PlaneShift

IMHO all the various "melt down" transforms should be exclusively in Working with Stock and Working with Rare Stock as appropriate, requiring minimal skill in Metallurgy only. Whether or not one can make the item should be irrelevant, as any fool can dump metal parts in a forge. In theory, any weapon or armor item could be melted down, the wood / leather bits destroyed, resulting in a stack of molten metal of reasonable quantity. Rules department would have to take care to avoid an exploit of sorts by which players could buy cheap heavy armor from a merchant and turn it into a stack of steel without having to do any mining or smelting.

I was doing some thinking out loud earlier and I'd like to see a cross-discipline book with all kinds of reclamation transforms which would include unwinding leather handles into strings, shield cores to carved blocks of wood and whatnot. It could include alchemical formula for separating alloys into base metals losing any organic components or coal. A little beyond the scope of the original idea of course.

Sounds great!

With regard to the mentioned exploit: The resulting amount of steel could be tuned by the quality of the original item. Thus only a Q300 item would return all the steel put into it for the making. An NPC-bought Q50 would only return 16% of the original amount of material. That would also suit nicely from an RP-perspective, since worn-down items have lost material.

Sorry but I disagree with cutting the volume like that. From the original raw material inputs to make the item, there is already some loss in making the item if you compare the respective weights. There could be some additional very small loss in reclamation, but not 84%. Quality would be driven by the player skill, with a minor factor of the quality of the original item, because good metallurgists would still make good ingots from really good steel, and novices not so much, but given a Q50 piece you shouldn't expect Q300 steel on the first casting regardless of skill.

Remember, this wouldn't give you 25K tria worth of steel from a 25K suit of armor. Steel stock is worth much less by weight given same quality. A large part of the value in an armor piece is the labor, and that's lost in reclamation.

–Example numbers from my arm pit…didn't look up any actual weights– So if the armor piece weighs 3kg, you'd get roughly that in steel (assuming the part is all steel in composition), rounded down to nearest ingot. It may have taken 5kg of iron and coal to make the piece originally.

While I still think care should be taken to avoid an exploit, I'm not convinced anyone cares that much about economy balance at this point.