Has it any know use besides crafting the Chalcoelectronic Ring Electrum must be the most useless ingot in game!
A silver ingot's worth 380, gold's at 450, and electrum's at 400, so you don't even get more money for making electrum rather than selling the gold and silver directly (which was pretty much the only use of the stuff in DF)!
I added a craftable electrum ring for the next patch. Will think about this a bit and see if I can come up with some more fun to be had using electrum.
Copper + Tin = Bronze. Bronze makes fairly decent equipment all around. Not as good as Steel, of course, but I like dumping all my Bronze into making Cruelly Barbed Bronze Bolts, myself. The Bronze weapons are actually pretty good starter weapons, especially when Steel is at a premium on the first few floors.
Yeah I am playing tinker + smith and I am on the third floor and haven't seen 1 steel ingot (or chalk) yet. Ah well it'll come, I hope.
it does help undoubtedly, but they're not exactly littering the floors as in, no pearls either so far
A good help for generating pearls is Alchemy with its transmute gem ability -- granted, it has a 20 turn cooldown, and is unpredictable. But if you keep at it, you'll have a black pearl eventually.
Platinum is another one. I remember having about 20 ingots on some random character with smithing and yet, there were either 0 or 1 recipes that required it. I realize that Platinum is "expensive" because it looks like Silver and is rarer than Gold and isn't a particularly durable metal, but I would have thought that some of the higher-end armor recipes - especially the ones that are part of a "chain" - would have required an ingot or two. You know, like "Moste Uber Plate Mail = Plate Mail + 2x Gold Ingot + 3x Platinum Ingot + Level 5 Smithing". The excuse could be that it hold enchantments particularly well, so it's used in a lot of high-end, magical, artifact-y gear.
You have seen the Serpentine Plate armor, right? Requires full plate + silver + gold + platinum + level 5 smithing. You can't require more than four different ingredients in a recipe due to how the crafting system currently works.
Platinum can be very useful, depending on your build -- but you'll usually end up with more than you need unless you keep making the Emerald Amulet hoping you'll get something that's actually 'good' (so far, I've gotten some 'serviceable' results, but nothing good enough to last me to level 5 or 6 or so). But yes, there are other recipes that require it as well (In addition to Serpentine Plate, which is the best pure melee-build plate you can craft, and the Emerald Amulet, there's also The Mana Torus (a good caster ring), and The Flail of Pleiades (a really excellent artifact-level mace-type weapon). I'm not aware of any other recipes that CURRENTLY require platinum, but those alone makes platinum valuable to have, at least for some builds.
You still find far more than you can "spend", generally. I'd still like to see it in more high-end recipes of all sorts, even if it's only 1-2 ingots.
