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[Vorthon]

Wikipedia > Iron ore

Increasing iron ore demand, coupled with the depletion of high-grade hematite ores in the United States, after World War II led to development of lower-grade iron ore sources, principally the utilization of taconite.

We had roast pork for dinner last night, so it's taconite in my house tonight as well.

The pun! Eet Burns!

[G-Flex]

Consider, too, that with magma forges fuel is no longer an issue. If it came down to it, they could repeatedly process impure ores until pure iron is derived.

If you think this is possible, it's obvious you don't actually know how smelting works.

• Smelting, realistically speaking, requires a source of carbon no matter what. You need a reducing agent. It's true that magma furnaces don't, but magma furnaces are weird.
• Magma (or many, many rocks too numerous in type to mention), even if it contains iron, also contains many, many other elements. Even if you could smelt the magma, it would be just like smelting any other molten rock; you might as well smelt whatever stone is lying around. The point here is that, even if you're utilizing some kind of reduction process to get trace iron out of the magma, you'll also get trace everything-else-under-the-sun and won't have a way to separate it out. You cannot use random stone, molten or not, as effective iron ore, especially not in the late medieval period.

The trick would be allowing cooling to be slow enough that it isn't a glass like obsidian, as the different metal's different cooling points would allow one metal to crystalize and settle or be removed from the magma while the other metals are still above their boiling points.  That's something pretty extreme as a method of ore mining, but it's at least hypothetically possible. 

I have no idea how long the process would need to take in order to actually separate the metals, however.  The process may take hundreds of years or the like, and be almost completely inviable because of that.

This is a little interesting, but I don't know if it would work as simply (if difficultly) as that, especially if the iron winds up bound in complex chemical arrangements with other things; I mean, you're less likely to get hematite out of that as you are <insert just about any volcanic stone containing iron as well as a bunch of other things in a complex arrangement>.

[MasterMorality]

How do you check population counts?

[Zesty]

[NW_Kohaku]

This is a little interesting, but I don't know if it would work as simply (if difficultly) as that, especially if the iron winds up bound in complex chemical arrangements with other things; I mean, you're less likely to get hematite out of that as you are <insert just about any volcanic stone containing iron as well as a bunch of other things in a complex arrangement>.

"Less likely", in a sense, doesn't need to be a real issue - if we were to make it into a reaction, we could make it into a 5% chance of getting an ore with enough iron out of the reaction to be smeltable (like hemitite), and it would still be useful.  Throw enough dice and eventually, the law of averages will favor you.

I mostly think about it because the "gameplay entropy" doesn't really sit well with me - you start with a mountain, and then subtract out a finite supply of resources from it.  Eventually, you can just plain run out of EARTH, which is pretty silly.

I've been kicking around an idea to have some sort of vulcanism mechanic that would be able to trigger shifts in vulcanism when a certain critical threshold is hit that makes the magma sea simply vomit up some magma which eventually cools into semi-molten, then regular rock to replinish the earth when you actually manage to pretty much excavate the entire crust of the planet down to the mantle.  When it does that, it becomes not just obsidian, but also things like gabbro and basalt, and relevant ores might be found there, as well.

Basically, I view the world as an ecosystem, where matter is continuously in flux, but not being created or destroyed.   This entropic decay of the game that forces regenning worlds and abandoning forts and player-made towns being incapable of living more than about 20 years or so really bugs me at a fundamental level.

If stone is getting wiped out of the game by being dumped into the magma sea to eliminate the excess useless stone, then why not have some stone capable of coming back out of the magma sea?

[Grax]

My current .18 fort completely lacks coal/lignite, but I can deal with that.  A complete lack of iron ore would've killed it.

Exactly. Especially in evil or savage biomes, iron is pretty important to fort survivability. One can sometimes make do with alternative materials, Goblinite or trade, but that does not always work out. Even then, it can take a lot of effort and luck.

Masterful weapons and armor made of bronze is almost equal to exceptional iron or even steel.
Also good trained soldiers in bronze are far more effective than untrained in steel.

And if there's no iron, then i suppose it is the proper time to search for deep blue fun.

[G-Flex]

"Less likely", in a sense, doesn't need to be a real issue - if we were to make it into a reaction, we could make it into a 5% chance of getting an ore with enough iron out of the reaction to be smeltable (like hemitite), and it would still be useful.  Throw enough dice and eventually, the law of averages will favor you.

Okay, yes, but on the other hand, there's a chance that it's not just "less likely" but actually totally infeasible. In fact, I have no idea why any sort of relatively pure hematite would crystallize out of that. Granted, it does sometimes form due to volcanic activity, but I'm assuming that's a bit more complicated.

Basically, I view the world as an ecosystem, where matter is continuously in flux, but not being created or destroyed.   This entropic decay of the game that forces regenning worlds and abandoning forts and player-made towns being incapable of living more than about 20 years or so really bugs me at a fundamental level.

The game will probably be always a bit weird in this respect, but I suspect it'll matter less once worldwide trade and other interactions open up, because then you don't have to treat that big slab of rock (your fort) as being the whole universe, nor would you have to strip-mine it quite as much.

[tps12]

Eventually, you can just plain run out of EARTH, which is pretty silly.

I've been kicking around an idea to have some sort of vulcanism mechanic that would be able to trigger shifts in vulcanism when a certain critical threshold is hit that makes the magma sea simply vomit up some magma which eventually cools into semi-molten, then regular rock to replinish the earth when you actually manage to pretty much excavate the entire crust of the planet down to the mantle.

Having the Earth spit up more rock as you mine it away strikes me as way more ridiculous than running out of rock in the first place (to the extent that's even possible in the game). Mountains that really do get strip-mined away don't come back, and "new" rock is churned out a) really slowly b) at the bottom of the ocean.

[Kogut]

running out of rock

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corta_Atalaya#Gallery

[NW_Kohaku]

Having the Earth spit up more rock as you mine it away strikes me as way more ridiculous than running out of rock in the first place (to the extent that's even possible in the game). Mountains that really do get strip-mined away don't come back, and "new" rock is churned out a) really slowly b) at the bottom of the ocean.

Real-life mountains aren't stripped down to the mantle.  What dwarves do to stone is just flat-out impossible in real life.

Magma is kept down, especially in volcanically active regions, thanks to the mass and pressure of the stone on top of it - remove enough of that stone keeping the magma down, and the magma vent will be like an uncorked champagne bottle.  That's exactly what a volcanic eruption is - the mass and pressure of the stone above a magma vent becoming no longer heavy enough to counteract the internal pressures of the Earth.  Depending on the type of volcano, this means either a steam vent or slow volcanic magma flow like you see in Iceland or Hawaii, or else a pyroclastic explosion knocking the surface layers of stone out of the way.

[tps12]

Semi-molten rock isn't the mantle, it's just a fantastical element to make the game fun.

[NW_Kohaku]

Semi-molten rock isn't the mantle, it's just a fantastical element to make the game fun.

It certainly seems to be running on realistic principles in order to simulate a realistic world.  I would think that, after all the work to create "realistic" geology to just suddenly declare "no wait, it's all magic, really, never mind the realism" at some arbitrary point seems more than a little odd.

[Dante]

Semi-molten rock isn't the mantle, it's just a fantastical element to make the game fun.

It certainly seems to be running on realistic principles in order to simulate a realistic world.  I would think that, after all the work to create "realistic" geology to just suddenly declare "no wait, it's all magic, really, never mind the realism" at some arbitrary point seems more than a little odd.

By that reasoning, the z-levels in DF must be absurdly large to have so few of them before you get to the mantle.

[G-Flex]

Semi-molten rock isn't the mantle, it's just a fantastical element to make the game fun.

It certainly seems to be running on realistic principles in order to simulate a realistic world.  I would think that, after all the work to create "realistic" geology to just suddenly declare "no wait, it's all magic, really, never mind the realism" at some arbitrary point seems more than a little odd.

And that's why there's a magical stone layer with bottomless pits underneath it, and why it's only about a skyscraper's length under the ground, and why it's only forty feet thick, right?

Seriously, there's no way that's the mantle, at least not in any sort of realistic sense.

[Footkerchief]

Of all the release threads, this one's discussion has the highest ratio of words to relevance I've ever seen.  No wonder Toady doesn't link to them from the front page anymore.