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[K4el]

Can anyone confirm the fuel cost of melting an item? It seems like an awful lot of effort to melt small items for such a small return.

[NecroRebel]

Melting items costs fuel unless run at a magma smelter.

It is an awful lot of effort, and more importantly resources, to melt small items for a small return, unless you've got magma smelters, in which case it's just one more thing for your smelters to do, and probably worthwhile at that. Labor is cheap.

Get magma smelters.

[darkflagrance]

An operation to melt down and the re-use Goblinite using a normal smelter would be terribly inefficient - one fuel to melt and then more to recast. That's why one digs down to magma asap.

[K4el]

An operation to melt down and the re-use Goblinite using a normal smelter would be terribly inefficient - one fuel to melt and then more to recast. That's why one digs down to magma asap.

Yeah i'm starting to question why it's even worth bothering with a fortress near the surface instead of as deep as possible.

[wuphonsreach]

surface plant farming
livestock
trees

(And the 2nd and 3rd can be supported deeper underground, sorta.)

My forts always end up with the magma forges at the bottom, the workshops at the very top, trade about 1/3 down the stack and living quarters about 2/3 down.

[K4el]

The surface plants are really the only reason I could think to want to be close to the surface. Livestock and trees can be easily enough supported  with an aggressive cavern cleansing campaign.

I can think of a few dwarfy ways to engineer a surface plant farm a little deeper than you'd normally see them =)

surface plant farming
livestock
trees

(And the 2nd and 3rd can be supported deeper underground, sorta.)

My forts always end up with the magma forges at the bottom, the workshops at the very top, trade about 1/3 down the stack and living quarters about 2/3 down.

[tolkafox]

Anvils and some large metal items give a good return, other than that trade the junk for metal bars/anvils.

Ask the caravans to bring wood while they're at it, good ol charcoal.

[Hyndis]

Its an amazing source of endless metal with access to magma, but probably isn't worth it unless you have magma access.

Save up the junk items until you get magma to the smelters, then melt it all down.

[ThirdSpartacus]

Yeah i'm starting to question why it's even worth bothering with a fortress near the surface instead of as deep as possible.

Digging down to the magma level often takes a considerable amount of time and resources (due to the hippie caves and their hippie monsters), thus its usually preferable to quickly establish your dwarves on the surface level, somewhere near where they start.

Also, alot of action happens on the surface. Merchant caravans, immigrants, trees, and sieges(yay!) make building somewhat near the surface desirable, as compared to having to constantly change camera views to see what's happening 100 z-levels away and also risking immigrant death and merchant pre-departure.

Of course, the real action occurs much much deeper than the surface...

[wuphonsreach]

Press "h" and use the F1-F8 hotkeys to zoom quickly to 8 different locations in your fort (and you can add Shift-F1 to Shift-F8 for another 8 locations).  My hot-keys are generally F1 for the highest major level in the fort down to F8 for the magma forges, with F2-F7 covering the 6 major levels between those 2 points.

Digging down to the magma sea is not difficult, it just involves creating some 1x1 vertical stairs that you seal back up after finding a cavern (with constructed walls).  Then you find a good spot for a 2x2 vertical stairshaft to connect back to the surface and intermediate levels and you start building everything along that pathway.

[Reelyanoob]

I build a magma suburb, and have dining and drinks shipped in from the top level area. Probably should put bedrooms down there too. The trip's not that big a deal. Haulers are cheap. Definitely have food and drink caches spread around if you have a spread out fortress. This hauling actually save a lot of work, as rather than have the furnace workers go up to the dining area, eat or drink 1 unit, then go back to the forges, the hauler drags a potenially large number of drinks or meals down at once, saving a lot of trips for the furnace operators.

You can also build a long garbage-chute (careful with channelling this out, don't have a dwarf dig down through a cavern roof) and drop ores, flux, drinks, food straight down into the magma workshops, saving hauler trips. Just remember to periodically reclaim the pile.

PS I'd make the bottom of the garbage chute a 1x1 drinks and prepared meals stockpile, so haulers leave the barrels in that square, and have no ore stockpile, so there's no further hauling required.

[Nameless Archon]

You can also build a long garbage-chute (careful with channelling this out, don't have a dwarf dig down through a cavern roof) and drop ores, flux, drinks, food straight down into the magma workshops, saving hauler trips. Just remember to periodically reclaim the pile.

PS I'd make the bottom of the garbage chute a 1x1 drinks and prepared meals stockpile, so haulers leave the barrels in that square, and have no ore stockpile, so there's no further hauling required.

If you're going to stockpile this way, make the stockpile an ore/metal goods/food/drink stockpile, and quantum store all the items for eating, drinking, and smelting/melting at the bottom of the fort. Since the tile is full almost immediately, no one will haul anything to that stockpile, but it will allow you to reclaim and use all your ores, food and drink in one place at one time.

I use a second shaft to handle miasma-producing items like butcher shop leavings, goblin/kobold parts. That one drops out on a hatch that I can lever flip to drop the whole pile of items into the magma sea.

[Maklak]

This game could use a "batch smelting" job, where multiple items of the same material are smelted at once. Probably best implemented after materials are handled in a different way (mass / volume), tough.

[bucket]

That can be done from the Stocks screen (z). You can, for example, see that you have 20 iron bolts, then press 'm' to melt them all down. Of course, this requires a bookkeeper...

[Maklak]

Yes, but they will still be meted one by one (each using a unit of coke without magma smelter) into 0.1 metal (assumming, they are not in a stack). Besides I don't melt ammo anyway. I didn't make myself clear, I was thinking "Fill a smelter up with as much stuff designated to melt made of the same material as will fil, and smelt it all at once".