How can I prevent my dwarves from requesting Iridium during a strange mood?

In Dwarf Fortress, dwarves who are in a strange mood will normally request an entire class of items (stone, metal bars, cloth). However, they can also specifically ask for adamantine wafers. The Masterwork mod adds iridium, which can be specifically requested in the same manner as adamantine.

The problem is, any dwarf metalworker which goes into a strange mood asks for iridium, and uses that as the base material. This means that instead of getting artifact quality slademantine weapons, I'm getting artifact iridium weapons which are less than half as good. How can I prevent the dwarves from asking for iridium? I am familiar with modifying the raws, but have been unable to find any place where that is specified.


Solution 1:

There are two effects at work here:

Firstly, "moody" Dwarves can request specific metals instead of "any metal". When they do, it's always one of the metals which they have a preference for. If you have a Dwarf who likes Iridium, they will very likely ask for Iridium, no matter what raw changes you do.

Secondly, "metal wafers" are often taken in preference to anything else if they are available. In the base game, the only metal with the [WAFERS] tag is Adamantine; Masterwork (1.9.5, I didn't check the 2.alpha version) adds Iridium (in inorganic_mineral.txt) to that list. To fix this, locate the [INORGANIC:IRIDIUM] section near the bottom of the file and remove those two tags from it:

  • [WAFERS]
  • [STOCKPILE_THREAD_METAL]

Source: Dwarf Fortress Wiki Strange Mood: Demands and various DF forums discussions.