At the moment steel and various alloys of it are the best thing we have for many tools in the real world as well, titanium is softer, and tungsten is too hard to work with and brittle
the only upgrade option i can think of for vintage story is whatever the material of the temporal gears is
There does seem to be stainless steel planned, which could be a use for chromium. I assume it would be used for more complex machinery as in our world