Recent experimental work on the deposition of fee metals on a bee substrate motivates this atomistic modeling analysis of Ni and Pd deposition on Mo(1 1 0). A detailed atom-by-atom analysis of the early stages of growth, focusing on the formation of surface alloys and 3D islands is presented, identifying the interactions leading to each type of behavior. Further analysis describes the growth pattern as a function of coverage. Temperature effects are studied via Monte Carlo simulations using the Bozzolo-Ferrante-Smith (BFS) method for alloys for the energetics. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.