Yeah, all it took was a Heroic King, a crack team of BlackBirds, and all we got was...
"I think we need to cook them? And something happens?"
Whereby, we spent generations trying out all kinds of stuff, before we got any use of it.
Besides, it might be news that they found a new mine. Yay for them. Good luck stealing the mine.
Actually, we acquired metalworking through immigrations, rather than going full bore research metalworking on our own. We were also distracted by the taxation crisis anyway.
Then we waited to research more ecologically friendly way of acquiring metalworking.