Making steel

[gigi]

I am trying to make steel oh my.... I have turned all my stuff into Ingots.
Now to get "steel"I need to mix etc the stuff in the form of Fragments or Ore

So now to get it back to "ores" etc the guide is to put it into the "Forge" o "Oven" etc
and there is no such thing int he game or is there? WHERE?
OK tell me to go out and farm iron again ........ I have been doing nothing but in
running through all the houses etc, ie. months.
So now I start basically from scratch again and find stuff that I already had a huge
lot from and being ENCOURAGED basically to make it through all the stages to end piece only to be told to scrap it all?
I just will not run through all the towns etc and try to find the bare iron etc etc for weeks!!
What do the people due to players who cannot get decent games any longer and the only really good ones are The Infected and Conan which has been spoilt by turning it into top University brains and no fun any more due to so many instructions you go nuts!

[Amycat]

Have you got any mineral extractors *outside* of the caves?

As long as they're placed on bare, level ground, they should give Iron ores.

[OldManDave]

Sources of iron ore are mineral extractors outside of caves not set to stone only, rocks in caves producing lead and mix of rock/clay/iron ore, and town loot. Personally I mostly prefer a "smelt on demand" plan due to storage (ore is twice as dense as ingots). In your current case you need equal parts lead ore and iron ore so I would suggest farming cave rocks where you will get way more lead than iron but you can concentrate on just picking up iron and enough lead to go with the quantity of iron you find. If you have abundance of iron ingots also make some extractors set outside caves that will give mix of stones, frags, and ore. Extractors produce at rate of 1 item every 5 min or 1 stone every min so as you get your steel to desired levels you will be on your way to being able to turn them to stone only to feed your stone grinder which can then be your main source of frags and ingots.

So, break cave rocks and make mineral extractors is probably best bet.

[Nocternaldaze]

Once you add 1 iron ore and one lead ore on a anvil it will give one steel ore, the steel ore then can be placed in the furnace to smelt into a steel ingot.

[FallingOut]

Explanation using the in-game terms for things:

Place one Iron Ore and one Lead Ore on the Anvil to craft one Steel Alloy.
Smelt the Steel Alloy in either the small Stone Forge or the large Brick Forge to make one Steel Ingot.

Experienced players have learned by experience that they should not smelt scarce Iron Ore into Iron Ingots, at least not until their need for steel has been met. Instead, they should save up Iron Ore for the purpose of making Steel Alloy and only smelt Small Stones to get Iron Fragments that in stacks of 5 can be smelted into Iron Ingots. The Stone Grinder is essential in speeding up the production of Iron Ingots.

Later in the game, when you have multiple Mineral Extractors outside of caves churning out Iron Ore, Iron Fragments and Small Stones, you will end up with so much Iron Ore that you won't know where to store it. In the meantime you should mine boulders every time you visit a cave and fill a container with Lead Ore and Iron Ore. I actually have an anvil at every cave so I can combine one Lead Ore and one Iron Ore into one Steel Alloy right there at the cave to save space in the container. You will also need a lot of Lead Ore for building Wind Turbines and Battery Storage devices.