Finally got my hands on iron, but...

[SweenMachine]

Is there a quicker way to get it than just finding swamp crypts and excavating the scrap piles? I spent about 2 hours finding one crypt, which contained 17 iron, and looking at the forge I'm going to need hundreds.

Is sailing all the way to the swamp, fighting my way to a crypt, mining, and then sailing all the way back truly the only way? This seems to be a needlessly massive time investment if so. At least with copper and tin I could run them to base, but now I'm at the mercy of RNG with wind direction and I'd rather actually play the game vs turn on the paddle and browse my phone for about 30min glancing up every now and then to see if I've stopped sailing into the wind...

What should be the top priority gear to make with iron? I'm thinking armour, but would love to get some direction where this is just so friggin slow and I don't want to invest the time in getting 60 iron then just use it all when I could have spent it on something else to get more iron faster.

[rubinho]

you can sail to mistland and look for bridge ruine, dismantle few of them and enjoy iron and copper + bonus marble

[Landorf]

Just a bad luck. Usualy you can find 4-5 crypts next to each other and mine like 30-45 iron per dungeon. But sometimes... sometimes you find a single crypt with a few scraps inside. This is random...
If you dont want to waste your iron on anything but crafting stations and most usefull things, skip iron armor (at all)
if you use shield, make it - it costs not too much. You should also skip bow since iron bow does almost same damage and costs a lot. I prefer to craft iron mace and that's it... or only a shield when i choose dagger-n-shield style for the run.

[jonnin]

the crypts *frequently* have chests in them with stacks of 20ish iron for doing nothing but a drive by grab. You can just cut through the piles barely enough to get through and then look for chests. Its still rng, but beating on the piles until you are sure you got every last possible pick swing done is very slow.

top priority is probably just a weapon upgrade (and bow if it uses any?) and home building / crafting stuff. Tools, like an iron pick and maybe an axe.

Just so you know... all the armor after the swamp needs iron in large amounts, and if you are into home building, you want a large amount for supports as well. Out of all the stuff in the game, if I had 20 chests that I could fill with anything as a gift from odin, I would fill them with iron.

[Draconis]

You don't actually have to sail back at all.

You can build a harbor in the swamp, set up a smelter there and a forge.
You don't need the bronze-age forge extensions to upgrade your iron equipment.

So you can let the smelter smelt while you explore the next crypt.

[MacKaris]

Originally posted by rubinho:

you can sail to mistland and look for bridge ruine, dismantle few of them and enjoy iron and copper + bonus marble

What a brilliant piece of advice for someone who literally just got their hands on iron for the first time.

*facepalm*

[Sgt Sticks]

Make your poison resist meads and healing meads, so you have those on hand when first setting out to the swamps.
Having a shelter close by (in adjacent biome) and make short discovery runs into the swamp, bring the hoe to even the ground where you go (so you can avoid jumping around water all the time)

Aside those keep raiding the crypts, its the most effective way to get iron, will say though, your first crypt, with only 17 iron is really unlucky. The average amout of iron, i get from the crypts are around 50-70, just have to keep going.

Bring meads, they help, alot!!

[Psojed]

Open your world's modifiers and increase your resource rate.

As others already told you, find a different swamp where there's more crypts close by and hope for better RNG. Juiciest crypts can have over 150 iron, I think my personal record is 172 from one crypt.

[knighttemplar1960]

If sailing the ore is the problem the first thing you want to make with your iron is nails to make the longboat. It has a much larger hold than the Karve. For armor make the Root set and save the iron, You are going to need iron in the plains too but its not available in the plains. Make a weapon and a pick (pick will speed up mining the iron) a shield if you are a one hander. The bronze axe is still fine for cutting trees, no need to make an iron one (wait on a new axe until you can make a black metal one).

If you can find Bonemass' altar there are usually several crypts around it. Doing all of those should net you 450ish iron.

If you haven't all ready done so look around the swamp for turnip seeds so you can upgrade your cooking station and your available foods. The easiest place to find turnip seeds is at biome borders.

[Humpenstilzchen]

Go into your world modifiers and set the teleporters to allow ore. Then place a portal on top of the crypt you are at and just hop through the portal to bring the iron back to your base.

[Draconis]

A portal on or next to the crypt you are at (for repair and to bring home teleportable things), and a cart in front of the crypt, for iron scraps.

As soon as I am done with the crypt, I deconstruct the portal and the workbench and move on to the next one. Until the cart weighs too much (it starts to become difficult to drag it up a slope as soon as it hits 2k weight). Then I bring the iron back to my harbor.

And as soon as you have the longship available you will be able to bring a cartload of iron home.

But as mentioned above, you actually don't have to bring it home. You can set up a forge in the swamp and a smelter, craft what you need and if you should have to sail to another swamp, you just have to bring the iron ingots for the forge upgrades (and maybe a few ingots that are left over) with you to the next swamp.

[MacKaris]

Or he could just use the dev commands to conjure up iron right at his base.

This again just underlines how the RNG in the game can sometimes just be completely broken. Sometimes there are like 5 or 6 or more of those iron dungeons practically within a visual line of sight of each other, and each of them yields plenty of iron. Sometimes you search for ONE for 2 hours and it's like some one-room nonsense with two mud piles giving you 17 iron scrap in total.

[Vincitore Becchi]

Originally posted by SweenMachine:

which contained 17

you just been unlucky, crypt yeld is very random, i found 2 in my worst, 128 in my best, i know people found very tiny crypts with zero iron.. on average i needed 6/7 crypt to max out every single craftable in iron age: found a good swamp patch, set up a foundry with level 7 forge there (you just have to bring 16 copper and 2 bronze, everything else is teleportable or made with iron), not frustrating at all and just 1 big sea trip back home to bring some spare iron to base

[Thurston Forbush III]

Originally posted by Draconis:

You don't actually have to sail back at all.

You can build a harbor in the swamp, set up a smelter there and a forge.
You don't need the bronze-age forge extensions to upgrade your iron equipment.

So you can let the smelter smelt while you explore the next crypt.

This is really good advice.
I also suggest, for copper mining, after you locate a node, bring surtling cores with you to set up a smelter and kiln on the spot. You can dismantle and get all of your resources back. Added bonus if you're searching a crypt near a firehole.

[Humpenstilzchen]

Originally posted by Thurston Forbush III:

Originally posted by Draconis:

You don't actually have to sail back at all.

You can build a harbor in the swamp, set up a smelter there and a forge.
You don't need the bronze-age forge extensions to upgrade your iron equipment.

So you can let the smelter smelt while you explore the next crypt.

This is really good advice.
I also suggest, for copper mining, after you locate a node, bring surtling cores with you to set up a smelter and kiln on the spot. You can dismantle and get all of your resources back. Added bonus if you're searching a crypt near a firehole.

I don´t think it is good advice tbh because you´ll need some iron at your main base to make the upgrades for your workbenches and cooking station.

It´s really not that bad once you find a decent swamp with many crypts. Just build a longboat asap for the bigger storage, park it at the swamp shore and surround it with palisade walls so it won´t get attacked and then start mining and filling up the boats storage which is huge.

Set up a teleporter as well so you can skip the nights and refresh your rested bonus at your base and once done mining sail back and you´ll have enough iron for a while.

Repeat if you need even more. Compared to the time spend mining and clearing dungeons the sailing doesn´t factor in too much.

[Lacrimosa]

You just were unlucky. Once you will find a swamp with around 10 crypts and average amount of iron in them from my experience is around 60 but there were often times around 100 or even more. Once you find such swamp, you'll have iron enough to build a decent base with iron beams and all the armor. And then there are several swamps like that in the world, so don't worry