Why Do People Say Steel is Hard?

[Zane Mordien]

6 hours ago, Dilan Rona said:

Iron bloom you can only heat one at a time, at least with blister steel I can put in 4 at a time on the forge for heating. Meaning less fuel spent to process the metal.

That's why I typically use meteoric Iron for most tools. It comes right out of the bloomery as finished ingots without double handling and heating a single ingot at a time to finish it. I make only a little steel and only for very specific reasons. 

[Maelstrom]

CURRENTLY, steel isn't all that grand.  BUT, there are plans for steam power and I bet a heap ton of steel will be needed for that.  Something on the dev's roadmap is powered railroads and minecarts.  I wonder if iron will become much bigger deposits but even fewer and farther between.

[cjc813]

On 3/29/2025 at 9:27 AM, Zane Mordien said:

I thought the same thing about the mortar at first but the recipe makes a lot so that's not so bad.

It's not that I think mortar is difficult, it's that, after spending hours getting other materials and machines set up, I look and there's one more step that I forgot about that is going to have to run in the background. I couldn't be arsed to go mine more chalk and then cook the shit.

I've got a chest full of bauxite and quartz and maybe 30 cooked bricks that I haven't touched since. I decided to do other stuff for a while, because honestly, I was straight up not having a good time.

Edited March 31, 2025 by cjc813

[V1ncent]

As others said, steel making is more on the time-consuming & complicated preparation side, rather than being difficult or requiring high-skill. All the mechanics other than mechanical power are well available in your previous development process, and the setup is basic if you are lucky with borax/bauxite and patient enough to feed flint one by one to accelerate the heating process(or with a firepit fix mod ofc).

For me, I am actually satisfied with my stone tools and if not the hard lesson taught by bears and winter I would be happy running around naked. Making steel armor is just because my poor tin bronze lamellar breaks so fast, and why not just advance to the best if smithing armor pieces is already so painful for me.

[Maelstrom]

3 hours ago, V1ncent said:

Making steel armor is just because my poor tin bronze lamellar breaks so fast, and why not just advance to the best if smithing armor pieces is already so painful for me.

There is this stuff called iron that does not require the laborious carbonization process.  Just sayin'.

[KiaYaha]

I think people just regard steel making as very much end-game due to how much effort and time go into it. Refractory bricks aren't cheap either, and in my case I had to travel quite far and spend tons of time just to get bauxite and even begin the process of making them. However, a counter-argument is that steel plate just looks plain badass

[Maelstrom]

Currently steel is end-game.  Given the dev's roadmap to have steam power and powered minecarts / railtrack, I think steel will become a necessity and find its way to no worse than late-game but probably even mid-game technology.

[HalfAxd]

5 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

There is this stuff called iron that does not require the laborious carbonization process.  Just sayin'.

Agreed... iron is not too bad a process to get through...  I have not attempted steel mostly due to the perceived PITA the process appears to be.  I love exploring in VS, not being stuck at my meager base grinding.  I might take bites at the steel apple over time and slowly advance toward that goal, but I'm not in a race to get there.  Again, that's the beauty of this game. 

[Maelstrom]

Agreed.  I love how the devs don't force a single thing on us players.  

It sounds like the week long carbonization would be laborious for you.  It takes 5 firings to complete the process and fortunately, it doesn't resent once a firing is completed so you can load up the fuel, light it, leave it and fire the furnace up again once you return from your escapades.

[Chuckerton]

Im sure others have said what i will say now but oh well

Iron is fine but but the jump from iron to steel is a pretty small jump in terms of effort, once you have everything set up, but a pretty big jump in durability. Its worth it to upgrade, and generally once im capable of making steel i will only use steel for tools.

Once you have the infrastructure for making steel setup youve done 90% of the work for steel. Even though it takes a week to cook iron to blister steel, it really doesnt take that much of your work, keep it fed with charcoal once a day and then do whatever else you need to do. Once you get steel, start making more. By the time your current steel tools break youll probably have the next batch of steel ready to go. They save a lot of time in that you dont have to replace broken tools as often. 

That being said, it might be harder now. I know a recent update changed how fire clay is generated, and the last world i used fire clay on was generated before this last update so i dont really know if its any harder to get lots of fire clay.

[Maelstrom]

making fire clay is no problem at all.  My first 1.20 world I just ran around gathering loose flint.  By the time I got to copper I had 3 or 4 stacks of flint waiting to be converted to fire clay.  Each stack of flint will make 8 stacks of fire clay, which is WAY more than enough for 2 steel furnaces.  The big problem with flint is cooking it, making quicklime has the same issue.  Fortunately, better firepits mod fixes that problem.

[SubtleOrc]

For me, Steel is a multiplayer group exercise. The grind is simply not worth the benefits in single player. I'm happy with my iron tools 

[V1ncent]

13 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

There is this stuff called iron that does not require the laborious carbonization process.  Just sayin'.

Ahha, yes.

I do realize iron is a thing, and it can fit all the jobs steel can do with comparable efficiency. On the other hand, being in winter already, steel making is more like a winter exercise for my poor seraph to relieve her from the lumberjack chore (of eliminating the submerged frozen oaks due to a successful experiment of underwater afforestation). The carbonization fire also warms the frozen body as a side effect.

At the end of the day, I think steel is more like a gameplay option similar to the beehive klin and coke furnance. For me, the discovery on the trip to complete the puzzle itself is worth the time.

[SydneyACE]

On 5/7/2025 at 2:13 PM, Maelstrom said:

making fire clay is no problem at all.  My first 1.20 world I just ran around gathering loose flint.  By the time I got to copper I had 3 or 4 stacks of flint waiting to be converted to fire clay.  Each stack of flint will make 8 stacks of fire clay, which is WAY more than enough for 2 steel furnaces.  The big problem with flint is cooking it, making quicklime has the same issue.  Fortunately, better firepits mod fixes that problem.

Did you guys know you can cook the flint in a bloomery? Much easier than the fire pit.

[Maelstrom]

Tried it.  Once.  The yield wasn't worth the resources.  But I think it now cooks more than 6.

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, SydneyACE said:

Did you guys know you can cook the flint in a bloomery? Much easier than the fire pit.

Really? Interesting.  The thought hadn't occurred to me. Most of my playtime is on a friend's server though, and there's a mod that makes firepits more efficient, so in that case firepit beats bloomery. Next time I play vanilla though I'll have to test with the bloomery to see how good it is compared to the pit.

[Omega Haxors]

People these days just aren't good long-term thinkers, i'm afraid... They don't see all that work as a permanent 2.5x increase to durability and 20% increase to speed.

Back in my day you'd spend 10x that effort to get a fractional of a percent increase, because the amount of work it would cut out long-term was plainly obvious.
It's not even this game, there's lots of games where most players fail to see the Return on Investment if it drops below a certain threshold of instant gratification.

Edited July 5, 2025 by Omega Haxors

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Omega Haxors said:

People these days just aren't good long-term thinkers, i'm afraid... They don't see all that work as a permanent 2.5x increase to durability and 20% increase to speed.

Back in my day you'd spend 10x that effort to get a fractional of a percent increase, because the amount of work it would cut out long-term was plainly obvious.
It's not even this game, there's lots of games where most players fail to see the Return on Investment if it drops below a certain threshold of instant gratification.

Maybe. Depends on if you plan to continue playing or start a new game. To me it's a dead loss, because I'm never going to use any of the tools I make. Once I'm done making them, I'll jump off nerdpole to worldheight and let permadeath take its toll. Then it's off to the stone age.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

52 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I'll jump off nerdpole to worldheight and let permadeath take its toll.

Am I somehow playing in your old worlds because I swear I get some of the weirdest terrain generation...

 

[LadyWYT]

18 hours ago, traugdor said:

Am I somehow playing in your old worlds because I swear I get some of the weirdest terrain generation...

 

Maybe that's where all those things you just "found in the woods" came from.

[Thorfinn]

Yes, maybe steel isn't worth the effort. But mithril...?

[Maelstrom]

Isn't that just another name for meteoric iron?  

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Yes, maybe steel isn't worth the effort. But mithril...?

And that's when you dig too deep and unearth the Things That Shouldn't Be.

[Thorfinn]

3 hours ago, Maelstrom said:

Isn't that just another name for meteoric iron?  

I hope not. That would be so disappointing.

[CastIronFabric]

On 3/14/2025 at 12:44 PM, k1ngofpentacles said:

I see this a lot on reddit where people say that steel isn't worth it because it's too tedious or iron is good enough, and my question is: is this really a widely shared sentiment? I'm near the end of my first winter and am already one batch away from full chainmail and a full set of steel tools. I have the bricks to make a second cementation furnace but am not even bothering at this point because one more batch on top of what I've already made (total of 4 batches) feels like it should be enough to last for a very substantial amount of time. 

tl;dr Steel doesn't seem as hard to acquire as people make it out to be, does anyone else agree?

I think the question of 'is steel hard' and 'is it worth it' are two different questions.

Is it worth it? likely not

Is it hard? I am not even going to entertain that quesiton