| Description | You can't use charcoal at the forge. I'm not complaining about this because Wikipedia says you can, but because it makes no sense. If charcoal is good enough to melt metal the first time, it should be good time to melt the same metal a second time. Also, the game implies that charcoal and coke are equivalent by calling both of them "refined coal". Also, needing to use coke as fuel for making all metal items makes coal many times more important than flux stone, yet there is no option for coal in the site finder. The unfortunate player who doesn't have any coal at his embark site is crippled, having to request coal and then wait for the dwarven caravan to show up a second time before he can start making any weapons, armor, or tools at the forge.
Actually, even if you are willing to wait for the caravan to bring coal and/or coke, it doesn't really help because it doesn't bring much (in my experience, never more than a single piece of each), and you'll probably have magma forges within a few years anyway, even if the magma is 150 Z-levels deep underground and you insist on building a pump stack instead of just building the forge deep underground.
Just in case somebody tells me I'm mistaken about this, I'm 100% sure that I had 3 non-forbidden, stockpiled, non-tasked bars of charcoal. If you actually can use charcoal, then it would have to be one of those weird bugs where you have to have a non-stockpiled piece. But that seems unlikely considering that all those bugs only affect adding tasks to the building's list, while this problem occurs when a dwarf tries to accept the task. |