Hardened Steel requires Steel Bars and Black Ice to craft.
Star Metal requires SM Ore, Black Ice and Brimstone.
Black Ice and Star Metal Ore are both obtained in the icy tundra of the highlands, while brimstone is obtained in the sulfur lake, and a few caves & cliffs in the desert. Brimstone & Tar is then used to make Steel.
Progression wise, Hardened Steel is supposed to be acquired before Star Metal, but solely due to it requiring Black Ice, its obtained pretty much at the same time. Doesnt this make it nearly pointless for weapons and tools?
I recall an update that made Hardened Steel require only Brimstone and Steel and craft. This made a lot more sense to me. Is there any reason it was reverted?
Edit: Just gonna tag on, I think Brimstone and Oil would be a good recipe for Hardened Steel. Bonus points for it resembling IRL tempering techniques
I am really sorry but I cannot understand why you have issues to go north and obtain black ice. I won’t mention that you gain black ice in warmakers it is pointless to say. Where exactly is the problem here, I cannot get it and I would love to.
Yes, if you can go to the locations to get the materials for Hardened Steel you basically have access to the materials for Star Metal. Perhaps you just need a few levels.
That said, Starmetal also requires demon blood and crystal for crafting the explosives.
Then again, the materials for Steel are available as soon as Iron is.
Iron ore, Brimstone from any of the River adjacent caves, tar from tanning hides.
Likewise it is only limited by level. Oh, and having a firebowl cauldron.
Honestly, this one finds hardened steel most useful for crafting black ice weapons or thrown on the delving bench in Siptah. Unlike regular steel or iron gear, it retains use.
@LostBrythunian
Not to mention that Sepermeru chests provide the less 150 free steel bars every half hour . If you go carefully north and take the path of Ymirs religion from the mountains, your only opponents are goats. A darfari club is more than capable to kill rocnoses if you don’t want to go to the frost keep and farm the mount above the giant, all you have to do is 2 lights and 2 heavy combo and they will be unable to react, just don’t agro them all, one by one. Black ice is extremely easy to be obtained, extremely easy.
Not even that. If I recall correctly, you can the job done with demon-fire orbs, the raw materials for which are crystal, ichor, and volatile glands. Or if not just the demon-fire orbs alone, the combined effect of a gaseous orb and demon-fire orb.
I prefer explosive arrows, but if for some reason I had to eschew demon blood, I would go down the orb route.
True, but orbs are still more ingredients than just those for Hardened Steel.
Also, this one has never had a fire orb alone work, it’s always gas then fire and even then sometimes it misses, sorta.
Progression wise it’s pointless to have a leveling system in this game when once you hit 60 everything is redundant and a waste of your resources and time if you’re trying to craft hardened steel tools at a lower level instead of just getting to 60 and making star metal, obsidian or just going for black blood tools.
They did it for reasons are really obvious to me and I agree. Black ice is a reason to get players up there. Without black ice you cannot solve the survival issues of your gaming. Yet someone could always give you a handful of black ice to fix some preservation boxes. For Ice you didn’t have to go very north either you could easily farm it from lower and safer points. So making the black ice mandatory for hardened steel just force players to go up there. We both know the difficulty, we both understand it, for some is walk in park and others mountain climbing. Most of the time this seems mountain climbing for some players because they created a “box” in this game and anything out of it it is huge. We both know it isn’t, “they” must know that it isn’t too, so devs pushed them this way to go out of their boxes. It’s not only black ice, it’s fish traps too and others that helped some players to be closed in their boxes. The map is wonderful, the landscape is amazing and the “danger” really well balanced. This map hides no huge achievements, so people that play this game needs no category, there are not good players or bad, just people who tried and people who stopped because they thought “they can’t do it”. Everybody can!!! That is the message, for me at least .
So no matter if you’re right about brimstone for hardened steel, this created boxes and devs should unlock them, so they did.
In my opinion, it’s yet another a dumb idea to remove or limit Hardened Steel in Conan Exiles. I think it’s a dumb idea to change anything about how Hardened Steel is used or how often and in what quantities it drops. In both EL and Siptah HS can even be acquired without farming and without any crafting benches. Hardened Steel items have their own slot in the hierarchy of tools and weapons and Tinker’s Bench crafted items. It’s all just fine as it is!
I personally farm and fight with HS tools and weapons during some stages of the leveling process - they’re good enough at certain levels while others are too much hassle or too dangerous to acquire. Yeah, the game designers might get a few things wrong but crafting materials as they are currently are not one of those things. In this case FC knows what they’re doing and any suggestions much outside the current situation (including this suggestion) would only serve to mess up the game. Likely this suggestion comes from being bored and not having anything else to post in the forums - as it makes no sense otherwise. Just my 2 cents but…
What is with people wanting to change things when they have no clue what they’re talking about? Just play the game FFS…
Is it just me or did you copy/paste from another thread?
Back on topic, nothing about what Im asking makes Hardened Steel harder to obtain. It’d make it easier, which *could* admittedly be a bad thing for PvP balance, but itd be positive for PvE.
I take that back. It’d help level the playing field by providing okay weapons and access to Epic armours.
Iron>Steel>Hardened Steel>Starmetal is the general progression of craftable tiers. My arguement is that the gap to obtain Star Metal from Hardened Steel is absolutely tiny, nearly non existent, compared to Iron to Steel to Hardened Steel.
By time you’ve made your way to the snowy valley or mountains to get Black Ice, you’ve generally already unlocked explosives of some variety.
What also spawns (relatively) close by Black Ice? Meteors. Why haul the Black Ice back to base to make Hardened Steel when you could just use it to make Star Metal?
I agree with your point about people making a “box” and staying in it, but I think using Hardened Steel to push people is wrong, lacking a better term, simply because of how the resources are spaced.
Black Ice is (relatively) close to Meteor spawns. So why just take the Black Ice to make Hardened Steel when you could pop meteors and make Star Metal instead? People should have access to at least one variety of explosive to crack them by that point.
Yeah…I gotta agree that Black Ice for HS doesn’t make sense. I sort of like my idea that you need a furnace and oil. The only issue is that oil is also fuel for the furnace which then gets messy…maybe just have it in the the blacksmith bench.
You know that this is not true either. Hardened steel is equally necessary and easier to fix in huge amounts daily than star metal. Yet I don’t believe that this post has this reason, @erjoh made a wonderful post for this . Trust me my dear friend @tobbiusness, after all these years I get a lot more messages for “help” from pve players to farm black ice and this is a win win for devs. After they follow and reach there, they are scratching heads asking, why the heck all this time they didn’t think to continue the route of Ymirs religion and we both laugh . Again, there are not good or bad players for me, just players. I won’t judge anyone who chooses to play “the farmer” in Conan exiles world, his gaming, his fun, his rules . Yet…, this landscape up there is breathtaking. One fellow exile was with me to witness her first meteo shower after 3 years gaming, she was happy as a girl and I was happier . I wish more and more players stop for awhile and look around the beautiful job these people have done, million times told, Siptah is Beautiful, rich, but not Exile lands, not even close… At least for me .
. If you go carefully north and take the path of Ymirs religion from the mountains, your only opponents are goats. A darfari club is more than capable to kill rocnoses if you don’t want to go to the frost keep and farm the mount above the giant, all you have to do is 2 lights and 2 heavy combo and they will be unable to react, just don’t agro them all, one by one. Black ice is extremely easy to be obtained, extremely easy.
Requiring black ice instead of brimstone seems silly to me.
. Trust me my dear friend 
. I wish more and more players stop for awhile and look around the beautiful job these people have done, million times told, Siptah is Beautiful, rich, but not Exile lands, not even close… At least for me