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[Geb]

I modded in mercury as a component in making mercury-amalgam bars, a nice soft alloy that could then be combined with glass to make mirror items.

Just for fun I also made pure mercury into a weapon and armour metal. It had realistic melting points, so you could only use the weapons outside, at the south pole, in winter, on a world set to absurdly low temperatures with custom worldgen.

It wasn't very practical.

[Loud Whispers]

Sounds very dorfy.

[King DZA]

It would be neat to have a mercury drowning pool somewhere in my fortress...

Technically, I guess I could already do that with water, but water isn't nearly as pretty.

[antymattar]

It would be neat to have a mercury drowning pool somewhere in my fortress...

Technically, I guess I could already do that with water, but water isn't nearly as pretty.

Unless the whole room is filled with it you cant drown in it. Because you would float on it... Thought you REALLY  wouldnt want that to happen... EVER.

[King DZA]

Obviously, I would simply have a special area filled with water, and then channel the level above it, and I'd have myself a drowning pool.. Nice and ready for captured prisoners and melancholy dwarves to take a dip.

The nice thing about a mercury drowning pool would be that it could be much more shallow while still being deadly. And it's pretty.

[Starver]

But a shallower pool still wouldn't allow one to drown the victims...  They'd just bob up and down on it, unless somehow held under.  And if they didn't suffer from some other form of toxic shock their biggest health impact would be madness and senility in longer time-scales that might be entertaining, but not practical for a trap.

On the other hand, it might make easier-retrievable Goblinite, since the dord[1] of mercury (IRL) is about 13-and-a-half g/cm³ (or, alternately, kg/m³, the more SI-styled unit which just happens to be exactly the same in magnitude) , more than any normally available DF metal or alloy that I have thought to look up the figures for, except for gold or platinum.  Even lead items will float in mercury (11.3-ish units on that density scale).  Iron variants, including steel, are almost all a tad below 8 g/cm³.

So, similar to your water-setup, set up a pit to drop the enemy into.  Whether it has mercury in it already, or not, it needs 1Z of air, to prevent them simply "rolling out".  Then shoot at them.  When dead, fill to the brim with pumped-/bucketted-in mercury, scoop everything off of the surface (including all ammo used, which should not have broken).  It would be nice to have boiled and burnt the biological bits away (this would including relevant types of ammo), if you could apply sufficient temperatures that still didn't get above the approximately 350 degrees C or so at which the mercury itself vaporises (though mercury vapours might, if controlled well, be used against a long-term siege or other trapped enemies as a "Miasma++" attack...  still, it would be too long a death to be a standard attack method, of course).  Would also ideally need (fictionally famous dwarven proof against such chemical and biological problems, aside) everything "shaking off" of mercury, back into this temporary lake of quicksilver, before it is pumped/bucketted empty (or emptier) again, ready to receive new enemies.

Not entirely practical.  So perhaps it is dwarfy[2].  As for age of discovery, opinions are divided, but it has been found in Egyptian tombs, IIRC (so a couple of millennia BC, at least).  Practically, amalgams were made by Romans, IIRC, well before DF's general period of historical equivalence (purely legendary aspects, aside), even though instrumentation using pure mercury were probably after.  (Including the first practical seismometer, IIRC, or at least the one which was used to check the speed of explosively-created seismic waves in early experiments in the field.)  Other than that, there were decorative uses for mercury (e.g. to represent shining, flowing waters in Chinese tombs) as well as the alchemical aspects.  Generally the latter led to "potions of eternal life" which promised so much but probably visited an earlier (or messier) death upon their imbibers.  But it wasn't always just the mercuric component that was fatal, in those cases.

I've no idea how long a history mercury has in felt-work and the related hat making, but I've a general feeling it is an aspect of that and the millinery subset that lies well between the middle-ages (where such workaday uses of mercury were few) and today (where such uses are either banned or highly controlled).


[1] A word once in a dictionary, meaning "Density".  Apparently, a lexicographer submitted the definition "D: Density".  Another lexicographer changed this to "D or d: Density".  A third lexicographer read the slip of paper as "D o r d: Density", and given they usually space out the definition word, in went the word "Dord".  There.  Bet you really wanted to know that.

[2] The problem being that (at the moment) there's no way to have liquids other than water or magma, or gasses other mist, miasma or smoke...  I think that's all, but perhaps when you can fill pits with those barrels-worth of animal blood that you can occasionally get, the mechanism will be there to get quantities of naturally-present or modded-in mercury into a pool, or boiled into vapour, or something...

[King DZA]

You're quite right, A shallow drowning pool of mercury probably wouldn't have drowning as the main cause of death. I just like the mental image of a bunch of corpses lying face-down, half submerged in a shimmering pool of the mercury.

Of course, my mercury drowning pool would be used more for aesthetic reasons rather than defensive, likely the centerpiece to some kind of shrine or whatnot. Although in terms of defense, I think a generic evil villain trapdoor-leading-to- crocodile-infested-pit trap would be fun to put together. Though I might have to substitute capybaras instead, considering I've never had much luck finding the scaly buggers.

[kaenneth]

Would Magma creatures (like Magma Crabs) survive in Mercury?

Make an excellent alligator pit replacement in that case.

[Itnetlolor]

I think mercury can work well with alchemy workshops or as something carried on hand for assassination via poisoning food and such.

[Uristocrat]

On the other hand, it might make easier-retrievable Goblinite, since the dord[1] of mercury (IRL) is about 13-and-a-half g/cm³ (or, alternately, kg/m³, the more SI-styled unit which just happens to be exactly the same in magnitude) , more than any normally available DF metal or alloy that I have thought to look up the figures for, except for gold or platinum.  Even lead items will float in mercury (11.3-ish units on that density scale).  Iron variants, including steel, are almost all a tad below 8 g/cm³.

Actually, 13.5 g/cm³ == 13,500 kg/m³ and DF uses kg/m³.  Lead is indeed lower than mercury, as is silver.  And yes, I really have looked up the solid density of waaaaaaaaaaaay too many things because of DF.

Speaking of which, anyone want some Saguaro wood?  I still have a whole box of it from when I determined that its density was about 430 kg/m³ ...

[G-Flex]

I think mercury can work well with alchemy workshops or as something carried on hand for assassination via poisoning food and such.

This isn't true. It's a common misconception that elemental, metallic mercury is the kind of thing that you can assassinate something with.

For one, elemental mercury doesn't bioaccumulate the way that certain mercury compounds do. In modern times, for instance, when you hear about mercury in fish, it's mostly methylmercury, which is extremely dangerous in part because it absorbs easily through the digestive tract and accumulates in the body very well and isn't easily eliminated; organic mercury compounds like that are probably the most dangerous form.

Eating liquid mercury, on the other hand, isn't likely to do much to you at all (even, say, a spoonful of it) because mercury in that form does not absorb well via the digestive tract. Really, the problem is mercury vapor. If you want to really kill someone with mercury, just have them work in a cinnabar mine.

Inorganic mercury compounds also tend to absorb much better through the GI tract than elemental mercury does, because the mercury ions are more water-soluble... including the Mercury(II) ions in cinnabar. So you're better off poisoning someone with crushed cinnabar than with extracted, isolated mercury.

[Loud Whispers]

You're quite right, A shallow drowning pool of mercury probably wouldn't have drowning as the main cause of death. I just like the mental image of a bunch of corpses lying face-down, half submerged in a shimmering pool of the mercury.

Of course, my mercury drowning pool would be used more for aesthetic reasons rather than defensive, likely the centerpiece to some kind of shrine or whatnot. Although in terms of defense, I think a generic evil villain trapdoor-leading-to- crocodile-infested-pit trap would be fun to put together. Though I might have to substitute capybaras instead, considering I've never had much luck finding the scaly buggers.

They can't float to the surface, if there is NO surface, i.e. 7/7 with a roof above their heads. Better yet, have this underneath your dining room, with a glass block floor.

Dorf entertainment, look at the corpses flowing down the pretty mercury river.

*Or you know, pump mercury everywhere to devastate the world ecosystem. Bai bai elves.

[Starver]

Actually, 13.5 g/cm³ == 13,500 kg/m³ and DF uses kg/m³.

Yeah, my brain fell over.  I had in mind I was dealing with cubic decimenters (i.e. litres, and a thousandth of a cubic metre) instead of cubic centimetres (1000th of a litre, 1,000,000th of a m³).  So when I mentally inspected the orders of magnitude involved, I saw 10³==1000, rather than 100³<>1000.

(Though with g/litre == kg/m³, this means water is 1000g (a kilogramme) in a litre, or 1000kg (a tonne) in a cubic metre.  Equally, between the two, giving or taking the same factor as between the this handy benchmark and that standard palladium weight, or whatever it is. )


Not modded DF as far as densities are concerned.  Not even looked at that part of the raws, for quite a while, I was just looking at RL.

[Uristocrat]

Actually, 13.5 g/cm³ == 13,500 kg/m³ and DF uses kg/m³.

Yeah, my brain fell over.  I had in mind I was dealing with cubic decimenters (i.e. litres, and a thousandth of a cubic metre) instead of cubic centimetres (1000th of a litre, 1,000,000th of a m³).  So when I mentally inspected the orders of magnitude involved, I saw 10³==1000, rather than 100³<>1000.

No worries.  I'm just way too familiar with that because of the mod I made where I researched all kinds of material properties and tried to make them as accurate as I could.  I had to convert g/cm³ (which almost all sources use) into kg/m³ (which DF uses, probably because it's an integer) about a zillion times.  So I don't even have to think about it any more, I just know to multiply by 1000.

And even though this is an old idea, I still have fun reading all the scientific (and !!scientific!!) things people post about mercury whenever this sort of topic comes up

[GreatWyrmGold]

Mercury seems heavily anachronistic, seeing as the tech cap is ~1400s.