40d:Melt item

You can melt items at a smelter to recover some or all of the metal they are made of.

Choosing What to Melt

You can designate metal items for melting directly from the Stocks page and the Look interface.

You can also select metal items for melting from any interface that allows you to view the object's description screen. Simply type m to mark the object for melting. To bring up a individual object description screen when the object is:

• On the ground: Type k, scroll to the object, select it from the list, and type Enter.
• In a workshop: Type t, highlight the workshop, select the object from the list, and type Enter.
• Held by a dwarf: Type v, highlight the dwarf, type {k|i}} to show his inventory, select the object from the list, and type Enter.
• Inside another object: Display the container's object description screen, navigate to the specific object you wish to see, and type Enter.
• In the stocks menu: Type z, hit right-direction a few times to select "stocks" and press return. Scroll to the type of object you wish to melt, type Tab to show individual items (You have to have an exact number or this won't work. See Bookkeeper for how to get this.), scroll to the specific object, and type v to view.

Melting the Items

Items designated to be melted will be left alone until you queue a "Melt a metal object" job at a Smelter or its magma variant. Melting down an object requires the Furnace Operator labour.

Yield

For every unit of "material size" an item has, 1/10th of a bar of that item's metal type will be recovered. These fractional bars are "stored" at each smelter; when a full bar's worth of one type of metal has been melted, one bar will be produced.

For instance, plate mail has a material size of 9, and melting one bronze suit will produce 0.9 bars of bronze. If you then melt another bronze suit, one bronze bar will be produced, with 0.8 bars remaining in the smelter. If, however, you melt one suit at each of two smelters, no bars will be produced; each smelter will have 0.9 bronze bars stored up.

More research is needed on material size before generalizations can be made about recovery ratios from metal items. However, many items require about one metal bar for every three units of material size, so for now, a recovery ratio of 30% is a good rule of thumb (0.3 metal bars recovered from each metal bar used in manufacture).

Melting equipment left over from sieges can still be an abundant source of metal, although captured weapons may be best used in weapon traps.