DishonoredHero 2 Posted January 28 Report Posted January 28 Black Bronze looks awesome and I've always wanted to forge a set of armor out of it for the style points but I've never actually taken the time to for a few reasons, mainly: Gold and Silver are painfully difficult to acquire in any reasonable amount. Gold is the main bottleneck here since silver is more abundant in my experience. The benefits of Black Bronze over the other variants just kind of aren't worth it. It's far easier to find copper and tin for bronze for mostly similar stats Being a variant of bronze, iron is better than Black Bronze in every way and even with the increased effort to manufacture it, I've always gotten to iron long before I considered putting in the effort to make the stuff So as much as I can appreciate that the devs included it, I really don't see what the point of it is aside from for the sake of realism and similar, which is a good reason to be fair. Nonetheless, I'd love to know if I'm missing something to do with Black Bronze since I'll take any excuse to use the stuff. Maybe my gold prospecting skills just suck or something. Picture of Neuro Sama unrelated
jerjerje Posted January 28 Report Posted January 28 While a full set of black bronze gear is unrealistic, you can make at least one or two pickaxes for the faster mining speed. That could be worthwhile when searching for iron. I wouldn't go out of my way to find gold and silver for this. But since you can get both as a byproduct of mining quartz or panning, you might have a few nuggets lying around. And you don't need much gold and silver to make a couple ingots of black bronze. (See the ratios on the wiki). 1
Zane Mordien Posted January 28 Report Posted January 28 7 hours ago, DishonoredHero 2 said: So as much as I can appreciate that the devs included it, I really don't see what the point of it is aside from for the sake of realism and similar, which is a good reason to be fair. Nonetheless, I'd love to know if I'm missing something to do with Black Bronze since I'll take any excuse to use the stuff. Maybe my gold prospecting skills just suck or something. If you are like me and enjoy panning bony soil then you may end up with 2 nuggets of silver and gold, which is what you need to make a black bronze tool. I always make the pickaxe. Then I actually had one playthrough where I was having trouble getting tin but there was a gold and silver quartz deposit right next to my base. It is the one and only time I actually made a black bronze anvil and used it to get into the iron age. Again, you have to pan enough gold/silver to get the pickaxe before you can mine the quartz or buy the tin from the trader to make the intial bronze pickaxe. 2
pigfood Posted January 28 Report Posted January 28 I've never ever been able to find a decent amount of gold. Getting enough gold to repair Forlorn Hope armor is an extreme struggle. I can't even comprehend wasting gold on black bronze. I've found decent silver deposits a fair amount of times. I've never found enough gold to be willing to waste it on bronze.
LadyWYT Posted January 28 Report Posted January 28 Black bronze is useful for getting an early bronze pickaxe for mining tougher materials/mining faster. However, it's also useful as a weapon material since it does the most damage of the bronze options. Aside from that, black bronze items fetch better prices at your friendly local traders, so if you need a few low-risk early game gears for some reason, selling a black bronze item or too can be a good way to get them.
Teh Pizza Lady Posted January 28 Report Posted January 28 (edited) Black bronze is so hard to get because what it requires to smelt it can be more easily obtained after progressing to Iron tech. It's only there to reward you with a better bronze for using any lucky gold nugget finds from panning, pretty sure, but otherwise, you're stuck at waiting until Iron to mine out the quartz veins for their gold. 23 minutes ago, LadyWYT said: Black bronze is useful for getting an early bronze pickaxe for mining tougher materials/mining faster. However, it's also useful as a weapon material since it does the most damage of the bronze options. Aside from that, black bronze items fetch better prices at your friendly local traders, so if you need a few low-risk early game gears for some reason, selling a black bronze item or too can be a good way to get them. Edited January 28 by Teh Pizza Lady
Distilled Spirit Posted February 1 Report Posted February 1 On 1/28/2026 at 9:00 AM, DishonoredHero 2 said: Nonetheless, I'd love to know if I'm missing something to do with Black Bronze since I'll take any excuse to use the stuff. Maybe my gold prospecting skills just suck or something. Depends heavily on your luck. My last playthrough had me spawn 350 meters away from a quartz vein in a huge rock. I could see it from afar and it had plenty of both gold and silver in it. Could be a potential replacement for tin/bismuth, if lucky enough. Other than that, you can reliably sell falx/shovel/pick for 6-7 gears to a treasure hunter - could be very useful if you do not have enough for anything at the start of the game. Just cast 2 black bronze tools, sell them and you can progress the story. Very useful when you can not physically have or sell leather/other bronze/tons of bread/linen yet. Gold can be bought from a luxury trader for about 7-11 gears per 1.5 ingots. You can buy tin bronze pick for 8-13 gears from a survival goods trader, if you do not have any tin nearby. Ultimately, it is down to your luck. Lanterns suck, they look worse that lead-copper alloy, and they are not purple. Mining quartz is unnecessary, just blow it up. Finding the right vein truly is a problem.
Bruno Willis Posted February 4 Report Posted February 4 My first play through had more easy gold and silver than tin or bismuth, so I ended up attempting the first story location looking so good, in my black bronze plate armor. I left defeated, with my black bronze armor torn to shreds, vowing to return some day when I had steel. 2
Maelstrom Posted February 4 Report Posted February 4 So basically everyone agrees that the main black bronze use case is to flex. My flex? Black Bronze helve hammer head along with one iron, one meteoric iron and a steel one banging away on an meteoric iron anvil. 1
Maelstrom Posted February 4 Report Posted February 4 (edited) 17 hours ago, Bruno Willis said: My first play through had more easy gold and silver than tin or bismuth, so I ended up attempting the first story location looking so good, in my black bronze plate armor. I left defeated, with my black bronze armor torn to shreds, vowing to return some day when I had steel. That sounds like an excellent story for the *ahem* Humorous Stories thread. Edited February 5 by Maelstrom
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