Depends on the college really. Celestial wizards for example have no strictures against making a fortune and tend to easily do so with their ability to see the future and grant good fortune.
There's also going to be outliers in the Colleges such as with Mathilde who owns quite the fortune. Presumably out there is a Amber wizard with a liking for gold and a Jade wizard who charges for her services.
Probably. Looking at possible stave materials for each Wind:
-Chamon - They'd probably actually prefer metal staves. Especially those with lots of gold content.
-Ghyran - Wood staves. Nothing's going to compare with one that was(or preferably, IS) alive for the Wind of Life.
-Ghur - Bone is key. Metal is probably too far from their ideals, even wood is closer.
-Aqshy - Its not too difficult to infuse metals with Aqshy via sustained heat, the trick is likely focused on the point where the metal is recognizably the same item/material, so you want it to be below the melting point while you cook as much Aqshy into it for a couple months.
-Shyish - Probably bone again, but lead and iron also have death associations. Ideally? Bog iron, iron leached from the soil and concentrated by rot, likely cold forged to avoid contaminating it. Incidentally the Shyish-Kebabs we mailed off to the College would be fine too, they're literally infused in centuries of concentrated Shyish.
-Azyr - Meteoric ANYTHING would be ideal.
-Hysh - I'm drawing a blank here, its the wind I'm least familiar with. A mad impulse says glass or grinding down a raw quartz crystal to the right shape might fit.
-Ulgu - You'd want a metal that's neither here nor there, which takes good gradient patterns, and is predominantly grey, but being able to be shiny AND dark. So steel is likely a good base, if you could find the right alloy. And probably work it cold, in shadow. Handy information is that steel's visual appearance and material quality varies a lot by the weapon structure and a LOT of pre-industrial smithing was about beating the steel into the right KIND of steel on the right part of the weapon.
There's probably some plant with oil they can use.
Olive oil is...an option but its not great at being used for frying.
Sunflower oil is good for frying on.
Dwarfs probably have some subterranean thingie which can produce frying oil?
Most oils come from animal fat reserves, milk, or plant seeds(which are also fat reserves). Subterranean plants probably wouldn't have a lot of fat content to use, though I suppose you could use a pig as a mushroom to fat converter.
Was frying as much of a thing in that sort of time period?
looks things up
Huh, apparently it was. People used olive oil, but you could apparently just used fat of any kind. I'd guess that's generally how they did it, got a block of fat and greased up their pans with it.
Dwarfs probably would use more baking I think? Their environment is well suited for the Roman type hearth setups. Without fat though, a lot of the product is going to be very very hard to chew.
