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.

If the item is designated for melting and forbidden then the item will not be melted.

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, and consumes a fuel unit (for the non-magma smelter).

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 the specific smelter where the item was melted; 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, at least for each different type of metal or alloy melted.

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. Some items are available cheap from traders, or are otherwise refuse, so melting is a distinct option. An entire suit of chain armor, including shield, consumes 7 bars to make - melted (and with high boots) it yields only 2.1.

If training different metalsmithing skills and hoping to regain as much metal as possible, some items are better than others. The skill to be trained in the chart below is trained at a forge; melting items at a smelter only raises the Furnace Operator skill. When using a produce/melt loop to train up a skill for a minimum metal loss, the following items work best:

Item Melted	% Returned	Skill
enormous corkscrews, giant axe blades, menacing spikes	50%1	weaponsmithing
leggings	50%	armorsmithing
goblet	60% (2/10 each)2	metal crafting
chain	50%	metal crafting
bucket	50%	blacksmithing
Furniture3	33% (1 bar each)4	(not recommended for training)
bolts	.30%(+?)5	(difficult to use for training)

Notes:

1) Some other weapons have a better return/weapon, but cannot be manufactured by dwarves, negating their value for training purposes.

2) Goblets are produced in threes, and have an individual item size of 2; 2/10 x 3 = 60% recovery/bar.

3) Includes cages and anvils, both of which are available from traders. Anvils will always be either iron or steel, while cages can be of copper, lead, nickel, tin, or zinc only.

4) Furniture takes 3 bars to create, and returns 1 bar for each item melted

5) A stack of 25 metal bolts produces 0.3 bars. However, 25 stacks of 1 MAY produce more. Since metal bolts will not be used for training, it's difficult to manipulate a stack into individual bolts, so this is not popular for training.^[Verify]