  I have a legendary glass maker who could make very high quality glass disks, but if the material is bad then there is no helping it. 

I imagine that in future versions glass trap weapons would be similar to obsidian swords, in that they are very sharp and cut flesh easily but dull quickly against heavy armor.