40d:Smelting

Building and using a Smelter

Metal bars you produced with a smelter are usable in a wide variety of goods, and fuel is usable in a smelter, metalsmith's forge, kiln, or glass furnace.

To build a smelter you need to have a dwarf with the building designer skill, a Fire-safe material and the appropriate craftsdwarf. You place a smelter building using the keyboard commands b-e-s, after which your architect dwarf designs it and then your craftsdwarf builds it.

Using a smelter requires a dwarf with the furnace operator skill and one unit of fuel. You require ore to make a metal bar, or bituminous coal or lignite to make coke. Just like any other building you give a smelter a task using q.

Please note that you have to already have a fuel source in order to make fuel in a smelter, so you either have to bring a unit of fuel or wood with your expedition, have a wood cutter, trade for fuel, or use a wood burner to make charcoal.

If your map has a magma vent or pipe, either visible from the start or one that you have tunneled into, you can instead use a magma smelter, built using the keyboard commands b-e-l. The requirements for building it are the same as for a regular smelter, but for it to function, there must be open space under one of the eight edge tiles(the center is the only tile that cannot be open space), and on the Z-level beneath, there must be magma in that open space, to a depth of at least 4/7. Magma does not currently obey pressure and seek its own level, so tapping a magma pipe from the lowest available Z-level will not cause all the magma above it to rush into the fortress through the opening in the smelter. If there is sufficient magma under the smelter, the circle in the impassable tile at the top middle of the smelter will be red; if not, it will be grey. There does not need to be magma present when the smelter is built, but the channel must be dug in advance, because this cannot be done when the building is already in place.

The magma channel can be under the impassable tile, but it does not need to be. Placing it there may help prevent magma-dwelling creatures from actually seeing any dwarves that may be working in the smelter.

The critical advantage of a magma smelter is that it requires no fuel, except coke or charcoal will still be used in the production of pig iron and steel.

Smelting Ore Results

All ores smelted alone have a % chance of turning into a certain kind of bar. The following table shows those chances.

Ore	Iron	Gold	Silver	Copper	Nickel	Zinc	Platinum	Tin	Bismuth	Lead	Aluminum	Adamantine
Hematite	100%
Limonite	100%
Magnetite	100%
Garnierite					100%
Platinum nuggets							100%
Gold nuggets		100%
Silver nuggets			100%
Horn silver			100%
Galena			50%							100%
Tetrahedrite			20%	100%
Copper nuggets				100%
Malachite				100%
Sphalerite						100%
Cassiterite								100%
Bismuthinite									100%
Aluminum											100%
Adamantine strands												100%

Note that smelting galena often produces only lead, which is mostly used in producing lay pewter. Additionally, smelting Adamantine strands results in wafers, which are needed in greater quantities than bars when creating items.

Coke Smelting

Please note that wood is not actually smelted, it is burned in the wood furnace. It is not called coke when burned, it is called charcoal.

• Bituminous coal smelts into 3 coke
• Lignite smelts into 2 coke
• Wood burns into 1 charcoal

Flux

Flux is that stuff you use to get the impurities out of steel. There are 5 kinds of flux: Calcite, limestone, dolomite, chalk, marble. All function the same way so if you see flux in a recipe, any will do.

Alloys

There are 2 sets of recipes for alloys. The first set use only ore while the second set use only bars. You cannot mix the two.

Recipes using Ore

Please note that when copper or silver ore is needed, any type of ore that produces copper bars or silver bars may be used. This means that you can actually make billon bars out of just tetrahedrite.

Ingredient 1	Ingredient 2	Output
Copper ore	Cassiterite	Bronze bars[2]
Copper ore	Sphalerite	Brass bars[2]
Gold nuggets	Silver ore	Electrum bars[2]
Copper ore	Cassiterite[3]	Fine pewter bars[4]
Copper ore	Cassiterite[2]	Trifle pewter bars[3]
Silver ore	Copper ore	Billon bars[2]

Recipes using Bars

The following are all the recipes when smelting bars at the smelter.

Ingredient 1	Ingredient 2	Ingredient 3	Ingredient 4	Output
Copper bars	Tin bars			Bronze bars [2]
Copper bars	Zinc bars			Brass bars [2]
Iron bars	Coke*	Flux		Pig iron bars
Iron bar	Pig iron bars	Coke*	Flux	Steel bars [2]
Gold bars	Silver bars			Electrum bars [2]
Copper bars	Tin bars [3]			Fine Pewter bars [4]
Copper bars	Tin bars [2]			Trifle pewter bars [3]
Copper bars	Tin bars [2]	Lead bars		Lay pewter bars [4]
Copper bar	Nickel bars [2]	Zinc bars		Nickel silver bars [4]
Silver bars	Copper bars			Billon bars
Silver bars [3]	Copper bars			Sterling silver bars [4]
Gold bars	Silver bars	Copper bars [2]		Black bronze bars [4]
Gold bars [3]	Copper bars			Rose gold bars [4]
Copper bars [2]	Tin bars	Bismuth bars		Bismuth bronze bars [4]

• The coke used as a reagent for making pig iron and steel bars also counts as the fuel needed by a normal smelter.

Note: Every recipe that is not used in steel making (except electrum) requires some copper. If you want to have a variety of metals in your fortress, you will want to conserve this resource.

A spreadsheet listing these recipes can be found at the following link. Work is being done currently to allow a person to input how much ore and bars he has, and the sheet will tell him how many of what kinds of metals he can make. Both Excel and Open Office formats are included: http://mkv25.net/showcase/df/Ore%20Smelting%20Chart.zip --Chthon 10:11, 3 November 2007 (EDT)