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[Kilowatt]

Food production is up, fortress is fine, and now I turn to getting a steel industry going. I have the components, all the flux, everything, and I queue up some steel bars. Then I see this:

Urist McMetalsmith Cancels Make Steel: Need 150 iron bars.

Anyone know what's going on?

[Sphalerite]

You need iron bars.  Do you have any?  Don't mind the 150, that's just a bug from the weird way DF handles material sizes.

[Acperience]

You read the wiki article on steel yes?

You need to make pig iron first:
1 Iron bar
1 Flux
1 Coal/Charcoal (for the reaction)
1 Coal/Charcoal (for fueling the workshop, unless you're using magma)

Then to make steel:
1 Pig Iron Bar
1 Iron Bar
1 Flux
1 Coal/Charcoal (rxn)
1 Coal/Charcoal (fuel)

The 150 error message is sortof a typo, it should say something like needs 1 iron bar. The numbers displayed are material sizes or something.

[Kilowatt]

Yes, I've all the above. Two smelters making iron, one making pig iron, one making steel. Plus assloads of lignite (made into coke) and flux from excavation.

EDIT: Whoops, realized that it's a bottleneck in production of iron due to depletion of ore on one level and the need to go much farther to retrieve magnetite.

[Acperience]

Lock this topic up?

[pixl97]

On steel production I kinda 'cheat' and use quantum stock piles otherwise it takes far too long to get any amount made. Just make a dump zone beside your smelter, dump all your iron ore, flux, coal (and iron bars and coke if you want) in to it. This way every dwarf in the fort with refuse hauling drags the stuff up rather quickly. Just don't forget to unforbid the stuff.

[twilightdusk]

(and iron bars and coke if you want)

Iron bars and Coke can be stored in bins on a bars/blocks stockpile, unlike stones with cannot be stored effectively unless you abuse the dumping functionality. Besides, if you have that one smelter on a loop for everything you need (make coke (r), make coke (r), smelt iron ore (r), smelt iron ore(r), make pig iron(r), make steel(r)) you'll never have any bars of iron or coke that are available for dumping.

[pixl97]

Twilight, yea, if you have him stuck in his own burrow no one else can reach, otherwise when he takes a break, the weaponsmith your training to make iron maces might snatch his iron bar when he runs off to lunch. I like to have 25+ stockpile each of coke and iron bars, that way when I'm not paying attention and they use up all the raw ore, I have time to mine more without people sitting idle.

[shadowform]

The 150 thing is like this - since Toady wants to implement using 'partial' materials to more accurately track items, each bar of metal counts as 150 units (unless I'm mistaken), much like how each item of cloth counts as 10,000 units and an item of thread counts as 15,000 units.

I think this is so, in the future, when you melt small objects you'll get, for instance, 20 units of metal back and eventually form them into a 150-unit bar, instead of the current system where you either get 1 bar or nothing.