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 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. Therefore, you should do all your melting at one smelter.

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.

Melting objects nets you fewer bars of metal than were required to make them, although for some objects this loss is much greater than for others. All furniture (including anvils and cages, available from traders) requires three bars to produce and produce exactly one bar when melted. Goblets, which are produced in threes, have an individual item size of two, meaning you can recover 60% of the metal used to make them. Leggings have the best recovery rate of armor items, requiring one bar to make and producing 0.5 bars when melted. Battle axes and picks have the best recovery rate of dwarf-manufacturable weapons, returning 0.4 bars each. Buckets and chains have a recovery rate of 0.5 bars. A stack of 25 metal bolts produces 0.3 bars.