Hey, I got a question: what exactly is necessary for special weapons/armor that only appears through moods? Does it require the dwarves to have access to the reaction? the weapons? the buildings were it's made? Also, is it possible to make artifact-only variants of other things, such as crafts?
I ask cause it would be pretty cool for a "special" tech tree to be hidden away, only to be discovered when a random stoneworker creates a strange mechanism that, when installed in a forge, upgrades the metal smelted in it. Or something like that anyways.
i believe the weapons concepts lab was implemented because moods very rarely produce an item you normally cannot produce, so it's probably possible to implement that but it would almost NEVER be used...
I've found that this is only true for weapons. Dwarves will only produce a non-permitted weapon if they happen to have a preference for that particular weapon (rare) - this is likely a hard-coded safeguard against dwarves making weapons that are too big to use in vanilla. Funnily enough, this safeguard does not work for anything else - artifact bow, armor, and clothing types are all randomly selected with no regard for entity permissions.
I get artifact armor, clothing, and bows all the time that are not normally produced by the dwarves. I got an artifact spiked mail shirt the other day, as well as a tower-cap spring-loaded bayonet crossbow (which was like... thanks, I guess?) and a few articles of clothing in my most recent fort. Someone a while back mentioned an adamantine reactive chest plate, though I've only ever been lucky enough in testing to get a steel one. The fungiwood void energy projector was a real gem.
I do have a few screenshots, as proof that it actually does happen, but it is significantly more common to get exotic armor, bows, and clothing than it is to get weapons. You are correct, though: this is why the weapons concept lab was added.
If you get lucky enough to nab a runecloak, give it a spin and tell me what you think. It's a prototype for the workings of tier four of the tech tree's "upgraded armor" concept.