Alternate iron gathering methods

[caethan]

Look into using a flora file to generate iron "plants" for raw iron gathering.

[mlangsdorf]

So I don't know if you ever did this research, but I did, and the results are weird. Here's the plant definition I'm using:

.Bog Iron. (10) [mushroom] [NAME:Bog Iron] [TILEGFX:shr-bogiron] [SIZE:L] [SPROUT:1] [MATURE:90] [WITHER:10] [REGION: eastern western northern southern] [TERRAIN:river open_mire pine_mire] [SYMBIOSIS:water] [POPULATION:10] [FREQUENCY:10] [COMMONNESS:10] [HERB_KNOWN:all] [EFFECT_RAW:deadly_poisonous]

This does more or less what I want: about 1 in 10 river or mire tiles has a "crop" of bog irons, which is usually 4-5 instances next to a bit of water. Each one harvests at 0.4 lbs. A crop of bog iron sprouts in January, but won't be available for harvest for 90 days, so there's a natural mechanism for it being too cold to dig into the turf to get to stuff. So that part works fine.

There are a lot downsides:

• bog iron is a food, and will rot. In the short term, that means that different bog irons collected at different times won't stack with each other.
• bog iron is a mushroom, and can be used in recipes, so you can create dry bog iron, for instance.
• bog iron is relatively quick to pick, and can be picked by hand.
• it looks like you can reharvest the same bog iron tile within a month, though I haven't experimented to be sure.

Altogether, I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

[caethan]

Thanks for looking into it. My idea was to mod it as a root plant instead of as a mushroom:

• That removes the reharvesting issue, as it will only respawn the next year instead of after a month or so with mushrooms.
• Picking by hand quickly doesn't strike me as a huge problem; I'd rather have the difficult part of gathering iron ore being finding the stuff instead of digging it up.
• Still usable in recipes, specifically as a vegetable. Not fantastic, but OK.
• Roots rot very slowly - I don't think I've ever seen my turnips go bad.

I may give iron roots a bit of a try and see what I think of them.

[caethan]

Yeah, tested with this:

.Iron slick. (1) [root] [NAME:Bog iron] [TILEGFX:flo-bogiron] [SIZE:L] [SPROUT:1] [MATURE:1] [WITHER:10] [REGION:eastern western northern southern] [TERRAIN:open_mire pine_mire wetland] [ROOT_USE:cooked] [SYMBIOSIS:water] [EFFECT_RAW:deadly_poisonous] [POPULATION:15] [FREQUENCY:40] [COMMONNESS:100] [HERB_KNOWN:all]

Found this neat page about bog iron smelting: http://www.medievalhistories.com/smelting-iron-viking-way/

My thought was to harvest them as roots, then add a crushing stage to the smelting process to easily transform the bog iron into a long-term storable form.