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[Hyndis]

Just have the same smelter do all of the melting. I have a magma smelter on melting on a continual basis. That is literally all it does. Works fine.

[Psieye]

You're missing the point - he means "melt ALL this goblinite in just one smelting job after 200 hauling jobs". But I don't really see the point in that, as the clutter would make the job slower anyway so may as well just have a well designed stockpile right next to the melting station and spam the melt job.

[Hyndis]

You're missing the point - he means "melt ALL this goblinite in just one smelting job after 200 hauling jobs". But I don't really see the point in that, as the clutter would make the job slower anyway so may as well just have a well designed stockpile right next to the melting station and spam the melt job.

Build two weapon/armor stockpiles. One for the stuff you want to keep, the other for the junk you want melted. Adjust the settings in each stockpile so items are automatically sorted by your dwarves. Put the melting stockpile right next to the smelter. Every once in a while to d-b-m over the melting stockpile (assuming you use wood and not metal bins) and all of the newly hauled goblin junk will also be allocated for melting. As the dwarf doing the melting only needs to walk a few steps to grab a new item to melt, a legendary furnace operator can melt down a huge number of items at a magma smelter in a very short period of time.

[tolkafox]

Garbage zone and dump, garbage chutes make items go down faaaast. It's a bit of a pain, but have one stockpile (preferably under a bridge) active and unforbid/dump all the leather/cloth/silk crap that needs to be smashed. Then unactivate that zone and activate the zone next to the chute and unforbid/dump all the goblinite.

You can also have two chutes, on that goes to magma and one that goes to the smelter. Get creative with walls if they go through caverns, if the magma chute goes to a magma cistern then nothing but vermin will spawn in it and I don't believe magma vermin fly.

[Starver]

Don't forget that a very big part of the original point was that one fuel item (coke, charcoal) is used for each of these jobs, regardless of distance[1].  A cost that doesn't exist in the case of magma workshops.

Personally, I can see it being very Dwarfy that the magma solution is the overwhelmingly best one, but for those not yet able/prepared to pursue the magma workshop solution (or is as yet unknowledgable about the whole possibility), it's a big hit on possibly rare coal deposits and/or wood supplies usable for many other purposes.


[1] I already do similar sorting for keep/trade piles of armour, whether because of size or because of lower quality.

[Hyndis]

Garbage zone and dump, garbage chutes make items go down faaaast. It's a bit of a pain, but have one stockpile (preferably under a bridge) active and unforbid/dump all the leather/cloth/silk crap that needs to be smashed. Then unactivate that zone and activate the zone next to the chute and unforbid/dump all the goblinite.

You can also have two chutes, on that goes to magma and one that goes to the smelter. Get creative with walls if they go through caverns, if the magma chute goes to a magma cistern then nothing but vermin will spawn in it and I don't believe magma vermin fly.

Customized stockpiles works better. Its entirely automatic, and you can use mass designations (assuming wooden bins) to add new items to the melt queue without interrupting anything or even needing to go to the stocks menu.

[tolkafox]

I have no metal or coal on my map and about 20 trees growing that I've yet to cut down and haven't decided to dig to magma yet. I melt all my goblinite at a smelter using charcoal as fuel. All of my fuel comes from wood that the caravans bring and the coke/charcoal that I request from my civ. All of my metal is imported through my civ or melted from goblins. All the copper junk gets smelted into bolts, the silver into hammers, and the steel into armor.

I just bought 92 logs from the elven caravan, along with some barrels and cloth bins. I sell the cloth to the human caravan minus the bins.

If you had metal on your map it would be better to smelt the ores, but I get anywhere from 30-50 copper bars from melting siege junk. I don't keep track of fuel costs because I don't run out, by the time all the wood gets burnt into charcoal the next caravan arrives with more wood to burn. I find it more fun this way. My woodburner works year round, partly because the stockpile doesn't accept bins and when the workshop fills up too much he slows down. A 40 tile charcoal stockpile works best as a supply/demand filler.

[alcohol_dependent]

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.

Yeah I was thinking of something like this after I read the history of metallurgy and learned about a process taking large batches of scrap iron and flux and turning it into steel. I thought it'd be cool to have a process like that to turn goblinite into steel easily.

I am gunna make a mod to make steelworking a little more deep, including damascening and dwarven metal folding for swords of higher quality that will be scarce by virtue of being time consuming to make.

I also modded some more real world minerals in related to tetrahedrite. I did a bit of research on it and found there are a family of minerals called sulfosalts, of which tetrahedrite is a member. Tetrahedrite itself also can sometimes contain a variety of Dwarfy ores, one of which is arsenic (which is much more common actually than copper/silver tetrahedrite). Arsenic could be used to make arsenic bronze with copper (responsible for its invention), though tetrahedrite has been known to contain traces of other metal ores such as iron, zinc, mercury, lead and, interestingly, bismuth. Other sulfosalts have similar compositions, though the ore combinations tend to vary.

I modded in a few of these sulfosalts. With tetrahedrite being practically omnipresent, it makes otherwise lame starting locations a little more interesting, with metals being scarce but not nonexistent or trade-only. I'm going to mod in arsenic bronze next.

If you had metal on your map it would be better to smelt the ores, but I get anywhere from 30-50 copper bars from melting siege junk. I don't keep track of fuel costs because I don't run out, by the time all the wood gets burnt into charcoal the next caravan arrives with more wood to burn. I find it more fun this way. My woodburner works year round, partly because the stockpile doesn't accept bins and when the workshop fills up too much he slows down. A 40 tile charcoal stockpile works best as a supply/demand filler.

I attest to this being fun.

[darkflagrance]

Actually, the truth is that DF tracks the wood that the player has stored. If the player has no wood (or, sneakily, has forbidden it all), the game loads up the next caravan with a large load of it.

[tolkafox]

Wow, I just read through the posts I didn't read and I completely said in my last post what has already been said.

I was going to argue that it requires the same amount of fuel to melt an ore into liquid for bar making that it does to melt metal items into liquid for bar making, but having them melted in batches does make sense the way you describe it. Although accurate, you're over thinking it as far as gameplay is concerned. All you need to do is expand the melting process (melt breastplate, melt warhammer, etc) and assign a percentage of a charcoal/coke bar required to melt each item. Multiple melting jobs for one bar of charcoal. Don't ask me where the percentage is for melting items into fractions of bars or where the code is for having multiple bar usage, I'm positive Toady removed the latter from current versions. I also believe that Toady is already planning on doing this, but that's just a rumor that I made up.

Another way to do this that I favor is to have them extract (butcher) metal items into scrap, same way items turn into fraction of bars at a smelter they turn into scraps (fractions) that build up for bars but without the usage of fuel. Scraps store as a variable in a workshop (easier), and when you have enough for a whole bar you can melt them which would then require fuel. Only problem is I don't know how you would do that last process with fuel. Contemplating if melting steel should be more difficult. There's already a quarry mod that has the same reactions for stone, one could easily work off of that.
A simpler method for this would be to melt X (iron caps) into bars, #IF [{X(.1)*10>=1} THEN makebar {Y(iron)}] where X is the material size rounded to the nearest 1/10, and Y is the lowest value material type used. I wonder if that code is even still in use, oh well I'm tired and you (hopefully) get the idea. Only problem with that is you'd need to set the material size functions to their proper form. Still, should require less work than the previous methods.

I'd do it myself, but it's easier to buy wood from caravans. They need a reason to enter my trade depot anyways, cause it's sure not going to be for their cloth.