How do mermaids have metallurgy if they can't use fire...

I always figured they just looted shipwrecks

A wizard did it.

This is the 8th time I recall this thread being made in the last 3 months. You had plenty of opportunities. The answer is "No, they'll never develop metallurgy on their own, they might realise it is possible from studying land dwellers, but it is only possible to smelt ore above water, *even with magic*, which means that any big, intelligent mermaid civilisation have to contest control over coastal villages and river inlets because they can't do jack shit otherwise. Like yeah they could trade too but inevitably someone will play hardball with them and they can't risk that, far better to crush the local militia and control the villages as mechanisms of their own state"

This is a viable way of crafting a tiny handful of high quality items very inefficiently from a given sample of meteoric iron.

Meteoric iron is INCREDIBLY rare, and much harder to find underwater, so no you can't have a metal age civilisation on the back of such a technique.

He's the son of Poseidon so his Golden Trident was probably made by Hephaestus or some cyclops.

>but it is only possible to smelt ore above water, *even with magic*
If magic can be used to literally extract the metal components from ores and meld them together into one shape, I don't see why weapons couldn't be made underwater using magic.

Underwater caves could work. Really though it wouldn't work at all because Merfolk couldn't have a land presence unless they're less 'Half Man/half fish' and more Naga from Warcraft. At which point you get into shit no matter what.

>son of Poseidon
>son of

what?

But how do they paint underwater without it just bleeding out immediately?

Paint it above water and heat it with it's inbuilt electrical energy.

Might not work the first time but I'm sure they could figure it out after a few tries.

>You think Ariel was somehow special when she was up

youtube.com/watch?v=_nH6ya5g2-s above the waterline?

Don't use fire, don't use magic.

Use an organism like a giant oyster, with an electric organ laced with small amounts of ferromagnetic materials like lodestone.

It uses this to filter the same seawater that it takes microorganisms and oxygen from. After 50.000 cubic meters of ordinary seawater, the monthly average passing by its organs, it produces an "iron pearl", an 1-kg nugget of wrought iron coated in nickel. The coating is to resist corrosion.

Further breeding could produce oysters which produce blade-shaped or armor-plate irons. I imagined an oyster-scabbard in which one puts away the sword. The creature repairs and sharpen the blade in its interior.

I don't know if such a biological mechanism could achieve steel, but it should be enough to provide the tools for a true underwater civilization.

Other technologies for said civilization are underwater concrete, a well developed alchemy/chemistry, a variant oyster that reworks manganese nodules, domesticating bioluminescent organisms, underwater waterwheels.

The final goal is developing an reliable electrolytic cell so one can separate seawater into oxygen and hydrogen, invent the Hall–Héroult process and oxy-torches.

After that, you can fly so far away that your world is as a pearl amidst a great abyssal sea.

Also the cave would run out of oxygen

That's Triton, not Poseidon.

Depends on the setting, but I like to presume the mermaids don't have metallurgy, but trade the valuables of the sea (pearls, deep sea fish, maybe retrieved ship wreckage) for among others arms and armor made from non-rusting metals (bronze?) made by humans or other surface dwellers. It might even result in some kind of cooperation pact, where the mermaid obligate themselves to protect human shipping while sabotaging enemy ships.

It could also provide a non-magical realm explanation for why human nobles of the area have qt mermaid princess wives. The remaining question is whether the result of such a union would be some kind of übermensch that's just as comfortable on land as in the sea, or some sin against nature that lives only to suffer and desires death from the moment it is born.

Hephaestus does it for them.

It's late bogleech, let's have this thread in the morning.

whale dick bone

Sea volcano.

>hurrbadurr 2 hot they'd die

Just like smiths who die from being in their forge in real life right

Cold welding.

youtube.com/watch?v=Y2nQ8isf55s

Yellow coral?

This is underrated.

This is a beautiful and elegant role playing solution.

>Underwater vents would heat the surrounding water and cook any attempted smiths.
They use underwater vents and really, really long tongs.

Air is a bad conductor of heat.

Water is a much better conductor of heat.

However it would be possible to build a structure which would pump cool air to the smith and keep the forge thing hot.

An underwater forge is opened by manipulating doors in a long corridor that does not let water in. When a blacksmith chooses to open the forge, they have to open a set of doors and manipulate waterflow in such a way that the forge stays dry. Membranes in the rooftop allow all the excess steam to exit without allowing any more water.

If your underwaterfolk can't stomach going out in the water for long, make the blacksmiths look like astronauts.

But how would they make the tongs?

Gefestus made the trident

Yes. Yes... YES!

Another pair of tongs.

Tongs all the way back.

boards.fireden.net/tg/search/text/metallurgy underwater/type/op/

What an interesting video. Thanks user

Interesting, but completely and utterly irrelevant to the thread subject matter. First of all, cold welding is not actually useful in creation of tools out of raw materials. Second of all cold fusion occurs in an environment that does not oxidize the surface of metals. Which... well, water actually tends to increase oxidization, not decrease it.
So as interesting piece of technological trivia it is, it's completely useless and unrelated to the question of how could a water-dwelling society create metal tools.