Why don't devs add iron spears?

[Dynn_Morvain]

Spears are the king of the battlefield. Always have been in real life. Swords are a sidearm. Not having a good steel spear because "Balance Issues" is a lame pants on head copout. I get it if what you're going for is bushcraft bronze age only, but it goes strait up to steel in terms of tools and full on plate armor. We have things like the Ruined Ranseur, Warhammer, Boar Spear, Voulge, all these great historic weapons we can't make even though the tech we can achieve is far higher- and I don't even care if they can be thrown or not. Steel is no cake walk to just jump to either. People seem to forget that weapons and armor were an arms race.

And to add to that, I don't agree with the argument that the player should be forced to keep collecting copper for spears and such in late game unless they actually need it. I sure know I'd still be making a copper roof and lanterns, just means less materials going into the tool void and actually going into building.

[ArgentLuna]

Have iron or better spears but you cant throw them, just let you poke things at a longer reach ~ particuly if one could fight from behind an ally if in multiplayer

[Topminator]

I agree with this thread. Make iron spears too heavy to throw to balance them out.

[Thorfinn]

Just create your own iron spears, or even steel, and see if you ever use anything else. You have one side that wants iron spears, the other that wants more weapon diversity, both at odds with each other.

[Monkeylord]

Honestly I don't really care that much about balance. Spears, just like any tool or weapon, should be craftable with all metals. Like, are seraphs really incapable of just hammering down an iron or steel spearhead? Spears have always been the primary weapon of most civilizations (maybe all) until the advent of advanced firearms. In-game most people (including myshelf) actually use them to hunt, not to kill rust monsters.

Spears have a lot of reach and can be thrown, and that might make them more "attractive" as weapons, yes,but they are also much more fragile than falxes or shortswords. Having to spend 2 or 3 times more iron or steel already makes them "balanced" enough for me. 

However, if we want to make spears worse for the sake of falxes and bows, we could just split them tino pikes and javelins from iron onwards: Javelins are specialices mid-distance throwing weapons that could have more damage than arrows but, of course, much less accuracy and reach and pikes...well, they are just very long spears youn can't throw. Either that or use polearms such as voulges, halberds or glaives to subtite spears in higher tiers. 

Oooor we could make falxes (and maybe shortswords) actually specialiced weapons, like their decription states: make then have higher damage specifically against monsters. This way you do have a reason to have both a spear and a falx.

[Forks]

I don't agree with making iron spears too heavy to throw as some people have said.
If people are so terrified of Iron Spears being game breaking and dominating the "meta" why not add Iron Spears with Iron level durability, but keep the damage the same as say Tin Bronze spears?
The damage is still very respectable and you get the bonus of cheap high durability spears late game that you don't have to hunt tin for.
Personally I've been converted to Recurve bow + Iron Arrow gang, but Iron Spears should exist in some shape or form.

[marmarmar34]

How about replacing spears with halberds at iron+? That way, we can have our long range melee option without worrying about the damage scaling with throwing. 

Edited January 12 by marmarmar34

[Thorfinn]

Or, and here's a thought, those who want iron spears just create a mod and have them? I get you don't think balance is a big deal, so make the game yours rather than insisting on the rest of us playing a game more to your liking?

[MKMoose]

Tyron has said a few months back that "the next update will probably have iron spears", and "there was some balancing done on the spears". My guess is that it will likely primarily involve a ranged damage nerf, but maybe it's gonna be more creative. I kind of hope that they don't touch the Stone Age tier, though.

 

3 hours ago, Forks said:

If people are so terrified of Iron Spears being game breaking and dominating the "meta" why not add Iron Spears with Iron level durability, but keep the damage the same as say Tin Bronze spears?

That's one of the things I don't get about these balance discussions. These are just numbers, and as long as any changes don't mess with some important thresholds (e.g. flint spears one-shotting rabbits), they don't really matter too much and can be freely adjusted to keep balance in check. It's entirely possible to compress the damage progression on the spears and end up with the overall balance of the game practically unchanged.

 

8 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Or, and here's a thought, those who want iron spears just create a mod and have them? I get you don't think balance is a big deal, so make the game yours rather than insisting on the rest of us playing a game more to your liking?

Sure, and since it's just a variant it's probably really easy. I could probably do it in at most a couple hours with essentially zero prior VS modding experience. But, here's a thought: making the game yours is the easiest way to end up with an incoherent and unbalanced mess and drop the game once you start losing control of all the tiny adjustments, especially as new game versions start introducing conflicts and changes.

Especially when someone has only recently started, they tend to at first play the game as the developers designed it according to their own vision. They can appreciate it for what it is, but will inevitably question odd choices like the lack of iron spears, and the natural reaction is to suggest an obvious change instead of modding everything in in a knee-jerk reaction.

You asked in another thread at one point to recommend damage changes to spears. Side note, you've also said that a 0.25 damage difference requires a multiple of 4 hits to matter. It doesn't - it can make a difference on any number of hits, especially once you start considering damage modifiers. Also, keep passive health regeneration in mind. Back to spears, how about we start by reducing the disparity between the different bronze alloys and copper, to make space for iron? Something kind of like this, alongside a few examples where each next tier helps with breakpoints assuming no damage modifiers:

damageByType: {
	"*-granite": 4,
	"*-flint": 5,
	"*-copper": 5.75, // two-hits T0 bowtorn, down from 3 for flint
	"*-bismuthbronze": 6.5, // -> 6.25 // two-hits T0 drifters and three-hits T2 bowtorn, down from 3 and 4 respectively for copper or flint
	"*-tinbronze": 7.5, // -> 7 // two-hits T1 bowtorn, down from 3 for bismuth bronze, copper or flint
	"*-blackbronze": 8, // -> 7.5 // three-hits T2 drifters, down from 4 for weaker bronze or copper (probably the weakest tier here)
  	// "*-iron": 8 // 2-hits wolves and pigs, down from 3 for bronze or copper
  	// "*-meteoriciron": 8.25 // two-hits T1 drifters and 4-hits T4 bowtorn, down from 3 and 5 respectively for iron
  	// "*-steel": 8.25 // alternatively, 8.5 could have some interesting thresholds, but I think they're better left for the bow
},

I don't really think it would make metal spears in any real way underwhelming, especially as long as their durability is reasonably high. With the above changes, a steel spear would have ~19% higher damage than the average of the three bronze spears when thrown, while a parallel comparison would yield a ~26% difference between arrows (assuming using the recurve bow) and ~17% between falxes, so it's not particularly slow progression by any means.

And if damage changes are not enough, then there's also other things that could be done, whether to balance spears as a whole, to balance them against bows, or to balance different spear tiers between each other. Even not considering anything that would be better included with a proper combat rework, a spear rebalance could quite easily involve adjusted accuracy, increased charge time required to throw a spear, adjusted attack speed, varied melee range, increased durability loss when thrown (possibly dependent on what it hits), adjusted throwing range, whatever, really. I would personally consider throwing charge time as the most interesting balance choice here, but each of them can have a purpose depending on what we would want the spears to exactly be.

 

6 minutes ago, marmarmar34 said:

How about replacing spears with halberds at iron+? That way, we can have our long range melee option without worrying about the damage scaling with throwing. 

That is my preferred route as well. Maybe not necessarily halberds, as there is an endless variety of other polearms that could be added, like a bill, a poleaxe, a ji, and so many others. As mentioned before, the game has a bunch of "ruined" weapons that include a boar spear, a voulge, a war fork, a ranseur, and a couple axes which could be classified as polearms as well. Also, a lance or pike as suggested by @LadyWYT elsewhere may fit what several people here are mentioning, as it naturally wouldn't be throwable but could have further exaggerated melee capacity with ~4-4.5 m range compared to the spear's 3.5 m (whereas other polearms would more likely have ~3-3.5 m).

I want to mention, though, that I think we need some combat changes for more weapons to make much sense. Currently, weapons only really use three parameters that affect their balance: durability, damage and range.

[Topminator]

On 1/12/2026 at 5:05 PM, Monkeylord said:

Honestly I don't really care that much about balance. Spears, just like any tool or weapon, should be craftable with all metals. Like, are seraphs really incapable of just hammering down an iron or steel spearhead? Spears have always been the primary weapon of most civilizations (maybe all) until the advent of advanced firearms. In-game most people (including myshelf) actually use them to hunt, not to kill rust monsters.

Spears have a lot of reach and can be thrown, and that might make them more "attractive" as weapons, yes,but they are also much more fragile than falxes or shortswords. Having to spend 2 or 3 times more iron or steel already makes them "balanced" enough for me. 

However, if we want to make spears worse for the sake of falxes and bows, we could just split them tino pikes and javelins from iron onwards: Javelins are specialices mid-distance throwing weapons that could have more damage than arrows but, of course, much less accuracy and reach and pikes...well, they are just very long spears youn can't throw. Either that or use polearms such as voulges, halberds or glaives to subtite spears in higher tiers. 

Oooor we could make falxes (and maybe shortswords) actually specialiced weapons, like their decription states: make then have higher damage specifically against monsters. This way you do have a reason to have both a spear and a falx.

Oh, yeah, increase monsters hp and give falxes double damage against them horrors beyond mortal comprehension