40d Talk:Rock crystal

Raw vs Cut

It appears that cut rock crystals can not be used for glassmaking. --Alpha 01:39, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Try the job manager. Won't work other wise, I think. REad that somewhere.--Zchris13 02:03, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Rarity

Despite being available within all stone types, these are not guaranteed to be available in every embark location. Searching my current fort's location in a revealed copy, I was unable to locate a single rock crystal cluster, even though a few other "all stone" gems (such as pipe opal and milk opal) could be located in reasonable quantities. --Quietust 15:56, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Couldn't prove it from the game-code, but from observation it ~seems~ that the game decides on a "common" type of gem in an area and then goes with that. When you have rock crystals, they tend to be found in multiple small pockets (still not particularly easy to find, but they're there.) But it's not uncommon at all to have zero rock crystals on an otherwise diverse map.--Albedo 20:39, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I've been doing some deep research into 40d, and I've discovered exactly how mineral inclusions are generated - in particular, each layer contains 5-9 small clusters, each large cluster contains 1-3 small clusters, and each vein contains 1-2 small clusters. Most of those small clusters are either gems or insignificant stones like hornblende, so rock crystals have a very low chance of actually being picked. Furthermore, the game tracks how often each mineral is selected in order to ensure that they're all equally represented, but metal ores and otherwise economic stones are exempt from this check - marking rock crystals as a metal ore (ideally something very common like COPPER) or giving them a REACTION_CLASS (and a reaction which references it) appears to make them about 10 times as common as they would be otherwise. For what it's worth, this technique does not appear to work in version 0.47.05. --Quietust (talk) 14:10, 21 August 2021 (UTC)