Cat Gold as Early Metal

[Kubius]

Cat gold, right now, is just a terrible curio you can get by chipping stone. Low LP gain and huge study time means you might as well just toss it out and keep chipping the more valuable stone instead.

My idea is that cat gold could be used as a very low grade ore to facilitate the start of mines.

Those tiny chunks aren't enough to make anything, so melting down 5 cat gold pieces into a cat gold nugget in a kiln (up to 5 chunks per load) would seem like a functional and low tech method to get it to a useable state.

I believe this would solve the catch-22 of needing to mine unsafely to mine safely.

[dvsfx92]

I agree, you should atleast be able to use it with the 'lay gold' option it does have gold in the name and appear to be yellowish. Then you have an option to use it as an aesthetic when paving instead of just tossing it

[DDDsDD999]

I believe this would solve the catch-22 of needing to mine unsafely to mine safely.

Mine in caves. Apparently there's a 1% chance of causing a cave-in, but I think it's just poor mining, seeing how jorb says there's no chance involved with cave-ins.

[dagrimreefah]

Too bad cat gold, or pyrite, is not a metal. Well, it DOES usually contain iron. It is a mineral.

[SuperNoob]

Too bad cat gold, or pyrite, is not a metal. Well, it DOES usually contain iron. It is a mineral.

its an iron sulfate, so its iron based...it can be a good source of iron if you heat it properly. the problem of course would be heating it properly(couldn't be done in a kiln). then again we have lots of stuff in game that isn't all that realistic, so why not 1 more that can really add to the game and give something useless an actual use?

[tremlingrendel]

-1 to changing the function of Cat Gold.

Personally, I think Cat Gold, as the gag-curio it is, is appropriately assigned to it's use as a "bad curiosity".

But low-quality (we're talking q1-5 here, stuff you would only use for supports) starter metals on the surface from high-level foraging, very small digging-nodes on mountains, and the 1/10000 chance find in stone chipping still sounds like a reasonable idea to me, only so we have more cheap low-quality metal to use in objects that are unaffected by quality values, and so newer hearthlings potentially have more valuables to offer a community (whether by their own choice or not).

However, I also understand that the mining system itself is setup to encourage hearthlings to acquire metals from others or to take the risk with the reward of chipping away at edges and getting toughened up before attempting such, and that it still has a lot of work to be done (among everything else in H&H).

[nokocola]

Too bad cat gold, or pyrite, is not a metal. Well, it DOES usually contain iron. It is a mineral.

Actually, pyrite is not cat gold. It's nick name is actually "fool's gold". The name "cat gold" most commonly refers to the mica group of sheet silicate minerals.

Edit: My bad. The nick name "cat gold" isn't specific to mica groups. However, it's a nick name for a large group of minerals that don't have any specific practical uses.

[dagrimreefah]

However, it's a nick name for a large group of minerals that don't have any specific practical uses.

Yes, commonly referring to pyrite. So yes, cat's gold is commonly used as a nickname for pyrite, as well as the name "fool's gold".



Taken from http://www.crystalvaults.com/crystal-encyclopedia/pyrite

You are partially right, though. It depends on the region where it is found on how it is referred to. In the west, it is more commonly referred to as fool's gold. But:

Actually, pyrite is not cat gold.

That statement is just flat-out wrong.

[miraclew]

A forageable that could be use as alt input for nuggets (but only for mine supports) wouldn't be a bad idea, like some sort of surface metal on mountain biomes. I found several untouched caves early on, so metal was never a problem for me, but I could see a late joiner in the world having a lot of difficulty finding any open caves to get their metal supply started.

[HarryDresden]

Here's a solution; Bog/Swamp iron. Finding the equivalent of nuggets in Swamps/Fishing.