This little mod adds one somewhat rare plant and the needed reactions to make a weaker variety of steel out of dracoroot thread or cloth.

You still need coal and iron, and the plant only grows in the dry tropical areas and sandy deserts. The cloth and thread can be imported from civs that have matching biomes but it is rather expensive. You currently cannot use completed products (ie. Dracoroot trousers) in the reaction. I'm waiting for a way to do it without spamming the smelter list.

Should be backwards compatible to all of the z-level DF versions 38a and older. To install simply unpack into your raw/objects folder. It will require a world regen.
Free to use, edit, whatever you want. Some credit would be appreciated but is not required.