Are steel spike traps worth the cost?

[Kasa]

45 steel for a 1 use trap, hits a lot harder then wood but steel is a lot rarer then wood early game where you would need them the most.

[Vintorez]

Probably not early game but once you have deep drilling it's good to switch, you'll get plenty of steel.

[Kasa]

Hmm thanks, I planned my base out for the first time using proper kill box's on tribal, but filling the box with traps is expensive.

[gussmed]

Wood traps are only about half the damage of steel, and far less armor penetration. They're reasonable effective against rabbits and other small critters, but questionable against anything big or armored.

Stone traps are about as effective as steel, but take a long, long time to build. Plus the time to cut the blocks.

Really, if you have surplus steel, steel traps are worth it. If you are running short and need it for something else, obviously not.

[martindirt]

I'm use multi types of traps.
Bone (mod: Bones) at the entrance of the killbox. Bone is really really abundant, but weak AF. The last 3 lines of traps (just the front of my sandbags) are made of stone. Tribals, xenomorphs, mad animals etc low / no armor enemies dying at the entrance. When heavy armored melee fighters (kijin dark knights high on juice, marine armored pirates, etc) attacking me, they reach the last trap line, but stone traps usually finishing them off.
+ I have wooden floor at my killbox. You know... A flamer, an incie granade, Molotov, etc throved on the wooden floor makes magical things.
Last time I got a black hive siege (44 bugs), and I'm stopped them with only 2 snipers, a shotgunner, a kijin archer, a heavy gunner (LMG), and a flammer girl. Got only 2 bruise injuries from a lucky megalouse.
But back to op. Place 5-6 lines of trap made of wood, and 2-3 lines made of steel. Most of the time your enemies won't reach steel traps, and you won't waste steel after tribal raids / man hunter packs.

[cloning_souls]

steel traps have saved me many times

and wood is just as rare as steel sometimes

i go steel

[Fasalrod]

Wood is rarer than steel on arid/desert maps, especially once you get deep drills and competent miners to run them.

I don't like the cost nerf from 35 to 45 mats, but steel traps are much more effective than any vanilla turret especially with the 3rd round of turret meganerfs which I don't understand since they were already useless from the 2nd meganerf.

[Kasa]

I actually recently updated the wiki to A) fix the broken table and B) fill it with up to date info:
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Spike_trap

Rareness aside steel traps are the most efficient traps at 100 dmg with 150 armor pen and 54 work to build, lil over twice the damage of wood and little under 3 times the armor pen and Steel traps only req a little more work then wood traps to make.

The next best Trap would probably be silver actually since silver is technically more common then Jade and has the almost the same damage as steel with slightly less armor pen and has the same work amount to make, considerably less then jade and almost half as much as Uranium and Plasteel both being much rarer metals.

It would seem the ideal setup if you don't have a surplus of steel is to make your front defence wood traps to kill small animals and Tribals while having you back row made of steal to finish off tougher raiders and anything that gets through the wood spikes.

[Fasalrod]

One strategy I've seen for early game is to provide decoy cover for raiders but have spike traps behind their cover.

[ambi]

I'd go for wood traps over steel, although it depends on your biome. If wood is plentiful, then I'd spam wooden traps. They're quick to build.

[HunterSilver]

In general if you can't guarantee that an enemy will step on a trap it's not worth making it. If you have a killbox already setup then just monitor the most used path, pave it, then cover just that line with traps. This is incredibly expensive in terms of labor and resources early on but steel spike traps will kill/severely injure basically all raiders and non-centipede mechanoids, so if you're having trouble with raids or are about to take a quest with an especially difficult raid, it is absolutely worth setting them up. Consider them an investment in the long term health of your colonists. Someone losing an arm, leg, or eye because of a fight is worse than losing 45 steel.