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[physicsdwarf]

Metal Industry Flowchart for the wiki.  Any suggestions or corrections?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[furlion]

I like it a lot. Very informative in a quick manner, handy for a reference. I will point some thoughts out, not really critiques just thoughts

-Perhaps label which skills are required for each step (wood burner for charcoal fuel, especially the difference between black smithing and metal crafting)
-Flux is a type of Ore and it is only used for steel production. Not sure if that even matters or what to do with it
-Adamantine requires the extra step of being extracted. I do not know where you sit on the spoiling things on the wiki fence but it could be helpful to include a separate flow just for it.

Those are what I think of. However I definitely say go ahead and put it up. Nice little reference people can look at. Very well done.

[Quietust]

Ballista arrowheads cannot be stored in bins, just like anvils and other types of furniture.

[celem]

i like, nice use of a legend and a clear modelling language chosen.  seems very familiar from my UML days

[physicsdwarf]

I put it up on the wiki Metal Industry page with the suggested changes.

I did not add adamantine to it.  Seems like most don't want that to be spoiled.

I was thinking about the labors too.  From the Metalsmith's Forge they are labeled, but for other workshops they are not.  I didn't really like how it looked when I added them, made it look more confusing.  I'm planning on doing more of these for every industry (although I think a few are already made by others), so maybe I can find a cleaner way of adding the labors in the future. 

Thanks for the help everybody.  Any other suggestions are welcome.

[Lord Darkstar]

I built a lot of industry cycle charts (in GraphViz) for my own understanding when I was first learning Dwarf Fortress. When I figured something new out, I'd pop that info into my personal wiki with chart. But when I started to merge them into a master chart--- ouch. Individually, no production step is very big. But when you start linking them up, your notation starts to get very complex.

Here's my old chart just to give you some idea. It has wood industry, plant collection, fishing, farming, brewing, and the beginnings of metal industry and weaving. And it is huge and fairly complex at this point with the kinds of notation I needed (note the legend).



WARNING: LARGE GRAPHIC. It's about a meg in size.

Although, I do like making the silly things, the main reason I stopped was that other than "wow, look at that!" factor, a large graphic wouldn't be that useful to myself, and probably not useful to new players. Too much info and to many wiggly lines going places. So I'd advise on keeping the graphics to just the immediate steps involved.

[dakenho]

Metal Industry Flowchart for the wiki.  Any suggestions or corrections?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

correct me if im wrong but done you need coke any ways?  if i remember correctly I thought you needed flux, coke *or charcoil* in  the reaction its just if you had magma you needed less....

[Quietust]

All smithing tasks require either a unit of fuel or that the task be done at a magma workshop. Making pig iron or steel is special in that it also requires an extra unit of fuel as part of the reaction - at a normal smelter, it requires 2 units of fuel, while at a magma smelter it requires only 1 unit.

Also, studding finished goods with metal reportedly does not require fuel.

[brucemo]

I think that this is one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words, but either more than a thousand words are needed to explain the topic, or the picture is the wrong thousand words, or both.  If you already know how things work, you can look at the chart and see that it makes sense, although it won't tell you anything you don't know.  If you don't already know how things work, that chart will make your mind bleed if you are really trying to extract information from it.   The chart is a chart for new people, but a) doesn't tell them what a new person would need to know, and b) tells them stuff that a new person would not need to know.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

i migth be wong but it seems that alloys can be made from ores directly (or at least it was true before)

[Quietust]

Only billon, brass, bronze, electrum, fine pewter, and trifle pewter can be made from ores - bismuth bronze, black bronze, lay pewter, nickel silver, rose gold, and sterling silver must be made from bars.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

So we can simply say that half of them can be made from ores ... maybe it migth be added to the chart (i still like the "only" in that ^ reply, it is funny with a 6 element listing after ...)

[brucemo]

A link to the wiki article about metal is better than trying to provide alloy information in a chart.  It is not always true that graphically presented information is better than a simple table. You're going to end up trying to jam a huge amount of information into a flowchart cell, or try to find an excuse to create a whole bunch of pointless flowchart cells in order to fit a little bit of information in each one.  It's like making a blueprint of a library that has every book in the library in its shelf location on the blueprint.  Blueprints are for the big picture, not the small picture.

Do you really want to have a big flowchart block to explain that you have to have the animal trapping labor enabled in order to make a metal animal trap?  I found this out today thanks to a noble with eclectic tastes.

The alloy information is most of the interesting information here and already exists in table form in the wiki, takes little or no time to load, and is clear.

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Metal