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[mszegedy]

What do you use? The only metal at my fortress is hematite, which is a pretty good iron substitute in real life. Dunno about copper. I also seem to have directly dug to the second cave level without revealing the first, and still only hematite ore. There's magma, though, which cools into useful obsidian.

[agatharchides]

Hematite is iron, or an ore of it both in RL and the game. For in game purposes there is probably nothing you can do with copper that you can't do with iron aside from some decorative alloys.

[IT 000]

The only metal at my fortress is hematite, which is a pretty good iron substitute in real life.

ninja'd

Obsidian is about as useful as beating someone to death with a pillowcase full of marbles. It uses blunt attacks and doesn't do effective damage. Your better off using some sort of metal. Even silver. Or making a hammer if you want the same effects.

Copper provides you with mediocre weapons and armor. If you don't have anything better, just shove a bunch of copper weapons in traps as a copper clad militia will get skewered by iron weaponry.

[_DivideByZero_]

Copper is good for brass. That's about the best use for it.

In a mod I;m planning to work on it will be used for lemon batteries, required to extract chlorine and process bauxite.

[arkhometha]

magma.

[Silophant]

Copper is good for bronze, which is as good or better than iron for armor and weapons. This is assuming you can find cassiterite for tin, which I never have in .31.19.

[MasterofYoda]

I've had similar issues with the last few fortresses I've started in 31.19 - regardless of how many layers of metal it says there are on the embark screen, I'm lucky to see more than one type. While the one where I found nothing but lots and lots of gold was amusing, I had to import all of the metal for my weapons and armor. Does anyone know if this (the relative paucity of metal compared to previous versions) is intentional, a glitch in my game, or what? I don't mind trading mounds and mounds of every type of ore for mounds and mounds of fewer types of ore, but I've only found iron one time after generating six fortresses, all of which had a deep metal and/or multiple shallow metal layers.

[Psieye]

I've had similar issues with the last few fortresses I've started in 31.19 - regardless of how many layers of metal it says there are on the embark screen, I'm lucky to see more than one type. While the one where I found nothing but lots and lots of gold was amusing, I had to import all of the metal for my weapons and armor. Does anyone know if this (the relative paucity of metal compared to previous versions) is intentional, a glitch in my game, or what? I don't mind trading mounds and mounds of every type of ore for mounds and mounds of fewer types of ore, but I've only found iron one time after generating six fortresses, all of which had a deep metal and/or multiple shallow metal layers.

Known issue. Look on the front page of news for more details. Short answer: not quite working as intended yet. Options to give back the old level of abundance will be conceded.

[Keldane]

As has been said, hematite is an ore of iron, and one that I have yet to see in any of my 31.19 embarks. To help counter this, I have modded in obsidianite - a metal smelted from obsidian that can be used to create anvils, weapons, armor, and picks. If you have access to any other weapons- or armor-grade metal, it's superior to obsidianite in some way, and as long as you have water and can tunnel to the magma sea, you have access to obsidianite. Testing has proven it statistically superior to being naked.

[bluelang]

Use the copper to make zillions of cage traps, smelt or sell the iron goblinite, equip with steel,























lose anyway.

[Raufgar]

Copper is good for bronze, which is as good or better than iron for armor and weapons. This is assuming you can find cassiterite for tin, which I never have in .31.19.

On top of Cassiterite, if you find any Bismuthinite, you can also go one more by making Bismuth Bronze, which is worth more than Bronze but has about the same properties when made into weapons and armor. My favorite metal for starting builds since it allows for more bars per smelting (4 bars), but uses slightly more fuel to do so.

[Girlinhat]

I've started embarking with bismuth bronze ore when able (namely, malachite, cassiterite, and busmunthinite) because it's actually cheaper than the ore for just bronze, produces more value, and has identical combat stats.  It's easy to get enough bismuth bronze to equip any good-size military just from your embark options, and definitely holds its value until you get steel equipment going.

[EveryZig]

Silver is also nice to have for the hammers/spiked silver balls/ silver bolts

[deknegt]

Does anyone here know any good uses for Lead?

Its useless for anything and i was wondering if you could make some nasty trap components with it.
I mean something like a pressure plate linked through a lead wrecking ball that decimates the entire corridor or something.
Or a huge ACME anvil that falls on top of your noggin

[Akura]

Nope. Lead sucks. Only good for bins containing valuables on abandon/reclaim.