This mod started off with my making several small modifications to the RAWs for myself. First I read about Curponickel, AKA White Copper, AKA plausibly orichalium (one of the modern most likely candidates for the Greek-roman material), This led to the addition of several other bits, which led to a lot of changes to my RAWs. Generally speaking, my aim is simple. How to improve the game and give more options, without changing the feel of the game. It should still be the same old dwarf fortress - the same workshops, and the same Iron/bronze = medium grade, steel = second best, as an example. However... there are gaps to fill and options to add. As well as bits of logic to add in. For example - Uranium is great for blunt weapons and plate armor... though expect your dwarf to be exhausted. (and possibly sterile? I kid, Uranium armor will only probably give Urist McRadioactive skin cancer after five years of goblin bashing)

Regardless, as a direct summary, my goal with Orichalium is to add as much content as possible, while retaining DF's feel. I use Obsidian as a graphics tileset thanks greatly to it preserving the overall feel I get from the game, while being consistent and letting you tell what everything is - giving both a visual appeal and functional upgrade. This mod will be updated as time and interest allow, and as things are right now I need input and further ideas more than anything else. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the mod!





List of updates and changes from vanilla:
New glazes - Glaze ceramics with Galena, Talc, Hematite, Pitchblende, and Cobalt for more colors, choices, and greater value.
More porcelain - Microcline and Orthoclase, as members of the Feldspar family, they get to be used for porcelain making as well. Go crazy with your ceramics industry.
More metals - Cobalt becomes useful as an iron-grade metal able to be smelted, Cupronickel is an alloy of copper and nickel, superior to iron and bronze, closer to steel in strength. You can now get antimony from stibnite and make solder alloy. Lastly you can now get natural Uranium out of Pitchblende for heavy armor and weapons. Say hello to Urist McRadioactive the Goblin Splatter. Also, strengthen bronze and steel with new alloys utilizing arsenic, lead and molybendium. Even forge a sword directly from a meteorite.**
More metal uses: Make warhammers out of electrum, short swords out of brass, and bolts out of lead... or pretty much any metal for bolts really.
Lead use - Aside from ammunition now being available, you may now use lead to make leaded crystal glass*
Peat - You can now use it as fuel or turn it into earthenware
Athracite - metamorphic layer fuel source, of greater purity than other forms of coal.
Quarry bushes - Also now able to be burned into fuel.
New deep plants - more of a reason to dig deep and access the third cavern. Digger weed is edible rawand is available year-round and more valuable than standard foods with the option to make flour, and Silkcap makes high quality (and climate controlled) cloth, also available year-round.
New weapons - dwarves get access to flails and morningstars, humans get rapiers and throwing knives, and savage races get clubs. Big clubs, along with warclubs** and shortspears**. Elves get longbows to beef up their archery.** Also, for those with access to sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal, and normal metals, you may now make gunpowder and simple hand-cannons.
New Armor - for those who like driving their dwarves to exhaustion, you now get the options of double chainmail for torsos and leggings, as well as heavy plate for your torso, chain coifs for added protection for your head, and great helms for protecting those skulls. (Note: chain coifs will not fit under a standard helm, but will under a great helm or cap.) Also, kite shields, heavy gauntlets, and heavy plate boots. Overall, the new armor gives you the ability if you have a lot of metal and a strong enough dwarf, to completely outclass the formerly common armor setups in protection, with obvious drawbacks.
More Fish - get tired of running out of fish quickly? Well I do, so their populations got boosted up by... a lot.
Chert as flint - an extra source for sharp rocks for use in a rock short sword.
Glass swords - like obsidian, but with regular glass instead. Less sharp, but significantly easier to obtain on many maps.
Short sword change - gave it a thinner tip for getting through armor easier.
Borax - use it as flux.
New trees: Ironwood, found in the lower caverns, has the density of iron and can take an edge. Training sword? It becomes a handy anti-elf weapon if it's made out of ironwood. Bolts from Ironwood are also rather nice. Steeloak is the aboveground version of Ironwood, and can be found in broadleaf forests. And finally you have Glowspore**, a deep cavern green-glowy tree similar in material properties to featherwood.
Unlimited steel (for the patient); Extract iron from red sand, and compress white sand into lime(stone, for now). Compress them into blocks at a screw press, take the lime-rich white sand block and refine it into a lime(stone) boulder at a smelter. Then for iron sand, you need flux in order to get the iron itself out of the sand. Yes, this process takes 3 flux stones to get a single bar of steel. But hey, it's unlimited... if time / fuel consuming.
refine
Beds.. from a lot more sources; Cloth, metal, glass, stone, even large gems!
Turn silicate based boulders into sand, in case your embark has none.... or you're just looking for creative ways to break down a good chunk of your boulder stockpile.
Turn vermin remains to ash, and with larger corpses, you can let your doctors practice their skills before cremating the bodies.
Use nethercap wood to create Nether-iron (a fixed temperature metal) and nethercrete items (netherkrete is pykrete made from nethercap dust.)**
With enough resources and a bit of prayer, you can create a divine or demonic forge to create divine metallic items - at the whims of the powers which take your dwarves, and not without sacrifice.**


* Presently unable to make a new crystal type for this production, thus, the reaction simply makes rock crystals. The value isn't different, however it is somewhat immersion breaking to a degree.
** New in update


The next future release will likely include new races - feel free to give me more input on things that you'd like to see.

Of note, I need to thank Putnam for the Materials Plus minor mod - while most of it does not fit my intentions with my mod, I am using it to cross check my own calculations (I tend to round up more it seems, but the discrepancies are within 2% of Putnam's values) And for materials I had no clue on exacts for (antimony, uranium) I am using Putnam's calculations for. I will also be using said calculations for future additions. - I just wanted to get out version 0.1.0 for some general opinions from others where to go from here.

I also need to thank both Putnam and Meph for their assistance with my questions through getting this far in making this mod. Especially Meph, you've been awesome putting up with my awkwardness and newbieness with a lot of the reactions.

Please note, I use and created this mod using the Obsidian tileset - though as things are a bit buggy still with the new version of dwarf fortress, not everything will look nice yet.

Naming conventions for the mods as I intend to use it for the curious:

1st number: determines the version the mod is made for, ex 1.x.x will be for DF 2012
2nd number: Major revisions / large content additions.
3rd number: Small content additions / bugfixes / individual changes to existing RAWs.


Old updates:
1.2.0

New additions:

Meteors added as a rare single tile ore in any sedimentary layer. May be forged directly into a longsword, superior to Molybendium steel but inferior to Adamantine. It is also rather expensive at more than three times the value of gold, though this again still pales in comparison to Adamantine. And if smelted, you only get iron and a chance of some minor metals, leaving it rather limited in scope aside the rare sword. (This was done as balancing, I considered adding in "star steel" as a smelted alloy, but I felt that such would largely break the feel and usefulness of traditional steel.)

Boulders - to - sand as a reaction is now in, get four bags of yellow sand per silicate stone.

Make breastplates, helms, and greaves from wood. Have fun going psuedo-elf... or putting that ironwood/steeloak to work to some degree.

Glass swords: Short swords with green glass + 1 unit of wood, or long swords with crystal glass + 1 unit of wood. I felt it would fall under the same lines as obsidian, just with that extra option, and giving crystal glass more of a unique use. (also given it is less brittle than other traditional glass, it makes sense that it could be used on a larger blade... somewhat.)

New tree: Glowspore. Think of it like an underground, green-glowy version of featherwood.

Beds: Now make beds out of metal bars, stone, glass, and even those large gems lying around, provided you have cloth on hand. Heck, if you've got a pile of 10 cloth sitting by, you can simply make a futon for your dwarves. Dwarven comfort levels as well as bedroom-value levels are easier to attain now!

Medical training building: Have a bunch of corpses lying around, and a largely untrained medical staff? Worry no more, as with a bit of fuel you can train your doctors in their ways, and turn those extra goblins into ash.

Cremate remains: Pulled straight from the wiki, burn vermin remains and get ash as a result. Great for both your potash/lye needs and your OCD for cleanliness. Also probably will help your FPS a bit in an old fort with a lot of cats.



Tweaks:

Ironwood now has the same material properties as steeloak, making it a deep cavern analog and equally effective.

Dwarves are given more tools to make. Because I find it weird for dwarves to butcher and bone animals without the proper knives.

Civilized races are now more likely to have settlements along a river in world gen. Practical reasons should be obvious.

Made Elf ethics more hateable than they were already.

Deer, foxes, and raccoons are now common dwarven pets. Why? Because with everything else dwarves have in their domesticated animals, it seems weird that they wouldn't be. Enjoy your deer-milk and war foxes.

Bugfixes:

Removed stone to dyes as the reaction would not work no matter what I tried. If I or anyone else figure out a way to fix it in the future, but for the moment I have pulled it from the mod for the sake of sanity.

Arsenic is now properly smelted from Realgar.

Hand-cannons should no longer be carried by migrants with no ammo. They are now instead produced at a craftsdwarf workshop with one metal bar and one unit of wood.


1.2.1:
Minor bugfixes (name of glowspore, and a few others). Modified the material requirements for beds due to personal concerns of gem / metal beds being too easy to make. Metal beds may now also be chosen from a list, and the metals for gem beds now exclude metals on the low and those on the high end of worth. Instead you'll use bars of iron/bronze/cobalt/etc. Also added in gunmetal as an alloy; 8 copper bars + 1 zinc bar + 1 tin bar + 1 lead bar = 10 gunmetal bars.