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[krisslanza]

The main thing I've learned about iron in my time within the realm of Dwarf Fortress is this:

You either have absolutely none of it whatsoever, or you have so much that you could use it to make everything in your fortress for the next couple decades. As far as I know, there is no middle ground.

Actually this... sounds fairly accurate. I either have so much iron that there's no point in using any possible copper (or even tin) on the embark. Or the rare embarks that have none. It's kind of bizarre really.

[acetech09]

It's because the 3 iron ores are abundant in their layer stones, but nowhere else. If you have one of their layer stones, you got a ton.

[khearn]

Here's an idea I picked up off the forums (maybe from Girlinhat?). I set up two magma forges, with one set so only those above novice can use it, and one set so only dabblers can use it. The dabbler forge is loaded up with 10 orders for copper bolts, all on repeat (this assumes I have lots of copper ore handy, which is usually the case). Then I take a bunch of otherwise unremarkable dwarves who don't have any moodable skills (haulers and cheesmakers and soldiers who have no other skills) and turn on weaponsmithing for all of them. When they have free time they'll head down to the forge a make low quality bolts (perfect for target use) and build up just a bit of weaponsmithing skill. when they get up to novice I turn the skill off (if I happen to notice - it's not a big deal either way since novices aren't allowed on either forge).

So if any of those dwarves gets hit with a non-possession/fell/macabre mood, they'll make a weapon and I'll have an instant legendary weaponsmith.

It's only practical if you have magma forges and an abundance of a weapon-grade material like copper or silver (or even iron if you want to divert some from steelmaking). But every fort has magma if you're willing to put in a minimal amount of effort, and it's rare to have a fort without a bunch of tetrahedrite or galena.

[Flare]

If you're really short on metals, I would suggest you use the exploitive process of melting that 15 bolt stack and getting back 1.5 bars worth of that metal. The only draw back and balancing factor is that melting things that give 0.1 bars per metal is an incredibly slow process. So much so that you probably need multiple firing rooms and multiple furnaces (even each with their own bar fraction count) just to break even in terms of time with this method.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Here's an idea I picked up off the forums (maybe from Girlinhat?). I set up two magma forges, with one set so only those above novice can use it, and one set so only dabblers can use it. The dabbler forge is loaded up with 10 orders for copper bolts, all on repeat (this assumes I have lots of copper ore handy, which is usually the case). Then I take a bunch of otherwise unremarkable dwarves who don't have any moodable skills (haulers and cheesmakers and soldiers who have no other skills) and turn on weaponsmithing for all of them. When they have free time they'll head down to the forge a make low quality bolts (perfect for target use) and build up just a bit of weaponsmithing skill. when they get up to novice I turn the skill off (if I happen to notice - it's not a big deal either way since novices aren't allowed on either forge).

So if any of those dwarves gets hit with a non-possession/fell/macabre mood, they'll make a weapon and I'll have an instant legendary weaponsmith.

It's only practical if you have magma forges and an abundance of a weapon-grade material like copper or silver (or even iron if you want to divert some from steelmaking). But every fort has magma if you're willing to put in a minimal amount of effort, and it's rare to have a fort without a bunch of tetrahedrite or galena.

I don't think that it's really practical, and it doesn't really save you a lot of metal, depending on how many dwarves is a "bunch" (if it's equal to the amount of unarmed dwarves that is needed to kill a single badger, it'll be quite a big bunch  ).

Consider that a mood bumps a skill to about Legendary+1, which is 20000 experience. If you train a dwarf from Dabbling, you only need 333 bars of metal. Since Novice requires only 500 experience (8 metal bars), you need to do it with much less then 41 dwarves to make it worth it (say, a "bunch" is 20 then, and needs 160 metal bars, for exactly half the cost of training from scratch).

Then you have the random chance that may or may not pick one of these 20 dwarves on the rare fey mood occasions (some of which will be possessions).

If you get a Weaponsmith migrant (pretty common), you have wasted a lot of metal, because he'll need even less effort to train.

So if you have plenty of useless metal (which is the case on most maps), you're better off just making a bunch of weapons with one dwarf (I'd recommend copper crossbows, since you'll get a lot of masterpieces very soon, which are actually useful). And if metal is very scarce, by the time you need a good Weaponsmith you'll probably melt enough goblinite to get 333 bars or whatever is needed to train the highest migrant Weaponsmith that you'll inevitably receive at that point.

[Sutremaine]

I think it's 334 jobs required. 333 x 60 = 19980. If you make trap weapons and melt them for half a bar, you should in theory need 167 bars so long as you remember which smelter has the half-a-bar.

167 bars -> 167 jobs -> 83 bars (0.5 in smelter)
83 bars -> 250 jobs -> 42 bars (0.5 in smelter)
42 bars -> 292 jobs -> 21 bars (0.5 in smelter)
21 bars -> 313 jobs -> 10 bars (0.5 + 0.5 in smelter)
11 bars -> 324 jobs -> 5 bars (0.5 in smelter)
5 bars -> 329 jobs -> 2 bars (0.5 + 0.5 in smelter)
3 bars -> 332 jobs -> 1 bar (0.5 in smelter)
1 bar -> 333 jobs -> 0 bars (0.5 + 0.5 in smelter)
1 bar -> 334 jobs -> 0 bars (0.5 in smelter)

In practice they'll make masterpieces that might or might not be meltable. If a dwarf makes ten masterpieces and you melt them all at once you're guaranteed a -1000 mood penalty. If you melt one you'll get a -100 mood penalty. If you then wait for the dwarf to recover their mood and melt another one, you might get a -100 penalty or a -111 penalty depending on whether the game counts currently existing masterpieces or total made masterpieces. Based on the lack of caring displayed by dwarves who get all their masterpiece meals dumped into the atomsmasher I lean towards the latter, but perhaps trading masterpieces is insurance against them being destroyed.

[khearn]

Here's an idea I picked up off the forums (maybe from Girlinhat?). I set up two magma forges, with one set so only those above novice can use it, and one set so only dabblers can use it. The dabbler forge is loaded up with 10 orders for copper bolts, all on repeat (this assumes I have lots of copper ore handy, which is usually the case). Then I take a bunch of otherwise unremarkable dwarves who don't have any moodable skills (haulers and cheesmakers and soldiers who have no other skills) and turn on weaponsmithing for all of them. When they have free time they'll head down to the forge a make low quality bolts (perfect for target use) and build up just a bit of weaponsmithing skill. when they get up to novice I turn the skill off (if I happen to notice - it's not a big deal either way since novices aren't allowed on either forge).

So if any of those dwarves gets hit with a non-possession/fell/macabre mood, they'll make a weapon and I'll have an instant legendary weaponsmith.

It's only practical if you have magma forges and an abundance of a weapon-grade material like copper or silver (or even iron if you want to divert some from steelmaking). But every fort has magma if you're willing to put in a minimal amount of effort, and it's rare to have a fort without a bunch of tetrahedrite or galena.

I don't think that it's really practical, and it doesn't really save you a lot of metal, depending on how many dwarves is a "bunch" (if it's equal to the amount of unarmed dwarves that is needed to kill a single badger, it'll be quite a big bunch  ).

Consider that a mood bumps a skill to about Legendary+1, which is 20000 experience. If you train a dwarf from Dabbling, you only need 333 bars of metal. Since Novice requires only 500 experience (8 metal bars), you need to do it with much less then 41 dwarves to make it worth it (say, a "bunch" is 20 then, and needs 160 metal bars, for exactly half the cost of training from scratch).

Then you have the random chance that may or may not pick one of these 20 dwarves on the rare fey mood occasions (some of which will be possessions).

If you get a Weaponsmith migrant (pretty common), you have wasted a lot of metal, because he'll need even less effort to train.

So if you have plenty of useless metal (which is the case on most maps), you're better off just making a bunch of weapons with one dwarf (I'd recommend copper crossbows, since you'll get a lot of masterpieces very soon, which are actually useful). And if metal is very scarce, by the time you need a good Weaponsmith you'll probably melt enough goblinite to get 333 bars or whatever is needed to train the highest migrant Weaponsmith that you'll inevitably receive at that point.

I never said it saved any metal. I only recommend it when you have more metal than that you know what to do with (which is pretty common). Yes, you can probably train up a weaponsmith on the same amount of metal. But those dwarves with no moodable skills are still candidates for moods. What would you rather they become, legendary bonecrafters or legendary weaponsmiths?

[Blue_Dwarf]

I never said it saved any metal. I only recommend it when you have more metal than that you know what to do with (which is pretty common). Yes, you can probably train up a weaponsmith on the same amount of metal. But those dwarves with no moodable skills are still candidates for moods. What would you rather they become, legendary bonecrafters or legendary weaponsmiths?

Well, I thought we were talking about training the one Weaponsmith that we desperately need, not secondary ones 

Your method certainly works if you want to make artifact weapons and stuff.

Technically, we don't actually need a fully trained Weaponsmith, unless the best materials are in really short supply. They start producing masterworks rather soon, and if the goal is to make at most 30 masterful weapons, a weaponsmith can do that by the time he hits Grand Master. Might as well let him use the best materials as soon as he is able to do that.

So yeah, training 40 Weaponsmiths to Novice is a pretty good idea.